Cathy Wilkerson opens her memoir literally flying through the air inside her parent’s Greenwich Village townhouse—massive dynamite explosions are ripping through its four floors. Just a few seconds earlier on that March morning in 1970, she’d been blithely ironing bedsheets, tidying up before her parents returned home from their Caribbean vacation. It’s as if the evidence she was trying to hide was merely the detritus of a raucous kegger, and not the presence of her Weather Underground collective, busy making bombs intended for a U.S. Army officers’ dance at New Jersey’s Fort Dix as well as for Columbia University’s Low Library.

An accidentally crossed wire later, three of the Weathermen lay fatally mangled. Ms. Wilkerson led fellow survivor Kathy Boudin out of the rubble.

Why had these sons and daughters of privilege been moved to declare war on “Amerikkka”? Thirty-seven years have passed, and Ms. Wilkerson is still pondering “how my friends and I came to be there at that moment and what I believed we were trying to do.” As for those friends, “their deaths led me, and many others, to begin to turn away from responding to violence with violence … to search for a different paradigm for change.”

A stirring thought. Except it never actually happened. There was little soul-searching within Weather over how murdering Fort Dix’s soldiers or Columbia’s administrators truly advanced the cause of social justice. Tactics, not ethics, drove the subsequent debate. Ms. Wilkerson admits that her initial reaction to the townhouse explosion was to begin studying electrical engineering: The new party line would focus on symbolic targets, not people—though now the bombs would have safety switches.

Ms. Wilkerson was part of a Weather team that went on to detonate a bomb inside the Bay Area’s Marin County Courthouse: “The success of the action—no one was hurt and the issue of the prisons was put squarely in the public’s eye for another moment—went a long way to assuring me and others that indeed I was as competent as the next person.”

Got that? Not only was she back in the good graces of her comrades, but somehow blasting apart a courthouse bathroom had struck a bold blow for prison reform. Welcome to “a different paradigm.”

In fact, slotting Flying Close to the Sun into the ever-expanding library of New Left chronicles makes for a case of literary Rashômon. Recalling a January 1968 antiwar rally outside Western High School in Washington, D.C., Ms. Wilkerson gushes that she “loved the energetic spirit” there: “I could see that the students were invigorated.” A co-organizer remembers that afternoon quite differently, telling The New York Times that “some greasers started to fight with the demonstrators. People were pushing and shoving and punching. I said, ‘This is terrible.’ Cathy looked at me, surprised, and said, ‘Oh, no, this is terrific. People are communicating.’”

The delusions continue: Ms. Wilkerson says she felt “completely rudderless” in January 1970 when the Weather leadership packed her off to a Seattle collective; she did little more, she tells us, than engage in some desultory firearms practice. How morally convenient. In a recently reissued memoir, With the Weathermen, the late Susan Stern—a member of that Seattle cell—describes Ms. Wilkerson as an enforcer sent to “separate the wheat from the chaff”: A cult-like program of group sex and all-night “criticism sessions” was intended to weed out those not fully committed to becoming a homegrown fifth column for Hanoi.

Today a 62-year-old high-school math teacher in Brooklyn, Cathy Wilkerson engages in the requisite hand-wringing over Weather’s ideological excesses before insisting that with its 25 bombings from 1969 to 1975, ranging from Queens’ 103rd Police Precinct to the basement of the U.S. Capitol, “tens of thousands felt heartened by our voice of outrage, our sacrifice, and our ability to elude capture.”

Looking back on that same slice of Weather history, Stern was willing to consider that her fervor for the glorious people’s revolution may have stemmed as much from a desire to dodge middle-class white guilt as from selfless idealism. Don’t expect to find any reckoning that honest in Flying Close to the Sun.

Brett Sokol writes on the arts for The Miami Herald and Ocean Drive. He’s at work on a book about hip-hop in Cuba. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

“The art world today is much more of a business than it was in the 70’s,” said Mirabelle Marden, the 28-year-old co-owner of the Lower East Side’s Rivington Arms gallery and, as the daughter of abstract art’s éminence grise, Brice Marden, genuine downtown royalty. “It’s all just so much bigger now.”

Ms. Marden and her business partner, Melissa Bent, held court at Miami’s NADA art fair this past weekend. Much of Rivington Arms’ featured work had already been sold during NADA’s opening hours, with collectors leaving a trail of sale-signifying red dots in their wake.

With prices ranging from $800 to $4,000, Rivington Arms’ wares were bargains. Many had been produced by artists just barely out of college and into their legal drinking years. Collectors’ cult of youth, meet the new professionalism.

“Art students have a different way of approaching their art now,” Ms. Marden said. “They can envision having a career.”

To sharpen that contrast, she need only look to her own father. At 68, he’s been saluted with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, on view until Jan. 15, 2007. This fall saw him hired by the Gap to model their T-shirts and personify the chain’s, ahem, “heritage in self-expression and individuality.”

But that hardly happened overnight. Mr. Marden dropped out of hotel-management school in 1958, married the striking Pauline Baez—sister to folk singer and then–Bob Dylan paramour Joan—and enrolled in Yale’s M.F.A. program. As he quipped last month on Charlie Rose, his original inspiration was simple: “I went into painting to meet those beautiful women that I used to see in Greenwich Village back in the 60’s.”

But in 1963, that Ivy degree had yet to resemble its current license to print money. Mr. Marden spent the next few years futilely mailing out teaching-position applications, floating from sister-in-law Joan’s California spread to father-in-law Albert’s Paris apartment, hanging with that era’s underground luminaries and, by his own admission, smoking copious amounts of marijuana.

It wasn’t until the end of the decade, following a divorce and his subsequent remarriage to Helen Harrington (now a painter as well), that Mr. Marden would blossom into an iconic top earner.

Along the way, his daughter Melia would become something of an intellectual sensualist. Robert Mapplethorpe would snap Melia Marden as a naked toddler in 1983. She would go on—at the age of 14—to interview Fran Lebowitz in Interview, then to graduate Harvard, where she designed costumes, in 2003, and to attend the French Culinary Institute—as well as to write, briefly, on fashion for Time.

Older daughter Mirabelle followed a more direct route. After graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, she and her classmate, Ms. Bent, opened Rivington Arms on the Lower East Side. “I knew I wanted to be close to art, and that was the neighborhood I felt most comfortable in,” she said. “It sounds strange to say we were meeting artists socially, but we weren’t scouting for them. We were just meeting everybody who was coming out of school at the same time as us.”

Rivington Arms drew a wealth of positive notices. Ms. Marden ascended to “It” girl status—shadowed by Patrick McMullan’s camera, profiled in Vogue, even christened the dour face of Manhattan’s “New Bohemians” by The New York Times Magazine this past fall.

This year, Rivington Arms was one of the last galleries to physically move their art inside their NADA booth, ostentatiously traipsing past their already-prepared fair neighbors, said one New York–based NADA gallery owner. The intended message seemed to be: We don’t have to hustle.

“Mirabelle shows good artists, and she obviously cares about making strong, young aesthetic statements,” said the dealer. “But she always wants to look like she’s never trying too hard, like it’s all so effortless.”

During Art Basel Miami Beach, Ms. Marden supped one evening at a private dinner hosted by Jimmy Choo bigwig Tamara Mellon, breaking bread with über-dealer and longtime family friend Larry Gagosian, blue-chip collector Aby Rosen, auction-house head Simon de Pury and—because South Beach party regulations apparently mandate the presence of at least one Hilton sister at all times—Nicky Hilton.

But the next night was decidedly more in keeping with her program. Ms. Marden hosted a fête for filmmaker Arden Wohl—a recent N.Y.U. grad, natch—with indie-rock darlings Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and what seemed like half of Williamsburg in attendance.

Ms. Marden’s downtown imprimatur seems as crucial to some of her artists’ popularity as their actual talent. Hanna Liden’s horror-flick-infused photos have an undeniable power, but many of her extremely young artists are just coming into their own. Will she and her stable “graduate” to the next level—or must they at all?

This year, NADA co-founder and Chelsea gallerist Zach Feuer, also 28, set up shop at Art Basel proper.

“NADA was always meant to be a launching pad for new galleries,” he said. “I wanted to help them develop the confidence to be able to say, ‘No, I’m not going to give you a 40 percent discount just because you’ve never heard of the artist.’”

So would he recommend that Rivington Arms jump from NADA to Basel next year? “Definitely,” he said with a chuckle.

Ms. Marden seemed a bit coyer about membership in the new establishment. True, she’d already moved her gallery from its namesake address to larger digs on East Second Street. Perhaps she’d find it uncomfortable operating so close to her father’s world? After all, the Basel fair was filled with his paintings, including one solid gray canvas being offered by New York gallerist Nick Acquavella for a cool $1.7 million. Could she envision herself someday selling seven-figure work?

“I’m not taking that bait,” Ms. Marden said. “I’ve never wanted to be judged solely by my last name. That’s why we didn’t name the gallery Marden-Bent.” She paused and wrinkled her nose. “Besides, that would’ve sounded too uptown.”

Indeed, mocking a then-popular Times promotional slogan, William F. Buckley Jr. headlined a 1961 magazine story on Matthews with “I Got My Job Through the New York Times: How one man’s opinion, disseminated through an influential newspaper, helped put Castro in power.” It was an assessment The Times’ own publisher and abashed editors came to agree with. Following his now-legendary 1957 front-page sit-down with Mr. Castro in the guerrilla leader’s mountaintop hideout, Matthews was thought too emotionally close to the story to render it objectively, and was initially barred from returning to Havana as a foreign correspondent.

What followed was a decade-long war within The New York Times’ newsroom, one that ran in tandem with the actual battles being waged in Cuba. Mr. DePalma’s book expertly intertwines these two historical strands, unearthing internal memos from The Times’ own archives (many of which are every bit as colorfully acrimonious as their latter-day e-mail counterparts), as well as Matthews’ personal correspondence and now-declassified F.B.I. records (including surveillance by a fellow Times reporter). There’s plenty of juicy grist for Kremlinologists of both stripes— Times-ian and Cuban.

The first myth to be demolished by Mr. DePalma is that Matthews’ fawning profile of Fidel was the product of an impressionable cub reporter. The 56-year-old Matthews was anything but green, though his Times résumé was checkered: His Spanish Civil War reportage alongside Ernest Hemingway had already drawn flak from editors worried about his pro-Loyalist bias. Any reservations were overruled by then-publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, with whom Matthews had developed a close personal relationship. In fact, Sulzberger eventually granted Matthews a unique position on The Times’ editorial board—the first and last time in the paper’s history in which a reporter was allowed to pen both news stories and unsigned editorials.

It was from this privileged roost that Matthews swept into Havana in 1957, itching to land a career-capping story and, in the derisive opinion of one colleague, live out his “Lawrence of Arabia” fantasies one last time.

Slipping past police roadblocks in an all-night drive to meet the rebel leader—then presumed dead—he certainly found plenty of stirring source material. In a series of articles, he presented to the world a dashing Fidel Castro, a Robin Hood whose only goal was to end the Batista dictatorship and usher in free elections. Just as crucially, whereas in reality Castro had perhaps two dozen poorly equipped men under his personal command, Matthews estimated his strength at upwards of 1,000—and growing daily. (It wasn’t the last instance of Matthews’ failed intelligence-gathering skills that Mr. DePalma wryly compares to those of Ms. Miller.) The results “did not create Fidel from nothing,” Mr. DePalma observes of the ensuing publicity, “but they did change his image from hotheaded loser to noble rogue with broad ideals, a characterization that appealed to a large spectrum of Cubans as well as Americans.”

Ironically, the sharpest rejoinder to Matthews came from The Times’ own Havana bureau chief, Ruby Hart Phillips, and over the next few years the paper was full of dueling accounts: Was Fidel Castro a Soviet stalking horse or a misunderstood democrat? Were the newly victorious rebel army’s firing squads producing a “blood bath” on the flimsiest of evidence, or were they merely administering rough justice in the name of the greater social good? It all depended under whose byline the story ran, Phillips or Matthews.

Meanwhile, Matthews’ involvement was ranging beyond his typewriter as he provided counsel to policymakers. Mr. DePalma notes that his input was influential in the hiring and firing of ambassadors to Cuba, in ending the arms sales to Batista (which sealed his fate) and in producing the ambivalent U.S. response to Castro’s initial months in office. As with Iraq, the State Department (where Matthews had the ear of the Cuba desk) hoped for an accommodation of some sort, while the Defense Department angled for a military strike. Accordingly, it was the desire to distance themselves from Matthews which helped persuade Times editors to defang their Bay of Pigs exposé, lest they be accused of tipping off Castro to the C.I.A.’s invasion plans.

However, by January 1962, a new publisher was in place at The Times, and Orvil E. Dryfoos shared little of his predecessor’s affection for Matthews. The result was a memo from on high which rivals in its bluntness 2002’s notorious inter-office e-mail demanding “we have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times”: “I trust that Herbert Matthews will remain: 1.) out of the news 2.) and not write for the news department.”

It’s not surprising that Matthews persisted in his cherished illusions. After all, he was hardly the only one to fall for Castro’s charms—Miami is full of figures, from business moguls to erstwhile comrades-in-arms, who can speak eloquently to their own rude awakenings. And among creative types, from Oliver Stone to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there still exists a storied tradition of acting as Castro’s apologist. (Castro has publicly boasted of using Mr. Garcia Marquez in the late 90’s as a back-channel envoy to President Bill Clinton.)

What’s shocking is that The Times allowed Matthews to dispense his folly for so long. He wrote editorials arguing that Cuba had no designs on its regional neighbors even as Che Guevara embarked on his doomed Bolivian insurrection; and as late as December 1966, eight months before his retirement, after 45 years at the paper, he was still injecting tsuris into the heart of yet a third Times publisher, Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger.

Like any old-school Times vet, Mr. DePalma largely reserves judgment through all this, remaining coolly dispassionate as Matthews eerily echoes Castro’s own belief that “history will absolve me” and returns to Cuba for one last trip in 1972, gathering material for what he hoped would be a score-settling tome. At the very moment when homosexuals, hippies and anyone else deemed “counterrevolutionary” were being rounded up and sent to forced-labor camps—a chilling period recalled in Reinaldo Arenas’ 1992 memoir, Before Night Falls—Matthews felt that the island’s rulers had at last “struggled through to something good for Cuba, and something that is at last beginning to succeed.”

It’s in his book’s last pages that Mr. DePalma finally sets his dogged evenhandedness aside and deftly carves up Matthews. “It is certainly arguable that the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban peoples are better off under Communism than under their previous regimes,” Matthews opines in his final unpublished manuscript, completed just before his death in 1977—a viewpoint Mr. DePalma isn’t about to let stand. He closes The Man Who Invented Fidel by traveling to the same jungle-shrouded spot in Cuba where Matthews first met Castro, and then speaks with the now-elderly local farmers in whose name the revolution was first waged. His discovery? “Only the calendar year seems to have changed.” Area families remain dirt poor, without even electricity, paralyzed into submission by their fear of a police state and waiting—praying—for Castro to finally die so a better future might emerge. “The sheer desperation of the scene stunned me. All the rancor and bloodshed of half a century, for this? How could so little have changed, when so much has changed?”

But don’t blame The Times for any of this. “Castro could have triumphed without Matthews,” Mr. DePalma insists, and he’s quick to share out responsibility to the horde of reporters who initially parroted Matthews’ take on the revolution, as well as uninformed U.S. diplomats in Batista-era Havana and their equally clueless counterparts in Washington, D.C.

Anthony DePalma coyly leaves it to the reader to substitute the word Iraq for Cuba, dancing right up to the obvious parallels. But while he may be unwilling to compare and contrast l’affaire Judy with the Matthews debacle, The Times’ current stewards would seem to have the similarities firmly in mind. As Mr. DePalma quips in the acknowledgements, executive editor Bill Keller “winced when he heard that I was writing about Matthews after so many unflattering books about the newspaper were being published.” No doubt.

Brett Sokol has written about Cuban culture and politics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Vibe magazine.

Indeed, mocking a then-popular Times promotional slogan, William F. Buckley Jr. headlined a 1961 magazine story on Matthews with “I Got My Job Through the New York Times: How one man’s opinion, disseminated through an influential newspaper, helped put Castro in power.” It was an assessment The Times’ own publisher and abashed editors came to agree with. Following his now-legendary 1957 front-page sit-down with Mr. Castro in the guerrilla leader’s mountaintop hideout, Matthews was thought too emotionally close to the story to render it objectively, and was initially barred from returning to Havana as a foreign correspondent.

What followed was a decade-long war within The New York Times’ newsroom, one that ran in tandem with the actual battles being waged in Cuba. Mr. DePalma’s book expertly intertwines these two historical strands, unearthing internal memos from The Times’ own archives (many of which are every bit as colorfully acrimonious as their latter-day e-mail counterparts), as well as Matthews’ personal correspondence and now-declassified F.B.I. records (including surveillance by a fellow Times reporter). There’s plenty of juicy grist for Kremlinologists of both stripes—Times-ian and Cuban.

The first myth to be demolished by Mr. DePalma is that Matthews’ fawning profile of Fidel was the product of an impressionable cub reporter. The 56-year-old Matthews was anything but green, though his Times résumé was checkered: His Spanish Civil War reportage alongside Ernest Hemingway had already drawn flak from editors worried about his pro-Loyalist bias. Any reservations were overruled by then-publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, with whom Matthews had developed a close personal relationship. In fact, Sulzberger eventually granted Matthews a unique position on The Times’ editorial board—the first and last time in the paper’s history in which a reporter was allowed to pen both news stories and unsigned editorials.

It was from this privileged roost that Matthews swept into Havana in 1957, itching to land a career-capping story and, in the derisive opinion of one colleague, live out his “Lawrence of Arabia” fantasies one last time.

Slipping past police roadblocks in an all-night drive to meet the rebel leader—then presumed dead—he certainly found plenty of stirring source material. In a series of articles, he presented to the world a dashing Fidel Castro, a Robin Hood whose only goal was to end the Batista dictatorship and usher in free elections. Just as crucially, whereas in reality Castro had perhaps two dozen poorly equipped men under his personal command, Matthews estimated his strength at upwards of 1,000—and growing daily. (It wasn’t the last instance of Matthews’ failed intelligence-gathering skills that Mr. DePalma wryly compares to those of Ms. Miller.) The results “did not create Fidel from nothing,” Mr. DePalma observes of the ensuing publicity, “but they did change his image from hotheaded loser to noble rogue with broad ideals, a characterization that appealed to a large spectrum of Cubans as well as Americans.”

Ironically, the sharpest rejoinder to Matthews came from The Times’ own Havana bureau chief, Ruby Hart Phillips, and over the next few years the paper was full of dueling accounts: Was Fidel Castro a Soviet stalking horse or a misunderstood democrat? Were the newly victorious rebel army’s firing squads producing a “blood bath” on the flimsiest of evidence, or were they merely administering rough justice in the name of the greater social good? It all depended under whose byline the story ran, Phillips or Matthews.

Meanwhile, Matthews’ involvement was ranging beyond his typewriter as he provided counsel to policymakers. Mr. DePalma notes that his input was influential in the hiring and firing of ambassadors to Cuba, in ending the arms sales to Batista (which sealed his fate) and in producing the ambivalent U.S. response to Castro’s initial months in office. As with Iraq, the State Department (where Matthews had the ear of the Cuba desk) hoped for an accommodation of some sort, while the Defense Department angled for a military strike. Accordingly, it was the desire to distance themselves from Matthews which helped persuade Times editors to defang their Bay of Pigs exposé, lest they be accused of tipping off Castro to the C.I.A.’s invasion plans.

However, by January 1962, a new publisher was in place at The Times, and Orvil E. Dryfoos shared little of his predecessor’s affection for Matthews. The result was a memo from on high which rivals in its bluntness 2002’s notorious inter-office e-mail demanding “we have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times”: “I trust that Herbert Matthews will remain: 1.) out of the news 2.) and not write for the news department.”

It’s not surprising that Matthews persisted in his cherished illusions. After all, he was hardly the only one to fall for Castro’s charms—Miami is full of figures, from business moguls to erstwhile comrades-in-arms, who can speak eloquently to their own rude awakenings. And among creative types, from Oliver Stone to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there still exists a storied tradition of acting as Castro’s apologist. (Castro has publicly boasted of using Mr. Garcia Marquez in the late 90’s as a back-channel envoy to President Bill Clinton.)

What’s shocking is that The Times allowed Matthews to dispense his folly for so long. He wrote editorials arguing that Cuba had no designs on its regional neighbors even as Che Guevara embarked on his doomed Bolivian insurrection; and as late as December 1966, eight months before his retirement, after 45 years at the paper, he was still injecting tsuris into the heart of yet a third Times publisher, Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger.

Like any old-school Times vet, Mr. DePalma largely reserves judgment through all this, remaining coolly dispassionate as Matthews eerily echoes Castro’s own belief that “history will absolve me” and returns to Cuba for one last trip in 1972, gathering material for what he hoped would be a score-settling tome. At the very moment when homosexuals, hippies and anyone else deemed “counterrevolutionary” were being rounded up and sent to forced-labor camps—a chilling period recalled in Reinaldo Arenas’ 1992 memoir, Before Night Falls—Matthews felt that the island’s rulers had at last “struggled through to something good for Cuba, and something that is at last beginning to succeed.”

It’s in his book’s last pages that Mr. DePalma finally sets his dogged evenhandedness aside and deftly carves up Matthews. “It is certainly arguable that the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban peoples are better off under Communism than under their previous regimes,” Matthews opines in his final unpublished manuscript, completed just before his death in 1977—a viewpoint Mr. DePalma isn’t about to let stand. He closes The Man Who Invented Fidel by traveling to the same jungle-shrouded spot in Cuba where Matthews first met Castro, and then speaks with the now-elderly local farmers in whose name the revolution was first waged. His discovery? “Only the calendar year seems to have changed.” Area families remain dirt poor, without even electricity, paralyzed into submission by their fear of a police state and waiting—praying—for Castro to finally die so a better future might emerge. “The sheer desperation of the scene stunned me. All the rancor and bloodshed of half a century, for this? How could so little have changed, when so much has changed?”

But don’t blame The Times for any of this. “Castro could have triumphed without Matthews,” Mr. DePalma insists, and he’s quick to share out responsibility to the horde of reporters who initially parroted Matthews’ take on the revolution, as well as uninformed U.S. diplomats in Batista-era Havana and their equally clueless counterparts in Washington, D.C.

Anthony DePalma coyly leaves it to the reader to substitute the word Iraq for Cuba, dancing right up to the obvious parallels. But while he may be unwilling to compare and contrast l’affaire Judy with the Matthews debacle, The Times’ current stewards would seem to have the similarities firmly in mind. As Mr. DePalma quips in the acknowledgements, executive editor Bill Keller “winced when he heard that I was writing about Matthews after so many unflattering books about the newspaper were being published.” No doubt.

Brett Sokol has written about Cuban culture and politics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Vibe magazine.

But it’s not the 27-year-old Mr. Bas’ body that is the object of Ms. Jagger’s affections—it’s his homoerotic paintings of dandies and waiflike teens falling out of dreamy landscapes and into each other’s arms. In her lust, Ms. Jagger may be reminded of her ex-husband’s glory days—or perhaps she just sensed yet another excellent investment.

Just five days before collectors and curators would pack onto JetBlue and wing south, Mr. Bas’ new contribution to one of his dealers’ booths, a half-finished 48-by-72-inch canvas that would be his largest work to date, lay before him in his Miami Design District studio. He works in a high-ceilinged space provided gratis by local developer Craig Robins, who believes that a rising art tide lifts all economic boats, especially those of, say, real-estate properties. “It needs another $20 worth of paint,” Mr. Bas joked of his painting, before it could be delivered to the top name on his dealer’s 200-strong waiting list, which is organized in an arcane pecking order that seemed to shuffle every time the phone rang with another wheedling collector.

“Everybody wants to jump ahead in line,” Mr. Bas said. “And they all tell me they want an important piece. What, as opposed to the unimportant ones?”

He needn’t have worried. Last Wednesday, before the fair even opened to the general public, Fredric Snitzer, his Miami dealer, sold that painting for $50,000 to a museum that he declined to name.

It was a new career high for Mr. Bas—but at this fair, in this self-hyping market, could any of it have gone wrong? That crazy rush of cash was a harbinger of the now-typical art-fair madness about to begin. Back in 1984, historian and critic Robert Hughes warned of a new “porousness of the barrier which separates the language of disinterested evaluation from sales talk,” a development that had created “Art World, the cultural equivalent to Disneyworld, full of rides and haunted houses and historical fictions …. ” Now that barrier may no longer exist. And hey! Let’s not forget the Magic Food Court!

EARLY AT WEDNESDAY'S GRAND OPENING, a clutch of young Basel staffers were discovered huddled around a BlackBerry, trying to console a female colleague who appeared near tears. Miami power-collector Ella Cisneros had just sent over another 14 names to be added to a private dinner honoring painter Robert Rauschenberg.

“We’re already 70 people over, and every person costs money,” said one staffer of the Bulgari-sponsored fête. “She can’t keep adding people! It’s not even our event!” Still, Ms. Cisneros was not a woman to be slighted, and clearly the e-mail reply was going to have be worded very carefully.

Yet no sooner had the group composition gotten underway than another panicked staffer ran up. Apparently, Robert Rauschenberg’s nurse was not on the V.I.P. list and had been barred from accompanying the wheelchair-bound artist inside. Double crisis! Let the party begin!

All in all, 36,000 out-of-towners joined a horde of locals to converge on the Miami Beach Convention Center and tear through its 195 gallery booths, while four satellite fairs housed another 248 galleries. Over the five days, there were swanky dinners, private parties and personal tours of the warehoused collections of Miami’s marquee collectors: Ms. Cisneros, Norman Braman, Debra and Dennis Scholl, Rosa de la Cruz, Martin Margulies, and pack leaders Don and Mera Rubell. Their vast stockpiles on display handily eclipsed the offerings of the city’s actual museums. Once upon a time, collectors stocked the museums: In Miami, they merely open their own.

Rather than being exhausting, all these overlapping frenzies only seemed to rev up the metabolism. And not every party was all artsy. For starters, when better to introduce Frida Kahlo tequila to the world? “Frida was very passionate about every aspect of her life, and that is the spirit of Art Basel,” said the Mexican artist’s grandniece (and family licensee), Mara Kahlo. But, one wondered, might not Frida’s old Communist Party comrades look askance at her iconic status being used to push $90 bottles of high-octane alcohol? “In her political salons,” Ms. Kahlo shot back, “when they gathered to discuss the issues of the day, they always drank tequila.”

But it didn’t take hard liquor to bring on the madness at Basel proper. Manhattan über-dealer Jeffrey Deitch compared the fair’s first day to Black Friday: “Did you see those photos of people pouring through Wal-Mart’s doors at 5 a.m.? That’s exactly what it is like here.” In a few hours, virtually all the work on display at the Deitch Projects booth had been sold. But then, that’s what everyone was saying: Dealers may dis the bubble, but they certainly want it known they’re deep inside it.

The Rubells, whose purchases have become as influentially price-setting on the art market as any museum, had bought a painting from Mr. Deitch by Chelsea’s latest star, Kehinde Wiley. Pointing to his remaining Wiley painting—an imposing nine-by-nine-foot piece which transposed a thugged-out hip-hop figure into a Napoleonic-era battle scene—Mr. Deitch said he was well aware that with the Rubell imprimatur, it would now easily fetch twice the $45,000 price for which it had been reserved, before the fair, by a museum.

“But a year or two later, it’d be back at the auction house again,” he added blithely. And raising the value of Mr. Wiley’s future work is, like, somehow bad for Mr. Deitch? “It’s important to avoid unsustainable prices,” Mr. Deitch said, as if schooling a child. “In a rising market, everybody looks smart. But I’ve been doing this since 1974, and there’s no such thing as a market that always goes up.”

So everyone keeps saying. That quiet and (so far) unwarranted caution was the party line all over town—just the sort of market self-deprecation that keeps a market humming. Even Miami gallery owner Genaro Ambrosino warned, “If you’re looking for a sure bet, buy bonds, not art.” A prominent New York collector quipped, “Anytime you’re involved in a transaction with somebody called a ‘dealer,’ whether he’s dealing cards, drugs or paintings, you know you’re about to get ripped off.” Well, then why are you here?

Wall Street, at least, had learned to love the bubble. The New York–based Fernwood Art Investments has pushed back the launch of its endlessly discussed art mutual funds, but the company still brought out a spiffy, super-bullish, chart-heavy circular. Over a 10-year period, Fernwood calculates, had you invested in all things Richard Prince, you would have seen an annualized return of 43 percent—and all that number-crunching was done prior to Mr. Prince’s stellar 2005 sales, which saw his Untitled (Cowboy) become the first photograph to break the million-dollar mark at auction; a painting from Mr. Prince’s Nurse series has also passed the seven-figure threshold, just three years after its initial offering at $150,000.

See? Why worry? And Zwirner and Wirth sold an Elizabeth Peyton watercolor for $110,000, while London’s White Cube sold all five editions of Tracey Emin’s new The Last Century DVD for $104,000—each. Take two, they’re small!

BUT THOSE SEARCHING FOR THE NEXT DECADE'S PRINCES, Peytons and Emins—or at least work with one less zero (for now) in the price tag—made their way across Biscayne Bay to Miami’s rapidly gentrifying Wynwood neighborhood and the New Art Dealers Alliance fair—which may explain why those Fernwood analysts who tout “investable art insight” had jumped onboard as NADA’s chief sponsor.

Betty Lee Stern, whose Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation has been a recent co-sponsor of exhibits at the Met and the Whitney, parked herself in NADA co-founder Zach Feuer’s booth, making it clear where she felt the strongest voices (or, ahem, investments) in contemporary art lay. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director who followed in Ms. Stern’s wake, shared her enthusiasm for the fair. “I’m more excited about the go-for-broke attitude here,” he said.

The same boldface-named collectors who had torn through Basel also picked much of NADA clean, fortunately, as it’s no fun to actually go home broke. Mr. Feuer had sold a set of four videos by Nathalie Djurberg to the Rubells at $5,000 each, while geek-chic gallery owner Daniel Reich didn’t even bother to rise out of his chair as visitors poked around his booth. “They’re all sold,” he barked when asked about his Hernan Bas holdings.

It was all a bit much for Miami painter and artblog.net editor Franklin Einspruch. “When you want to check someone’s pulse, you don’t do it after they’ve gone on a three-mile jog and done a line of coke,” he e-mailed during the fair, calling cheery economic forecasts based on Miami sales ridiculous.

Still, the only dealers in attendance not smiling were those who’d been denied a berth among NADA’s 83 slots. “I would have made a killing there,” groused one rejected Wynwood gallery owner. “All you need is their stamp of approval for collectors to start throwing down.”

It was a belief that NADA charter member and Chelsea gallery owner Oliver Kamm became painfully acquainted with after a score of gallery owners back in New York begged him to put in a word with this year’s selection committee. “When NADA was just a bunch of dealers meeting over a pizza lunch, nobody came,” Mr. Kamm said. “But when you add an economic component, suddenly everybody’s your best friend.”

Over at Bellwether’s booth, gallery owner and NADA co-founder Becky Smith had given prime space to two of New Yorker Adam Cvijanovic’s paintings—windblown houses in flight with a mass of cultural detritus swirling around them—but it hadn’t even been necessary to hang them. The two prospective buyers—including New Line Cinema co-C.E.O. Michael Lynne—that she’d called a week earlier had both been standing outside NADA’s doors as she unpacked, each ready to pounce on one of Mr. Cvijanovic’s $20,000 paintings. And don’t even think about asking Ms. Smith if such an attitude is unhealthy.

“This isn’t a novel experiment,” she said. “I’m not trying to remain an emerging artists’ gallery for my entire career, where people show up and say”—she dropped her voice to a precious coo—“‘Ooh! Look! A cute little gallery with cute little artists!’ If I become established, it just means my artists now have real lives. Isn’t that the point? I’m not just trying to make a buck off a trend. I’m trying to help artists have viable careers, getting them onto the museum circuit and out into the world.”

HERNAN BAS, EMBARRASSED AT BEING TOUTED in the press as the standard-bearer for Miami’s homegrown art scene, kept a purposely low profile throughout the week’s affairs. But while his Patrick McMullan close-ups would have to wait, he’s no fool about the almighty market. “I wish people would stop pretending this isn’t a business,” Mr. Bas said, with a sigh, on the eve of Basel. “I’ve got friends who haven’t been paid by their dealers in nine months. If that happened in any other field, people would be outraged.”

When he was told that Charles Saatchi—famed for his hard-nosed speculation tactics—had recently made an offer to buy up the bulk of Mr. Bas’ latest work (according to a source close to Fredric Snitzer), Mr. Bas didn’t appear fazed in the slightest. “Sometimes I think artists are the only people who treat the art world as if commerce wasn’t involved,” he said.

But it’s not the 27-year-old Mr. Bas’ body that is the object of Ms. Jagger’s affections—it’s his homoerotic paintings of dandies and waiflike teens falling out of dreamy landscapes and into each other’s arms. In her lust, Ms. Jagger may be reminded of her ex-husband’s glory days—or perhaps she just sensed yet another excellent investment.

Just five days before collectors and curators would pack onto JetBlue and wing south, Mr. Bas’ new contribution to one of his dealers’ booths, a half-finished 48-by-72-inch canvas that would be his largest work to date, lay before him in his Miami Design District studio. He works in a high-ceilinged space provided gratis by local developer Craig Robins, who believes that a rising art tide lifts all economic boats, especially those of, say, real-estate properties. “It needs another $20 worth of paint,” Mr. Bas joked of his painting, before it could be delivered to the top name on his dealer’s 200-strong waiting list, which is organized in an arcane pecking order that seemed to shuffle every time the phone rang with another wheedling collector.

“Everybody wants to jump ahead in line,” Mr. Bas said. “And they all tell me they want an important piece. What, as opposed to the unimportant ones?”

He needn’t have worried. Last Wednesday, before the fair even opened to the general public, Fredric Snitzer, his Miami dealer, sold that painting for $50,000 to a museum that he declined to name.

It was a new career high for Mr. Bas—but at this fair, in this self-hyping market, could any of it have gone wrong? That crazy rush of cash was a harbinger of the now-typical art-fair madness about to begin. Back in 1984, historian and critic Robert Hughes warned of a new “porousness of the barrier which separates the language of disinterested evaluation from sales talk,” a development that had created “Art World, the cultural equivalent to Disneyworld, full of rides and haunted houses and historical fictions …. ” Now that barrier may no longer exist. And hey! Let’s not forget the Magic Food Court!

EARLY AT WEDNESDAY'S GRAND OPENING, a clutch of young Basel staffers were discovered huddled around a BlackBerry, trying to console a female colleague who appeared near tears. Miami power-collector Ella Cisneros had just sent over another 14 names to be added to a private dinner honoring painter Robert Rauschenberg.

“We’re already 70 people over, and every person costs money,” said one staffer of the Bulgari-sponsored fête. “She can’t keep adding people! It’s not even our event!” Still, Ms. Cisneros was not a woman to be slighted, and clearly the e-mail reply was going to have be worded very carefully.

Yet no sooner had the group composition gotten underway than another panicked staffer ran up. Apparently, Robert Rauschenberg’s nurse was not on the V.I.P. list and had been barred from accompanying the wheelchair-bound artist inside. Double crisis! Let the party begin!

All in all, 36,000 out-of-towners joined a horde of locals to converge on the Miami Beach Convention Center and tear through its 195 gallery booths, while four satellite fairs housed another 248 galleries. Over the five days, there were swanky dinners, private parties and personal tours of the warehoused collections of Miami’s marquee collectors: Ms. Cisneros, Norman Braman, Debra and Dennis Scholl, Rosa de la Cruz, Martin Margulies, and pack leaders Don and Mera Rubell. Their vast stockpiles on display handily eclipsed the offerings of the city’s actual museums. Once upon a time, collectors stocked the museums: In Miami, they merely open their own.

Rather than being exhausting, all these overlapping frenzies only seemed to rev up the metabolism. And not every party was all artsy. For starters, when better to introduce Frida Kahlo tequila to the world? “Frida was very passionate about every aspect of her life, and that is the spirit of Art Basel,” said the Mexican artist’s grandniece (and family licensee), Mara Kahlo. But, one wondered, might not Frida’s old Communist Party comrades look askance at her iconic status being used to push $90 bottles of high-octane alcohol? “In her political salons,” Ms. Kahlo shot back, “when they gathered to discuss the issues of the day, they always drank tequila.”

But it didn’t take hard liquor to bring on the madness at Basel proper. Manhattan über-dealer Jeffrey Deitch compared the fair’s first day to Black Friday: “Did you see those photos of people pouring through Wal-Mart’s doors at 5 a.m.? That’s exactly what it is like here.” In a few hours, virtually all the work on display at the Deitch Projects booth had been sold. But then, that’s what everyone was saying: Dealers may dis the bubble, but they certainly want it known they’re deep inside it.

The Rubells, whose purchases have become as influentially price-setting on the art market as any museum, had bought a painting from Mr. Deitch by Chelsea’s latest star, Kehinde Wiley. Pointing to his remaining Wiley painting—an imposing nine-by-nine-foot piece which transposed a thugged-out hip-hop figure into a Napoleonic-era battle scene—Mr. Deitch said he was well aware that with the Rubell imprimatur, it would now easily fetch twice the $45,000 price for which it had been reserved, before the fair, by a museum.

“But a year or two later, it’d be back at the auction house again,” he added blithely. And raising the value of Mr. Wiley’s future work is, like, somehow bad for Mr. Deitch? “It’s important to avoid unsustainable prices,” Mr. Deitch said, as if schooling a child. “In a rising market, everybody looks smart. But I’ve been doing this since 1974, and there’s no such thing as a market that always goes up.”

So everyone keeps saying. That quiet and (so far) unwarranted caution was the party line all over town—just the sort of market self-deprecation that keeps a market humming. Even Miami gallery owner Genaro Ambrosino warned, “If you’re looking for a sure bet, buy bonds, not art.” A prominent New York collector quipped, “Anytime you’re involved in a transaction with somebody called a ‘dealer,’ whether he’s dealing cards, drugs or paintings, you know you’re about to get ripped off.” Well, then why are you here?

Wall Street, at least, had learned to love the bubble. The New York–based Fernwood Art Investments has pushed back the launch of its endlessly discussed art mutual funds, but the company still brought out a spiffy, super-bullish, chart-heavy circular. Over a 10-year period, Fernwood calculates, had you invested in all things Richard Prince, you would have seen an annualized return of 43 percent—and all that number-crunching was done prior to Mr. Prince’s stellar 2005 sales, which saw his Untitled (Cowboy) become the first photograph to break the million-dollar mark at auction; a painting from Mr. Prince’s Nurse series has also passed the seven-figure threshold, just three years after its initial offering at $150,000.

See? Why worry? And Zwirner and Wirth sold an Elizabeth Peyton watercolor for $110,000, while London’s White Cube sold all five editions of Tracey Emin’s new The Last Century DVD for $104,000—each. Take two, they’re small!

BUT THOSE SEARCHING FOR THE NEXT DECADE'S PRINCES, Peytons and Emins—or at least work with one less zero (for now) in the price tag—made their way across Biscayne Bay to Miami’s rapidly gentrifying Wynwood neighborhood and the New Art Dealers Alliance fair—which may explain why those Fernwood analysts who tout “investable art insight” had jumped onboard as NADA’s chief sponsor.

Betty Lee Stern, whose Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation has been a recent co-sponsor of exhibits at the Met and the Whitney, parked herself in NADA co-founder Zach Feuer’s booth, making it clear where she felt the strongest voices (or, ahem, investments) in contemporary art lay. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director who followed in Ms. Stern’s wake, shared her enthusiasm for the fair. “I’m more excited about the go-for-broke attitude here,” he said.

The same boldface-named collectors who had torn through Basel also picked much of NADA clean, fortunately, as it’s no fun to actually go home broke. Mr. Feuer had sold a set of four videos by Nathalie Djurberg to the Rubells at $5,000 each, while geek-chic gallery owner Daniel Reich didn’t even bother to rise out of his chair as visitors poked around his booth. “They’re all sold,” he barked when asked about his Hernan Bas holdings.

It was all a bit much for Miami painter and artblog.net editor Franklin Einspruch. “When you want to check someone’s pulse, you don’t do it after they’ve gone on a three-mile jog and done a line of coke,” he e-mailed during the fair, calling cheery economic forecasts based on Miami sales ridiculous.

Still, the only dealers in attendance not smiling were those who’d been denied a berth among NADA’s 83 slots. “I would have made a killing there,” groused one rejected Wynwood gallery owner. “All you need is their stamp of approval for collectors to start throwing down.”

It was a belief that NADA charter member and Chelsea gallery owner Oliver Kamm became painfully acquainted with after a score of gallery owners back in New York begged him to put in a word with this year’s selection committee. “When NADA was just a bunch of dealers meeting over a pizza lunch, nobody came,” Mr. Kamm said. “But when you add an economic component, suddenly everybody’s your best friend.”

Over at Bellwether’s booth, gallery owner and NADA co-founder Becky Smith had given prime space to two of New Yorker Adam Cvijanovic’s paintings—windblown houses in flight with a mass of cultural detritus swirling around them—but it hadn’t even been necessary to hang them. The two prospective buyers—including New Line Cinema co-C.E.O. Michael Lynne—that she’d called a week earlier had both been standing outside NADA’s doors as she unpacked, each ready to pounce on one of Mr. Cvijanovic’s $20,000 paintings. And don’t even think about asking Ms. Smith if such an attitude is unhealthy.

“This isn’t a novel experiment,” she said. “I’m not trying to remain an emerging artists’ gallery for my entire career, where people show up and say”—she dropped her voice to a precious coo—“‘Ooh! Look! A cute little gallery with cute little artists!’ If I become established, it just means my artists now have real lives. Isn’t that the point? I’m not just trying to make a buck off a trend. I’m trying to help artists have viable careers, getting them onto the museum circuit and out into the world.”

HERNAN BAS, EMBARRASSED AT BEING TOUTED in the press as the standard-bearer for Miami’s homegrown art scene, kept a purposely low profile throughout the week’s affairs. But while his Patrick McMullan close-ups would have to wait, he’s no fool about the almighty market. “I wish people would stop pretending this isn’t a business,” Mr. Bas said, with a sigh, on the eve of Basel. “I’ve got friends who haven’t been paid by their dealers in nine months. If that happened in any other field, people would be outraged.”

When he was told that Charles Saatchi—famed for his hard-nosed speculation tactics—had recently made an offer to buy up the bulk of Mr. Bas’ latest work (according to a source close to Fredric Snitzer), Mr. Bas didn’t appear fazed in the slightest. “Sometimes I think artists are the only people who treat the art world as if commerce wasn’t involved,” he said.