The biggest news about Art Miami this year might have to do with the flooring. Under new ownership since August, the fair has committed to remain at the same 32nd Street plot for the next three years, and the proof is in the concrete.

That may not seem like a big deal, but Miami’s oldest fair (this year marks its 20th anniversary) is literally attempting to cement its niche among the Art Week competition since joining the December lineup three years ago. In 2007, Art Miami moved from Wynwood to its current Midtown location across from Red Dot.

If go-go Art Basel Miami Beach’s hospitality-world equivalent is the glitzy Setai, then Art Miami’s is the Fisher Island Club, the genteel enclave south of bustling Miami Beach that also happens to be one of the fair’s big sponsors. Art Miami’s main balancing act is to stay fresh without abandoning its deep roots. “It’s letting down your hair; it’s not overly pretentious; it has an edge, but it doesn’t fall off the edge. We try not to run it in a highly political way,” director and co-owner Nick Korniloff explained at the fair’s Tuesday-night VIP preview.

Korniloff added that he tries hard to cultivate a relationship with the fair’s host city, too. “Some of these dealers feel that they’ve been passed by because of the Basel craze and all this excitement,” he says. “We feel that we can’t have a name like Art Miami and not be represented by any local galleries.” Locals Praxis and Pan American Art Projects and Coral Gables galleries Tresart and Cernuda Arte all have booths. The preview’s $25 entry fee goes to Lotus House, a local charity, and Korniloff enlists Miami dealer Bernice Steinbaum to help foreign and first-time exhibitors find storage space and troubleshoot other issues. Friendly gestures like these, Korniloff says, keep Art Miami from being “perceived as a fair that just comes into town and disappears.”

The concrete does too, of course. As an added bonus, it can (unlike the old wood floors) support the weight of monumental works such as the Tony Cragg sculptures Munich’s Galerie Terminus brought to town this year.

According to Hasted Hunt Kraeutler’s Bill Hunt, who was showing at Art Miami for the third time and expected to make most of his sales Thursday and Friday, Tuesday night was for “tire-kicking.” The fair’s early vernissage gave it a leg up on Art Basel, which hosted its VIP preview Wednesday, and several galleries made some deals.

One was first-time San Diego–based exhibitor Scott White, who unloaded Robert Arneson’s ceramic House Box (1966) to an American collector for $75,000. As of Wednesday afternoon, White had still made just that one sale. But he said things were “outstanding.” “People are shopping, and we’ve got major interest.” He had a reserve on a Donald Judd, and collectors were circling Louise Nevelson’s Dawn Column V, a spire-like wood assemblage recently included in a Whitney retrospective and showing outside a museum for the first time.

McCormick Gallery — or, to be precise, a booth shared by Chicago’s Tom McCormick and New York’s Vincent Vallarino — sold two 1948 Harold Krisels, for approximately $25,000 each, to a Connecticut collector the dealers met at Art Miami last year. (Their piece de resistance, though, was a $3.5 million Joan Mitchell canvas that Vallarino said has never been on the market until now.) Also on Tuesday night, Pace Prints sold five Jim Dine works from the artist’s “Venus” edition. “We did very well with Dine last year, so I’m not surprised,” said the gallery’s Kristin Heming, adding that the price paid for the group was in the $30,000 range.

Pace’s location — in full view of the fair’s central lounge and its Nespresso-sipping visitors — didn’t hurt. Helsinki’s Galerie Forsblom, a first-year exhibitor Korniloff seemed to have courted with particular eagerness, also benefited from its prime positioning Tuesday night. A Hong Kong collector paid $27,000 there for a work by HC Berg, whose glass-and-aluminum creations achieve extraordinary light effects without the use of electricity.

Frej Forsblom put it bluntly: “Of course everyone wants to be in Basel, but not all can be.” While that may be true for galleries like his, first-time exhibitor Asher B. Edelman (who collects contemporary art but deals in Impressionist through modern) seemed to think he’d found the perfect place to display his show-stopping Giacometti, a 1948–49 unique cast of Torse de Femme (1933) priced at $4.5 million. (His position may also have been influenced by his seizure, with the help of a dozen U.S. law-enforcement agents, of some $7 million worth of work from Swiss Galerie Gmurzynska at Basel on Tuesday.)

“I’m trying to move Nick in the direction of doing more modern and secondary-market and Latin, and differentiating himself from Art Basel,” Edelman explained, using the Armory Show’s modern-oriented spin-off as an example. (Korniloff seemed open to that idea, but cautioned, “the market dictates, to a certain degree.”)

Art Miami has downsized this year, reducing its dealer count from 95 to 80 and its footprint from 115,000 to 86,000 square feet. Local blue-chip collector Marty Margulies, for one, was pleased with the recalibration of the space. “This is the best yet. The aisles are wide, it’s lit up well,” he concluded. His plans for the week involved a six-hour canvassing of Basel the next day and the reception he and his wife, Constance Collins, are hosting at their house on Friday. “I know from the RSVPs I’ve gotten that there are a lot of American collectors in town,” Margulies confided. “I think a lot of them decided to come at the last minute.”

And some of them, at least, were buying. Friedman Benda sold Gottfried Helnwein’s The Murmur of the Innocents (2009) to a Midwestern collector on Wednesday. And Tuesday night, its sister booth, Barry Friedman Ltd, found a home for Michael Eastman’s Duomo Door, Milan (2008) — a large-format photo of a decaying neoclassical façade that seemed wet with color. “We had Michael’s Cuba series last year, and it sold incredibly well,” Barry Friedman Ltd director Carole Hochman said. Both galleries declined to give prices, but Hochman confirmed that the Eastman buyer was a local.