In a long room, about 40 Turks were watching the performance group Ha Za Vu Zu play music. The 20- and 30-somethings sat on the floor and listened quietly. Some women wore retro styles, ’40s hair and cigarette pants. Men with poofs of black curls lounged in T-shirts. A pretty girl in a sundress thrust an invitation into my hand. “I’m having my first show!” she said. The venue was the prominent exhibition space Arter. “Please come.”

The artists then began dancing to old Turkish rock, a hybrid of Western and Anatolian music, joining together in a modern version of traditional Turkish dancing: arms spread wide, women and men dancing together in pairs. The vibe was anything but self-conscious; it felt like a safe place to go nuts. Shoes came off, feet turned black. After a few hours, sweat pouring down their faces, the men took off their shirts, shouting, laughing, stamping. Someone danced into a heart-shaped ashtray, spilling cigarette butts on the floor; a woman took off her shirt, too.

“We’re like girls and boys playing,” said Yasemin Nur, a 35-year-old artist who attended the party with Gozde Ilkin. Both are members of AtilKunst, an all-female artist collective. Nur had short, asymmetrical ’80s-style hair, with a thin braid. “I do feel it is like a playground,” Nur said. “But we are very serious. Everyone is hardworking. They live as they produce, and they produce as they live.”

This is a life few Turks will ever know. In this conservative Muslim country of 80 million, the artists have minimal influence on social and political life at home. But they will someday export contemporary Turkish culture to the world. They have grown up during a relatively free and prosperous time in Turkey and make up an artistic elite that has more in common with their counterparts in other nations than with their own countrymen. In conversation they can easily shift from Turkish to European to American pop culture. As one young woman put it, “I know Chicago politics better than I know my own municipality.”

Most of these artists now congregate in Beyoglu, the old European quarter, which for a long time existed in a state of spooky, decaying glamour. The elite wouldn’t go to Beyoglu at night. As Turkey’s economy exploded, kebab shops turned into conspicuously European cafes, squatter buildings bloomed into boutique hotels and high rents drove the poor to the city’s periphery. Art galleries popped up in unexpected places. The nouveau riche and old-guard elite realized that rich people should have art collections, and the art market spiked. All of a sudden, Turkey’s versions of the Rockefellers and Whitneys wanted to slap their names on old buildings and fill them with art.

Meanwhile, the ruling Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), which routinely throws writers and journalists in jail, rarely bothers with provocative artists, at least so far. (In a sinister dispatch from the Interior Ministry, an A.K.P. official pointed out that terror, that is, Kurdish terror, comes in all forms, including art.) During last year’s Istanbul Biennial — now a major art-world event — Emine Erdogan, the prime minister’s head-scarf-wearing wife, gave a speech at an opening at the Istanbul Modern, the city’s main modern art museum. Freedom of expression is bad for politics, but contemporary art is good for business. Whether the government’s heavy-handed relationships with the corporate patrons of the art world will be good for art is another story.

Some money has been trickling into the lives of young artists. I saw Gozde Ilkin’s work months earlier in the same Rumeli Han building, at the gallery artSumer. Her show was called “Refuge: Chorus of Voices From Inside.” Ilkin had sewn silhouettes — of a bride and groom, Turkish men dancing — onto old patterned bedsheets and curtains found in her family cupboards. The silhouettes came from scenes she’d seen in real photographs. In another piece, tiny tanks, helicopters and soldiers hid among the orange and brown flowers on a curtain. The work, titled “Curtain: They Were Sleeping Somewhere Inside of Us,” seemed to be popular with visitors.