By James Westcott

FIAC, part two of a four-weekend art fair marathon (preceded by Frieze and followed by Art Forum Berlin and Artissima in Turin) finished up late on Sunday with enormous crowds milling inside the spectacular Grand Palais, and a long and tenacious line of curious and cultured Parisians still waiting outside as late as 5pm.

The Grand Palais, inside and out, on Sunday afternoon. All photos: James Westcott

And the dealers were pretty relaxed, or at least working hard to give off that impression. The global stock market collapse hasn't hit the art market too hard just yet. Local gallerist Serge Le Borne, who reported good sales for photographer Su-mei Tse and Krijn de Konig, who'd made an installation specially for the booth, said: "The disaster is still arriving. Maybe if the fair had been one month later we would feel it more. But things are still great."

And, by most accounts, things were much better than Frieze. Le Borgne wasn't there, but he had a diagnosis for the slackening demand at Frieze a couple of weeks ago. "London was a hype city for the stock market, real estate, and it was the same hype for art," he says. "It's the same money, same influence, and now the same fear."

With its healthy mix of 158 galleries both young and established, FIAC felt more like Basel than Frieze. FIAC actually reveals what a closed shop Frieze is: almost like a curated fair, or at least like a closed club for only the trendiest – and most transient? – galleries.

At Timothy Taylor, Lucy Meakin too seemed much happier with FIAC than Frieze. "France has a long tradition of collectors whereas in London people are newer to collecting. The spread in France is much deeper, so the drop off is not as significant. I am not worried." No wonder: she'd just sold Bridget Riley's Orphean Elegy 5 (1979) for £850,000, off the back of interest generated by Riley's recent retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne.

Bridget Riley, Orphean Elegy 5 (1979) at Timothy Taylor / work by Wolfgang Tillmans at Chantal Crousel

"Paris is not as touched as London," Karen Tanguy, a gallerist at Chantal Crousel, confirmed. She reported great interest – though as yet no sales – in Wolfgang Tillmans's abstract photos and in Melik Ohanian's Relative Time clock.

Due to the widespread and unashamed usage of red dots, it was evident that collectors were going hard after Yiorgos Kordakis's photos at Galerie Karsten Greve, which employ that increasingly familiar ultra-narrow depth of field technique that makes reality look like a cute model. Much harder to digest, and less attractive to own, was the carcass of a bombed out car, Ford Scorpio Ghia (Car Bomb) (2005), by Christoph Büchel at Hauser & Wirth's booth. Büchel blew up the car himself following guidelines from an Al Qeada manual he procured. The car was rotating like some horrific trophy, and the news was still playing on the car's radio.

Photos by Yiorgos Kordakis at Galerie Karsten Greve / work by Wolfgang Tillmans at Chantal Crousel

New York's 303 Gallery was making its FIAC debut with a booth converted into a lilac-painted salon decorated with small, soft and irresistibly sweet paintings by Karen Kilimnik. Even the chairs and table in the were in keeping with the Victoria-style decor. 303's Mariko Munro and another gallerist squirmed a little on their plush velvet seats at the mention of Frieze, and remained diplomatically silent – indicating they'd probably been rejected by the selection committee there. Anyway, here they'd sold five Kilimniks, which were priced between $65,000 and $225,000, and had reserves on others. "Everybody is in a really good mood," Munro said.

Work by Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery

At Cologne Gallery Christian Nagel, business was OK, "but not extraordinary," gallerist Florian Baron said. "It's a very local market. People are still interested but they're slow to buy. Rents here are incredibly high, more than Basel. It's a nice venue, but the booth construction is old school." Though in his case, the booth's metal frames provided a perfect centrepoint for a large circle of empty beer cans, crumpled up to look as if they're prostrate. This is French Algerian artist Kader Attia's reference to the circulation of Muslim pilgrims around the Ka'ba in Mecca. The beer cans are collected from les banlieues, Baron said. The piece was €40,000, and hadn't sold yet.

Kader Attia, Halam Tawaaf at Christian Nagel / Bruce Nauman, Good Boy Bad Boy, 1985, at Sperone Westwater

At the booth of New York gallery Sperone Westwater, which wasn't at Frieze, Bruce Nauman's two-screen video work Good Boy Bad Boy (1985) was arresting passersby. "I was a good boy. You were a good boy. We were good boys," the male and female actors recite, along with other banalities, with increasing venom, apparently reading from – and making theatrical – an English language primer. The video is an edition of 40; the Tate has one of them, and that's where I've seen it. It's wonderful to stumble upon classics like this in an art fair, as well as the endless supply of new work, which can't possibly sustain all the economic and critical importance projected onto it.

And there's just as much potential for repetition and familiarity – if not more – with newer work caught in the art fair churn. At the booth of New York gallery The Project I saw the same triptych of TV screens by Paul Pfeiffer showing football players diving and writhing that was at Frieze (though in some other gallery's booth) the other week. And on the walls of the booth was a piece familiar from the Whitney Biennial, now ready for transfer to the market. This was Daniel Joseph-Martinez's Divine Violence, an ongoing series – reminiscent of On Kawara's date paintings – of gold-coloured panels that contain nothing but the name of a terrorist group political organisation that has used violence to further its aims, said gallerist Yasmin Dubois. So far, Joseph-Martinez has catalogued and made panels for 1,700 such groups (including the people Barack Obama palls around with, The Weathermen). The panels can't be bought individually though; it's a one-wall minimum, and the artist gets to choose which panels go in it.

Videos by Paul Pfeiffer and panels by Daniel Joseph-Martinez at The Project

FIAC spilled over to a second venue, the cour Carrée at the Louvre – a tent in a large courtyard that was like a cubic protrusion prefiguring I.M. Pei's pyramid in the next courtyard. This was packed with younger galleries like LA and Berlin's Javier Perez, London's IBID Projects and Mumbai's Prescott Road. Just one note note from this tent, containing galleries much more vulnerable to the market conditions that are discouraging collectors from buying less established works, like the cute cartoons of the Royal Art Lodge, which showed a conspicuous lack of red dots at Perugi Artecontemporanea:

Works by The Royal Art Lodge at Perugi Artecontemporanea