MIAMI BEACH – Yesterday morning the action at Art Basel shifted away from the cavernous convention center and across town to an area called Northwest Miami. Actually, that’s not what it’s called anymore. Officially, Miami has renamed a formerly downtrodden region the “Wynwood Art District.” Yesterday morning, before the fair opened at noon, it was crawling with limousines, buses, and taxis bound for a smattering of galleries and private museums.

“This neighborhood is not so good,” said Luis Souza, a charming Brazilian cab driver whisking past warehouses and storefronts advertising braids and human hair, even though he, too, has agreed to call it “the art and design district.”

The contemporary art scene in Miami has bred a handful of wanna-be. Barneses – collectors who are insatiable buyers, extremely wealthy, and educated – and who have built monuments to their own good taste. Yesterday two of the most important reopened to the public after extensive upgrades and renovations.

Starting at 9.a.m., crowds poured into the Rubell Family Collection (RFC) to get a glimpse at a legendary collection. The Rubells have been buying for decades, and the fruits of their shopping are now displayed in a chic, loft like building with soaring ceilings and smooth concrete floors. One Rubell staffer said the collection was a “mini-MoMA.”

The Rubells have also created their own aesthetic universe. The reopening included a show of work by Richard Prince, who lived near the Rubells in the Hamptons and used to visit for lunch. (Prince works set record after record at the fall contemporary auctions.) Upstairs, work by young German painters filled gallery upon gallery. (German painting, especially the Leipzig group, is flying out of galleries.) The Rubells aren’t curating to market tastes, though; more like setting them.

One startling installation is a room with a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan. Off in a corner on the second floor, Mr. Cattelan’s sculpture, a baby elephant wearing a Klan-esque white sheet, was getting lots of attention. Many of the visitors, leaning against a chain blocking the doorway, asked the cheerful docent if that elephant hadn’t just sold at a Christie’s auction. In fact, the docent explained, it was another version of the same piece (from an edition of two), which set an auction record for the artist, selling for $2.7 million at Christie’s on November 10.

Another Cattelan, a small version of the artist himself in wax, sat in the corner of another large room. When the guard stepped away for a moment, a young man in a blue shirt reached out and grabbed the artist’s wax hand, sending the piece rocking back and forth. “Did you touch it?” said the guard, racing back into the gallery and back to the defense of the now swaying Cattelan. “Uh, no,” the man lied, as he hustled his taller lanky girlfriend out of the room.

Outside the Rubell collection, the sun blazed and weary art tourists searched for cabs, buses, or any mode of transport to the next destination. Across the street sat a ramshackle house with an unmowed lawn and two discarded sinks plunked on the front lawn. Next to the house was a dirt field dotted with empty beer cans, used lottery tickets, and sparkling shards of glass. A barbed wire fence surrounded the plot, keeping out Prada-clad collectors. A billboard above the dirt plot said, “Gallery Space will build to suit for 2-10,000 square feet.”

Several blocks away sat another prime art collection, a 45,000-squarefoot warehouse, home to the Margulies Collection. Martin Margulies, a local developer, has bought art since the 1970s. He showcases his photography collection with walls of prints by artists including Helen Levitt and Ed Ruscha. Each piece is accompanied by a discreet label noting the artist, title, and the tag, “The Margulies Collection.” It doesn’t have the same cachet as the Saachi Collection, but it is an indicator of the ambitions of these collectors.

Which brings us to the question of the merits of these private museums. It is a great service to the Miami community to have all this world-class contemporary art available for public consumption. But not all of the work is museum quality – mostly these are displays of personal whim and taste, something distinctive from a trained, objective eye.

There is also a rather heady controversy storming in Miami. The Miami Art Museum is making plans to move to a giant waterfront park as part of a $2.9 billion dollar revitalization project. About $100 million is slated for the museum. But top area collectors with their own art museums have not gotten behind this plan. In fact, Mr. Margulies has vociferously fought the plan, buying full-page ads in local papers to protest the projected move. He says the museum’s unimpressive collection is not worthy of taxpayer dollars.

If these collectors ever shutter their own mini-MoMAs and lend their collections to the city’s museum, it might be a different story.