Lisa Dennison, former director of the Guggenheim in New York, is now firmly ensconced at Sotheby's, and superdealer Larry Gagosian is back from last month's attempt to woo Russian clients in a Moscow mall. The scene may have changed somewhat since Christie's and Sotheby's boasted record-breaking sales in New York last May, but auction specialists expect that the two-week New York marathon of back-to-back Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales, which gets underway this week, might result in close to $2 billion worth of art trading hands.

The fall New York auction season arrives after a Grand Tour summer for the art world, which might have blissfully ignored the subprime mortgage disaster had it not been for its knee-buckling effect on hedge funds. Thank goodness for petroleum profits and the draw of a weak dollar.

Femme accroupie au costume turc (Jacqueline)

In order to secure eight-figure trophy consignments by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso, this season Christie's and Sotheby's reportedly issued $1 billion worth of guarantees, an undisclosed sum promised to a seller regardless of the outcome of the sale, kind of like buying a horse and betting on it. According to a recent Sotheby's SEC filing, for the last 14 years guarantees (both parties typically participate in any excess above the promised sum) have proven to be a moneymaker.

Still, the markups on some works this season seem high. Two years ago Pissarro's Four Seasons, a suite of four landscapes, attracted a single bidder at Christie's who was willing to pay $8.9 million. This time around, Christie's produced a separate catalog for the paintings in addition to offering the seller a guarantee and a $12/18 million estimate. In light of the sale of Damien Hirst's Lullaby Spring, one of four pill cabinets belonging to Hirst's seasonal allegory, which reset the contemporary art world when it fetched 9.6 million pounds ($19.2 million) in London in June, perhaps the estimate will seem perversely modest to someone.

Next week the stakes get even higher. Christie's expects that the Warhol Liz that Hugh Grant paid $3.5 million for six years ago will fetch $25 to $35 million. (For a more affordable, albeit less illustrious Warhol, check out the artist's take on Conrad Black, being sold at Christie's day sale in order to help pay creditors of Black's former private company, Ravelston, Corp, Ltd, estimate: $100/200,000).

Reports of $100 million-dollar skull sales aside, both Christie's and Sotheby's are betting that Jeff Koons can surpass Hirst as the most expensive living artist at auction. Christie's is offering Diamond (Blue) and Sotheby's is selling Hanging Heart, two large-scale sculptures from Koons's mythic Celebration series, which purportedly set out to induce a sense of childhood wonderment and are estimated to fetch in excess of $20 million each.

Diamond (Blue)

Koons has said that he produced the Celebration series to communicate with his estranged son (now age 15) during a well-publicized custody battle during the early 1990s with his ex-wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, known as La Cicciolina. In quizzically Koonsian fashion, the artist has described the four prongs surrounding the eight-foot-tall, seven-foot-wide Diamond as "sperm attacking an ovum. The facets of the diamond are the egg in the process of being fertilized." So much for innocence.

--Kelly Devine Thomas