MESSAGE 'N' A BOTTLE Branded Art/Basel party (Photo: Getty Images)
Art scene veteran, author, and regular Radar contributor Anthony Haden-Guest files dispatches from deep inside the annual Art Basel romp in South Beach. In the first installment, Guest takes the racing pulse of power players behind the brouhaha ...

Art Basel Miami Beach can be an overwhelming experience, a rolling week-long tsunami of openings and events, of unexpected faces in unfamiliar places.

Such as ...

"Hey! I think that's the guy from Outkast!"

It wasn't.

"That can't be Shaggy?" But, yes, it was New York's most infamous gatecrasher, and perched at a computer in the media center, no less.

But even at Miami-Basel you can find peace. And I like to think of the Art Collectors' Lounge as the fair's Heart of Lightness.

The blessed, which is to say holders of black VIP cards, reach the Lounge via a corridor that passes between a Wellness Center and a first-aid station. There is black carpeting, white flowers, white leatherette leather furniture, hanging white curtains stained with lilac or aqua light, and a long bar far more luminous than the one in The Shining. The Collectors' Lounge also has the merit of being one of the Convention Center's only almost entirely art-free zones, that is if one excepts Wendell Castle's plastic furniture and the pots by Gaetano Pesce, in the AXA space.

AXA are, of course, the art insurance behemoth. The Collectors' Lounge is where the thews and sinews of the art marketing complex proudly put themselves on view. Design Basel is the fiefdom of the bank HSBC. The Art Collectors' Lounge is UBS's realm. It's where you find Netjets. It is where Zumtobel lighteriors transform light into a lifestyle and where a young man wearing white gloves lettered STARFIT SECURITOP reverently opens an artwork made for Hennessey cognac, a limited edition called Le Coffre a Secrets, which includes a bottle of the hard stuff, and which retails for $200,000. Water courses down a skin of slate alongside the BMW Clean Energy stand.

It was here in the lounge that a clean-cut fellow from Cartier exulted that "art is at the heart of Cartier." It was also here that I was told that 12 brand-new Audis had been flown in from Stuttgart for the fair—"Each has a team of five"—just for promotional purposes. You realize just where you are—at the center of an Art/Media/Marketing complex. And why not? Terrific art was made when the churches ran things, and then when the state took over. And if art now reflects that we are part of a world created by marketing, well, again, why not?

From the Collectors' Lounge I took off for a party for Bob Colacello's book of photographs, Out. It was thrown by Andres Balasz in the ballroom of one of his hotels, the Raleigh. Colacello was signing books. Within minutes I ran into Jay McInerney, Anne Hearst, Glenn O'Brien, and the like—familiar faces, and reminders of a very recent, unbearably distant time, when we weren't swept up into the huge branding exercises of others but where doing our humble best to establish ourselves.

That night Jay Jopling, who created one of London's better galleries, White Cube, gave a dinner at the Soho Beach House. Chairs and tables were set out on the beach. Waves were foaming and undulating a few feet away. The sky was a tropical picture postcard. I was sitting opposite an oil trader, Jay Bernstein. He said his wife was the collector.

I told him that a fellow writer, William Cash, had overheard a man at Miami the year before saying "I gave my wife an unlimited budget. And she exceeded it."

"That was me!" Bernstein said cheerfully. He indicated a woman further up the table.

"And that's her," he said.

In the tents behind us a team was offering everybody three packs of cigarettes—Dunhills, as I recall. A bar was dishing out flavored vodkas. I was on wine, though, and forget just what vodka it was. We were given packs of Piaget playing cards as we left. Jopling shows Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. It's a branded world. Get used to it.