Collectibles and antiques are the inspiration for some of today’s modern art. Every year, I go to Miami for Art Basel and Design Miami, the biggest art shows in the United States, to see what’s selling. The show attracts wealthy collectors from all over the world who can buy the very high-priced pieces for sale there.

This year modernist jewelry from the 1950s-60s is “in” and several major collections were for sale at the show. I talked to one dealer whose Art Smith copper jewelry sold out the first day. (Watch the video at YouTube.com/Kovels; search for “Art Smith.”) There was also silver and copper jewelry by Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Claire Falkenstein, Salvador Dali, John Paul Miller, Earl Pardon, Paul Lobel, Margaret de Patta, Sam Kramer and Peter Macchiarini. I liked all of it, but most prices were in the thousands for single pieces.

Much modern art baffles me, but some of what I saw suggested new ways to think about collectibles. An 11-inch sculpture made of old brass, silver, wood, steel and other random parts was hanging on a wall. It included an ear trumpet and decorative metal filigree. Price: $4,500.

A nearby booth offered a shelf displaying broken blue and white dishes that looked as if they had melted. The shelf and four dish groups were made to be hung like a painting. The same artist had taken about 50 irregular chunks of china, attached each to a spike and then stuck a group on a white wall. Price was determined by the size of the wall space you wanted to cover. More broken dishes were displayed in an aquarium.

Six full-size Chippendale chairs were arranged in a circle. A huge spiderweb made of thin plastic rope and glass beads held the chairs together. Too big a “sculpture” for my living room—and the price topped $25,000.

But here is some art you might copy: a white wooden shelf unit hung on a wall and filled with books covered with white or beige paper. Just for decoration—not a practical way to store books you want to read. Then there was the pyramid of bead-covered tins of Spam, and a large wall clock made of bits of rolled newspaper comic pages. Each was selling for thousands of dollars.

But these two really shocked me: an 8-foot stack of concrete blocks piled in an irregular tower and priced $10,000. And, in a booth of Scandinavian modern art, a copy of a 19th-century chair that had been dipped in organic green dye made from spinach. Price: about $2,000. I did like the wall that I thought was covered with wallpaper but was actually decorated with groups of white porcelain figurines. Price: $100,000. Watch for another Kovels YouTube video about this.

Joke (at least to me) of the show: a full-sized van with a dummy driver and real bananas spilling out the door. The fruit had to be changed every day. Very expensive. The artist wouldn’t tell me the price.