This year, Art Basel’s well-heeled visitors will have something new to check out aside from another set of overpriced Damien Hirsts and Richard Princes. For the first time in Art Basel’s 40-year history, a gallery from the Middle East will have a booth at the fair. Dubai’s Third Line Gallery will be showing multimedia work by young emerging artists from across the Middle East at the Art Supernova section of Art Basel Miami Beach. That the committee for this prestigious fair thought it relevant to include a gallery from the region shows how hot the art scene is getting in the Middle East. At last year’s Art Dubai (the Middle East’s only international contemporary art fair), big names like the Louis Vuitton Foundation and the Tate scooped up works by artists of the region.

These days, books, like CDs and adopted children from war-torn nations, are collector's items for those who can afford them. Well, the current exhibit at New York's Center for Book Arts supports that idea anyway. "Artist as Publisher" isn't a gallery of art so much as a gallery of art publications. Skewing towards experimental work, the show examines the role of publications in the lives and careers of artists who have made a name for themselves, initially not through high-profile exhibitions but through independent publication -- an easier and more effective method of disseminating artwork.