''SOLD TO THE BRAVE''

Art.view sees evidence that the era of bulk-buying big names is gone, and the rare and the beautiful are back in vogue ...

The FTSE 100 index has fallen 30%, the Dow 40%. The interbank market is virtually frozen and Goldman Sachs is one of many firms that is defenestrating bankers by the bushel. That is the news from October alone, which goes some way towards explaining why, as the season opened for the autumn auctions of contemporary art, pundits were predicting a bloodbath.

There were bad moments, it is true. Phillips de Pury, which had to be bailed out by a Russian luxury-goods group, Mercury, over the summer, fared worst of all, buying in 31 of the 70 lots on offer at its evening sale on October 18th. Richard Hamilton's circular "Epiphany", which a Sotheby's marketeer thought to have reproduced as a badge for guests to wear at the launch party for its autumn sale and which featured on the contents page of the auction catalogue, also failed to find a buyer on October 17th. So did works by Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor and Cindy Sherman.

Bidding on Francis Bacon's lovely little portrait of the half-Indian muse, Henrietta Moraes, went up to £4m ($6.5m) on October 20th before sputtering to a halt. This was awkward for Christie's as it had promised the Irish owner of the picture, Garech Browne, one of the heirs to the Guinness fortune, a guarantee believed to be around the low estimate of £5.5m.

But what is surprising, in the new mood of austerity, is how much work sold.....