The £111m splurged at an auction of Damien Hirst pickled sharks, medicine cabinets and dot paintings in September – the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt – always seemed set to be the art boom’s last hurrah. And so it proved. Contemporary auctions in London last month raised barely half their pre-sale minimum estimates. The gloom spread to this week’s autumn sales in New York: three impressionist and modern art auctions by Sotheby’s and Christie’s earned 46 per cent to 65 per cent of their low estimates. High-end estimates that these sales, plus contemporary auctions next week, could pull in $1.7bn seem relics of a different era. If these auctions are any barometer, the mercury is falling fast.

Sotheby’s shares, a leading indicator for the art market, have slid 85 per cent in 12 months – a bigger decline than in 1990, before the last bubble burst. There is some hope the broader market pullback might be less precipitous: Art Market Research’s Art-100 index, a broad measure of selling prices, fell 60 per cent from peak to trough in the early 1990s. At that time, the top end was supported almost entirely by Japanese buyers; when Japan’s economy slumped, so did the price of artworks. Today’s art world is more globalised – though so is the downturn. Hopes that tycoons from emerging market would keep it afloat took a knock in disappointing contemporary auctions in Hong Kong and Dubai last month.