Some people sing for their supper. Others arm-wrestle for their art. It's the ends that justify the means.

So sweating, panting and grimacing in a public arm-wrestling match onstage in front of about 100 people may not be that high a price to pay for a mixed-media work by Quisqueya Henríquez.

That was among the prizes awarded Saturday night to the roughly 40 men and 40 women who participated in Art Wrestling, a performance art piece conceived by Los Angeles artist Ioshua Okon and presented at the Art Positions container village in Miami Beach's Collins Park. The 20 galleries exhibiting at Art Positions donated the prizes.

Some may quibble over whether arm-wrestling is really art, but not Lizabeth Eva Rossof, 35, of San Francisco.

''What makes it art is it's disrupting something that's in people's minds,'' said Rossof, a performance artist in town for Art Basel. ``You're putting a sport, arm-wrestling, in a new context, which is an interpretation by the artist.''

That's easy for her to say. Rossof arm-wrestled her first opponent into the mat, and later emphasized that she was motivated by pure ambition.

''The thing that I'm really fighting for is the glory, the title,'' she said, tongue-in-cheek. But Rossof's effort was no joke. ''It was a lot harder than I thought it would be,'' she said of the match, which lasted about one minute. ``I definitely was quivering.''

-- DANIEL CHANG

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