“For us, it’s tough,” he said. He mimed a fairgoer glancing up at the sign on his booth. “People see Moscow gallery, they think, ‘Eh, it’s a bad country,’ ” he said.

“It’s not so big business,” he continued, explaining that for him Art Basel was more about meeting collectors and introducing the Russian art scene. For that same purpose, Mr. Ovcharenko is among the dealers behind a new art fair that will open in Moscow on Dec. 17, called Cosmoscow.

Latin American galleries, on the other hand, seemed to be thriving. That’s not unusual, given Miami’s geographical proximity and the fact that many Latin American collectors have homes here, but what was new this year was the level of interest in Latin American art from museums.

Anne Strauss, an associate curator in the 19th century, Modern and contemporary department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was at the fair on Wednesday specifically to look at Latin American art, and she was apparently not the only museum representative doing so. The Mexican gallery kurimanzutto sold a Jonathan Hernández collage to the Miami Art Museum, and a sculpture by Abraham Cruzvillegas was reserved for another American institution, according to the gallery owners.

The booth of the Brazilian gallery Fortes Vilaça was dominated by a large installation by the artist Ernesto Neto. A rounded wooden structure raised slightly off the ground, wrapped in red nylon, it looked a little like Cinderella’s carriage after midnight, if it had turned into a strawberry instead of a pumpkin. Inside the sculpture, titled “Circleprototemple ...!,” a bench encircled a large drum, over which dangled a hefty drumstick. The work was first exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London this year. Alessandra Ragazzo d’Aloia, one of the gallery’s owners, said she hoped it would go to a Brazilian museum.

In the meantime, however, the sculpture made an attractive resting place for tired fairgoers and, over the course of the fair, it hosted a shifting party of people chatting in English, Spanish and Portuguese. On Thursday evening the artist himself arrived, straight off a long flight from São Paolo but still in impish spirits, and held court inside his “temple,” where he played the drum vigorously in between otherwise uninterrupted streams of conversation.

Mr. Neto explained that the work was inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges short story, “The Circular Ruins,” and that the red structure was meant to be a heart, with the drum providing the heartbeat. Then (prodded by a reporter’s questions) he went into a long and hilariously animated discussion of his next project in Rio de Janeiro — a series of projections of photographs he has taken, many of them of his friends — and of the difficult logistics of planning the accompanying late-night beach party.

Apart from encounters like these, artists often seem marginal to the social scene at a blue-chip fair like Art Basel Miami Beach, which is dominated by dealers, collectors and museum trustees, who use these four days to reinforce their business and personal relationships at often opulent dinners and parties. (Artists are a bigger presence at the satellite fairs.)

A “family reunion where you get to pick all your relatives” is how one collector described the fair — an accurate enough statement, except that it ignores the millions of dollars changing hands within the family.

One family member who had changed roles was Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York art dealer who this year made the unusual transition from art dealer to museum director. As usual, on the opening night of the fair he gave a party on the beach at the Raleigh Hotel, where he danced to the band LCD Soundsystem.

“I was always central to Miami,” Mr. Deitch, who now runs the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, had said earlier in the day, confessing that he was “nostalgic” for his years as a dealer there. “They didn’t even replace my booth — it’s a group of benches now.”