Andrea Rosen, a Chelsea dealer, represents David Altmejd, whose work occupies the entire Canadian pavilion in Venice. Taking center stage at her booth here is “Wood Clock,” one of his fantastical sculptures. It includes a giant log, mirrors, a white plaster waterfall, moss and an array of fauna like owls and a peacock. Donald Young, a Chicago dealer, is also taking advantage of the visibility the Biennale provides. Joshua Mosley, the Philadelphia multimedia artist he represents, had a large installation at the Biennale. So Mr. Young brought “A Vue,” a 2004 video work by Mr. Mosley about a park ranger named Henry and a woman named Susan.A Zen-inspired installation by the Korean-born artist Lee Ufan made its debut in Venice; several of his paintings are in booths here. The dealer Micheline Szwajcer from Antwerp, Belgium, for example, is showing an untitled 1994 painting, an all-white canvas adorned with one gray brush stroke.One of the more striking booths belongs to Presenhuber, a Zurich gallery. Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist, designed the entire installation, which includes a series of cast aluminum and enamel doors. His work can be seen in Venice too, at an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi. With the highest-quality material hard to come by, some dealers are offering works they had squirreled away. Karsten Greve, with galleries in St. Moritz, Cologne, Paris and Milan, brought several Cy Twombly paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. “When I bought one painting at auction 20 years ago for a record price of about $200,000, people thought I was a fool,” Mr. Greve said. By Tuesday morning he had sold it for $1.5 million. Art fairs help to gauge popular tastes, and dealers hungry for material often revisit artists who have gone out of fashion. A decade ago no one would have paid attention to the installation of Belgium street signs by Marcel Broodthaers adorning the booth of Michael Werner, a dealer in Cologne and New York. But by the afternoon of opening day they had all been sold.The international flavor of Art Basel is part of its attraction. Walking around the cavernous exhibition hall, one could hear German and French, Russian and Japanese. “We held our first event in Russian,” said Sam Keller, the fair’s director. On Monday the Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and the Russian philosopher Boris Groys took part in a series of talks about various art world topics. “We had a translator,” Mr. Keller said. “The Kabakovs live in the United States, and Mr. Groys lives in Germany. Yet they’re Russians. It’s a sign of the art world’s globalization.” Buyers represented the global market too. By Tuesday evening William Acquavella, a New York dealer, said he had sold about 10 paintings by blue-chip masters like Magritte, Warhol, Mr. Freud and Mr. Twombly. “Eighty percent of the buyers were new people, the majority of them Europeans,” he said. “It was a huge day.”(Editor:Xie Mu)