Some of Berlin’s leading art galleries used to give Art Forum Berlin, the city’s most important art fair, the cold shoulder. But this year’s edition, which kicked off on Thursday and continues until Sunday, marks a new phase in its fortunes.

Two new co-directors, both previously with Art Basel, have been brought in to shake up the event and they have succeeded in attracting back many big name galleries, including Max Hetzler, Johann König, Klosterfelde and Neugerriemschneider.

“Berlin galleries want a strong fair, to match the city’s good galleries, great museums and thriving artist community,” says co-director Peter Vetsch. A link-up with the alternative ABC contemporary art event has been forged, and datelines have been pushed back to accommodate art from the 1960s.

“We didn’t want to miss the fair this year, whereas before it seemed to lack direction,” says Max Hetzler, showing works by the Berlin-based Arturo Herrera. Within a few hours of the opening, he had sold three works, sculptures and collages, at prices between $30,000 and $80,000.

Also doing well was the Berlin-based Contemporary Fine Arts, with a solo show by the Romanian-born twins Gert and Uwe Tobias. Four brightly-coloured woodcuts on paper quickly sold at prices around €26,000. The gallery is a stalwart at the fair. “I always found it unfair not to participate in Art Forum, as we all benefited from its presence,” says director Nicole Hackert, who reported seeing “lots of new people”.

But judging by the opening day, buyers remain cautious, with dealers reporting some “on holds” but not that many “solds”.

Phillips de Pury launches its new series of monthly themed sales today with “Now”, mixing 291 lots of photographs, design and contemporary art, at its Howick Place saleroom in London.

Further sales in London and New York are being repackaged as “Music”, “Sex”, “Film” or “1980s”, but will offer the same mix of objects. Accompanying Saturday’s sale is an attractive, large-format magazine/ catalogue, with editorial articles including an interview with the ever-energetic curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The auction house, which belongs to Russia’s Mercury luxury goods group, specialises in the newest contemporary art. This has been the hardest-hit part of the market, and has made Phillips far more exposed to the downturn than the larger auction houses, with their broader spread of categories. So the firm is hunting for new buyers and giving an even hipper spin to its auctions – bringing in a DJ for its “Music” sale, for instance – and including artists new to auction alongside some established names.

Some of the offerings are very affordable: an Aya Takano lithograph estimated at £300-£500 or a Timothy Briner photograph at £500-£700. Alongside these are works by well-known names: Chris Ofili (a watercolour diptych at £4,000-£6,000) or Grayson Perry’s decorated pot, “I Hate You, I Hate Myself” (2000) at £20,000- £30,000).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the 18 new categories, plus the established sales, will produce enough volume to pay for the company’s structure, which includes salerooms in London and New York and offices in Paris, Berlin, Munich and Geneva.

Only one of the 10 highest-priced photographs sold at auction is a vintage work. Edward Steichen’s romantic, impressionistic “The Pond – Moonlight” (2009), which sold for $2.9m at Sotheby’s New York in 2006, stands at number four in the line-up. The other nine images are by just five artists – Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Hiroshi Sugimoto, with Gursky figuring no fewer than four times and Prince twice.

All these prices were set in a brief but frantic two-year binge between 2006 and 2008. But if these works came back to auction today, “they could have lost 30 per cent of their value for those sold in 2007 and 2008, and 20 per cent for those sold in 2006,” as Christie’s contemporary art specialist Matt Carey-Williams told an Art Insight seminar on the photography market in London last week.

So what would top the list today? “The Steichen, probably, because it is such a rare and wonderful work,” he said, to the delight of the seminar’s audience of photography buffs. “There was definitely a feeling that the Steichen was reclaiming its rightful place,” commented Art Insight’s Jeffrey Boloten, himself a photography specialist. “At the moment there is a distinct shift away from multiples and towards the unique, beautifully crafted art object, and even in photography a lot of artists are producing single images now,” he said.

Coming up for sale in Las Vegas next Saturday is Samson, which, in spite of its masculine name, is actually the 66m-year-old skeleton of a female Tyrannosaurus rex. She is a whopper, standing 40ft high, and is one of the three most complete known examples of a T rex – which explains the hefty estimate of $6m-$8m. But even if she reaches that price, the vendor may not be making money. Samson was unearthed on a farm in South Dakota in the 1990s, and the original owners tried to sell her for years at figures up to $50m. Finally she was offered on eBay for $8m, but remained unsold. In 2004 the Isle of Man hotel millionaire Graham Ferguson Lacey bought her for an undisclosed sum, and had her mounted – a long and expensive procedure that can cost up to $3m. He finally sold Samson to the person who is now offering her at Bonhams.

The skeleton (pictured above) is currently on view in the former premises of the Guggenheim museum in Las Vegas, and Bonhams & Butterfields director Thomas Lundgren says there have been thousands of visitors already. Natural history specimens are rarely covered in this column but they have some notable collectors, including Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar, who has bought in this field with as much passion, and money, as he has devoted to art. Asked if the sheikh had been to see Samson, Lundgren said, “Not yet, but I’d love him to come by and visit.”

The Third Moscow Biennale launched on Friday in the Garage, the vast former bus depot turned art space founded and run by Dasha Zhukova, girlfriend of the oligarch Roman Abramovich. Zhukova is the daughter of an oil mogul, but she is not the only heiress shaking up the art scene in Russia. Maria Baibakova, daughter of mining billionaire and art collector Oleg Baibakov, has just opened a solo show of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans in her art space, the Red October Chocolate Factory. Baibakova, at 24 years old, is the youngest of a clutch of Russian women who have opened such spaces in the capital.

Moscow is not the only recipient of her largesse – she is also the lead sponsor of the Kandinsky exhibition currently on show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper