New is necessary in the art world. And so this year the beachfront at Collins Park, which had been home to Art Basel Miami Beach's popular Art Containers exhibit of mini-galleries inside metal shipping containers, is bursting from its boxes.

The re-named Oceanfront area is now home to a brightly colored, fantastical art ``village'' with a mini-amphitheater for performances, video and panel discussions, a place, Basel organizers hope, for fairgoers to gather, talk, eat, watch and listen for new ideas.

``When the art fair opened [the Art Containers area] was a new and exciting thing, but after a while even something really special doesn't strike people as so special anymore,'' says Jens Hoffman, director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco and curator of the fair's Art Perform program.

In tough times, even Art Basel is looking for ways to give art lovers and shoppers more artistic and intellectual value for their money. Two years ago, people were buzzing about the commodification of performance and artists such as Tino Segal, who made performance ``pieces'' consisting of simple instructions that he would sell to wealthy collectors. But, for now anyway, expensive, evening-long exercises in vanity have gone the way of derivative-fund profits.

``The art business in this economic climate is a really tough business,'' Hoffman says. ``The whole Oceanfront area is going to be much less about selling and buying but about presenting new cutting-edge art and making a situation where people can appreciate art without having to think about it being for sale.''

The Oceanfront area has been produced by Creative Time, a New York City-based organization that commissions provocative public art. Creative Time selected artist Pae White, who has re-created the Oceanfront space as a brightly colored village of geometric structures. At night they will be lit from inside like giant lanterns, turning their walls into transparent displays of geometric patterns, like a fantastical cityscape.

``The entire environment is an art work,'' says Meredith Johnson, Creative Time curator and producer for the Oceanfront.

Performances and videos will be on Thursday and Saturday nights, while Friday night features a screening of the work-in-progress version of Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a documentary about the famous graffiti artist-turned-gallery star who died of a drug overdose in 1988. Mornings will be devoted to Art Basel Conversations, talks and panel discussions on art-world issues.

Most of the videos and performance pieces at the Oceanfront play with the intersection of the artistic and ``real'' worlds, performance-art territory since its early 20th century beginnings. Video artist Marc Horowitz, for instance, traveled the United States documenting his efforts to ``solve'' such problems as a smelly sewage system in Ewing, Ky., which Horowitz tackled by driving around in a truck laden with burning incense.

Even more provocative is video artist Jill Magid, who works with public systems most people regard with distrust -- the police, secret services, security surveillance. For Evidence Locker, Magid went to Liverpool, England, home to the world's largest surveillance system, and insinuated herself within view of the security cameras and the hearts and minds of the people who operate them. She wandered the city in a red trenchcoat, documenting her activities in daily requests for video footage that were written as intimate love letters to the surveillance cameras and their operators.