The essence was not the extensive possibility of “seeing”, but the fact that by exposing the senses to the influence of this vast number of works – those of nearly a thousand 20th and 21st century artists - the unexpected angles of perspective, new dimensions of vision, are experienced by the body. One example of this was A simile without a cat, the firework display created by Pierre Huyghe and Phillippe Parreno – the transformers of “Anlee”, the figure of Japanese “anime” symbolizing the artist’s rejection of the representative codes, and a vital reflection on the arts of simulacrum – who, in the midst of the inaugural night of Art Basel, effected a spectacular disappearance of form.

According to the director, Samuel Keller: “Art Basel represents a 21st century concept: the actual mobility of selected events in the materialization of which museums, collectors, institutions and people linked to the world of art in different ways collaborated”. The program included Art Statements, 19 personal interpretations by emerging artists, Art Positions, 20 cutting edge galleries installed in containers converted into public spaces and placed in the Art Deco District; the Art Sculpture Park – sculptures for exteriors and facilities located in the Bass Museum of Art; Art Projects, works of art fashioned for specific spaces; Art Video Lounge, Art Loves Fashion and Art Loves Architecture.

One of the most interesting art projects in this sense was the Inter-Play performance, sponsored by collectors such as Eugenio López and Carlos de la Cruz. With Patrick Charpenel and Silvia Karman as curators, it numbered artists from Mexico, the United States and the Caribbean, including Francis Alÿs, Quisqueya Henríquez, Fernando Palomar, Fernando Ortega and Luis Gispert, among others. A visitor who had not been previously warned described his astonishment on entering a white room leading to a moving image of feet from different people sticking out from a false ceiling. “People” he said, “couldn’t resist the temptation of tickling them, of touching them, to see the reaction”. An exciting experience in which the diversity of the feet – white, brown, black, feminine, masculine – and their unusual placement changed the recording of a perception used to seeing faces and bodies from above. Game exploration places art in a space where the customary is erased and gives way to forms of revelation.