At the CAA conference back in February, during a panel discussion on the art market, collector Don Rubell said that at an art fair, everything happens within the first twenty minutes. "If you aren’t there in the first twenty minutes," he insisted, "you miss everything."

According to this article in today's New York Times, you can now cut that number in half:

The doors to Art Basel, the annual contemporary art fair here, opened promptly at 11 a.m. Tuesday, and 10 minutes later Ms. Mosseri-Marlio, a collector from Basel, looked distraught. Works by artists like Kelley Walker, Sherrie Levine and Rudolf Stingel had already been sold. Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, seemed just as surprised. “People literally ran and were here by 11:01,” he said.