You can feel the collective ripple in the body aesthetic when one of the big collectors swims past. Like sharks with their attendant pilot fish, they are often accompanied by consultants and advisers. I catch a glimpse of Blackstone Group C.E.O. Stephen Schwarzman cruising purposefully in the company of Kim Heirston, the superstar art adviser, just moments before spotting Janna Bullock, the mysterious Russian mogul who has made a big splash on the New York art scene in the past couple of years, accompanied by her dashing P.R. man, R. Couri Hay. The hot blast of big Russian bucks like Bullock’s has helped inflate the giant balloon of the contemporary-art market in recent years. Everyone’s buzzing about all the serious buyers in our midst, including megacollector Steve Cohen, head of SAC Capital Advisors, who has lately spent several hundred million dollars buying art from the likes of David Geffen. In 2005, Cohen bought Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde—one of the great icons of our era and a too-perfect übercapitalist totem—for the then-spectacular sum of $8 million. (It now seems like a bargain.) Hirst himself isn’t present, as far as I know (last year Paul McCarthy famously remarked that attending the fair as an artist was like watching your parents fuck), though I suspect he would approve of the spectacle, with its monumental scale and exuberant commercialism. One booth features $1,500 silk-screen prints of Hirst’s diamond-studded platinum skull, which recently set a record price for a work sold by a living artist, going for a reported $100 million. Hirst himself was a member of the consortium that bought the piece.

For all the complaints about luxury retailers trying to cop the cred of the art world, I begin to suspect over the next few days that the shoe may be on the other foot. Hirst’s venture into high-end jewelry is cutting in on Cartier’s turf. But don’t feel bad for the jeweler—it’s here in Miami, protecting its franchise. Or projecting its franchise.

Last night, I attended a preopening dinner sponsored by an ostensibly odd couple, Cartier and Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s still-funct tabloid. The art component of the evening was supplied by honoree Jorge Pardo, the Cuban-born multimedia sensation who is the subject of a massive show at Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which I had managed to check out just an hour before the dinner. The show, called “Jorge Pardo: House,” is a sprawling re-creation of a house complete with Pardo sculptures and paintings as well as apparently functional objects such as chairs, tables, even a refrigerator and stove. The walls are papered partly with photomurals of Pardo’s actual home in Los Angeles. Pardo blurs the lines between art, architecture, sculpture, and design, and in that regard his show is representative of an inexorable border-jumping trend on display. The fine arts, the applied arts, and the art of the deal are all coalescing here in Miami.

How else to explain the theatrical, ­crimson-colored geodesic dome, which had been erected by Cartier for the occasion, lined with display cases exhibiting tens of millions of dollars worth of jewelry? Frédéric de Narp, the company’s president, gave a speech, the only part of which I was able to hear reminded us that art is the middle name of Cartier. (Now I get it.) Calvin Klein was sitting between Ingrid Sischy, former editor in chief of Interview, and his ethereal ex-wife, Kelly, and directly across from Lance Armstrong.

Samuel Keller, the longtime director of Art Basel and its Miami offshoot, was wafting around the room, looking hip and gnomic. Keller, who is stepping down after this fair ends, couldn’t possibly have imagined what kind of monster he was about to create back in 2001, when he was invited to launch a beachside version of the venerable Swiss art fair. The festival was almost stillborn, officially canceled in the wake of 9/11, and in the early years, some of the big galleries stayed away. Now it’s the single most important event on the American art-world calendar.

Sitting beside me was Joel Wachs, the urbane president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, who is here, in part, to monitor the fair’s Warhol offerings. Warhol’s influence, as well as his images, was everywhere in Miami. Certainly the conflation of old money, new money, Euro aristocracy, celebrity, and the art world here in South Beach was one that Andy practically hand-forged. “I like money on the wall,” he said. “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then, when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.” To update this quote, just add a couple of zeros.