This year there was considerably more excitement over the appearance of billionaire businessman and Chelsea Football club owner Roman Abramovich - hot from spending $120 million in the New York auctions on a Bacon and a Freud - than there was at the simultaneous presence of Brad Pitt, keeping a low profile in a green trilby and prudently with his lawyer in tow. 

Abramovich may have restricted his purchases to a 1956 Giacometti sculpture, but what gives Basel its buzz is the most up to the minute work.  All the galleries save their best and most show-stopping pieces for Art Basel: it is the mothership fair where major sales are made and global reputations launched. Nowhere is this more evident than in the vast Art Unlimited space, which adjoins the main fair and where no expense is spared in presenting the most ambitious projects. Among the stars of Unlimited 2008 were Qiu Anxiong’s ‘Staring into Amnesia,’ an entire 1960’s railway carriage shipped from China, its windows acting as screens for contemporary and newsreel footage from the Cultural Revolution and World War 2; a surveillance cabin complete with flashing lights gliding up and down a nine metre pole by Geneva-born artist Fabrice Gygi and Thomas Hirschhorn’s ramshackle 51 foot long, two storey ‘Hotel Democracy’ built in cardboard, plastic sheeting and packing tape which he  describes as “a sculpture of an uncertain building embodying different concepts, realisations, misunderstandings, perversions, hopes, dreams and disasters of democracy.”

Although he is now a global brand, Japan’s Takashi Murakami’s eight ton, platinum leafed Oval Buddha also drew a few gasps, especially when it was sold on day one for an undisclosed sum by the Paris-based art advisors who work for Christie’s owner and mega-collector Francois Pinault. But size isn’t everything. An atmospheric, exquisitely shot video projection of a shabby derelict Bangkok hotel by the less well known Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul provided a quiet respite amidst all the art world manoeuvrings; and similarly soothing was New York based Spencer Fitch’s subtle installation of seven rainbow coloured fluorescent lights each of which recreates a shadow captured in seven Eugene Atget photographs of 19th century Paris. 

And then there is the main fair itself, a daunting maze of booths displaying the wares of Art Basel’s 300 participating galleries which spreads over two floors and shows works ranging from a room full of Surrealist paintings by Joan Miro (complete with security guard) which had not been shown together since they left the artist’s studio in 1936, to ‘Der Letze Dreck,’ a pile of sweepings taken last year from the studio floor of sought- after Austrian artist Hans Schabus which was sold to a European collector  for €17 000. Add to this a constellation of satellite fairs devoted to prints, decorative art, and younger artists and galleries, as well as a programme of talks and films – including a highly explicit movie by veteran Conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, which was screened in the city’s porn cinema behind the station – and an extraordinary Patti Smith performance organised by the Cartier Foundation in the soaring Gothic Elisabethenkirche in which even the most conservative art collectors were literally dancing in the aisle and it becomes evident that, despite credit crunches and economic jitters, by the banks of the Rhine the art market continues to be a force to be reckoned with.