The idea of Unlimited is that galleries can present work that won't physically fit within the confines of the regular Basel booths: large-scale sculptures, video projections, site-specific pieces, performance art and installations are all included.
Alongside the gallery booths are 18 large-scale installations curated by Sydney-based The Curators Departmentt and a moving image program curated by the Australian Center for the Moving Image.
The good stuff, Mr. Jentink said, comes from the small-scale growers who fill the booths at garlic festivals.
Art Basel's Unlimited sector was launched in 2000, as a platform for artworks that can't be displayed within the limitations of an art fair booth, such as large-scale installations, sculptures, video installations, wall paitings, photographic series and performance art.
Even some artists who normally work on a large scale have downsized: Luhring Augustine has a booth of pint-size works on paper by the German painter Albert Oehlen.
Mr. Italiano, a designer with Custom Mobile Food Equipment of Hammonton, gazed across the football-field-length of exhibition booths, where arias boomed from loudspeakers hidden in half-scale Italian villas.
Stretches of what appeared to be three-quarter-scale ersatz-timbered buildings held dozens of booths serving "feasts fit for ye kings" and the Budweiser and Coke that in Renaissance festivals comes under the category of "drynke".
Also, the walls she worked on counteract that perceived space with surface texture despite the sense of space in the scale and perspective of her portraits and the art fair booths.
Often it's simply a matter of scale -- or so the necklaces by artists including Arman, Wifredo Lam and Harry Bertoia, at Didier's booth, would suggest.
The booth environment (light, sound, and temperature) was also rated before and after each session on a scale of 0 10 (0 = poor, 10 = excellent).
