• Nearby, at the Nitsch/Paragon booth, D15, Richard Dupont's life-sized sculpture draws a crowd not because it's a buff-naked man in 3D, but because of the distortion viewers experience from seeing the piece from various angles. The sculpture, $85,000, was created from a digital scan of the artist.

AROUND TOWN

• Giants in the City features blow-up sculptures by 10 artists -- Gustavo Acosta, José Bedia, Tomas Esson, Alette Simmons-Jiménez, Michelle Weinberg, Anja Marais, Frank Hyder, John Martini, Angel Ricardo Ríos and Alejandro Mendoza at Bayfront Park, off Biscayne Boulevard.

• Even if he's not here in person, president-elect Barack Obama appears in image at nearly every art fair this year. For political statements that reach beyond the U.S. border, head to the Scope fair under a tent in Midtown. Don't miss the bronze sculpture and companion painting of Mao fattened by the labor of workers by Wang Huaxiang at the Byron Cohen booth; be sure to nip around the corner to see Su Xinping's Final Supper. At the Gagliardi booth, you may find yourself haunted by Daniel Glaser and Magdalena Kunz's video projected on a pair of plaster figures, so lifelike that one patron asked if they were real people. The piece was inspired by the South African struggle for freedom.

• General consensus: The quality has never been higher at Art Miami, also in a tent at Midtown. In various booths are works by Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery -- along with newer artists. Highlights include the stainless steel chair by Wendell Castle at Barry Friedman; display of the By and About Women series of prints by 10 top photographers, sold as a set to benefit Lotus House; and photographer Joel-Peter Witkin's The Raft of George W. Bush at the Catherine Edelman Gallery (don't stop if you're a Bush supporter.) Fans of the late Cundo Bermudez won't want to miss his just-released sculptural casting at Cernuda Arte.

• The collective black experience explodes in a profound, provocative exhibit called 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection. The 200 works by African-American artists exploring race in America were culled from the Rubells' personal holdings. Among the artists is Rashid Johnson, who fuses portraits, sculptures and photography bathed in the color black. His works represent a fictional secret society of African-American intellectuals, he said during a visit Thursday. ''I use altars [with shea butter] and portraits to show the complexity of the black experience,'' he explained.

• Dutch jewelry artist Ted Noten shows how dangerous a woman can be with gold-covered Walther pistols -- yes, they're real -- encased in clear acrylic and crafted into fur-covered handbags. ''It's a Super Bitch bag,'' he says -- with a price that matches, from $52,000-60,000. The bags are for view and sale at Design Miami's Ornamentum booth. To get the bags through Customs, gallerist Stefan Friedemann learned to shoot a pistol and got a gun permit; the purse was transported in components that Noten assembled in Miami.

After you've seen Noten's purses, check out the raffia covering the HSBC private client's booth and ogle the strangely organic ''couches'' that comprise Diamantina; both are by the Campana brothers, named Design Miami's Designer of the Year. At Johnson Trading Gallery, the black table and chairs by Max Lamb, $28,000, are covered in a bomb-proof material; the accompanying child-sized white chairs were purchased by Brad Pitt at Design Miami's Swiss sister fair last summer for $25,000 each. Look up: The vast tent housing the fair was designed by Aranda/Lasch of New York.

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