Since the auction houses set estimates to attract sellers, a work that fails to sell, or sells at the low end of the estimate, may simply reflect the outsized ambitions of the current owner. In the past several years, because works of art have broken price record after price record, results that fall within those estimates are interpreted as weakness in the market.

That’s what happened with the five Basquiats in London. The artist, who died in 1988, set records in the $5 million range throughout the art boom, from 1998 to today, and many experts felt his best work—primitively scrawled and monumental in size—was due for a price jump. It came this spring with works selling for $10 million and $14.6 million, and collectors are thinking their Basquiats must be worth $10 million now too.

“I’m not surprised that the Basquiats performed as they did,” says Westreich. The three Basquiats that didn’t sell, and the two that sold— for $1.9 million and $5.7 million—lacked signature elements that would have made the paintings world-class. “I think it’s a question of quality.”

Last week three of Damien Hirst’s very popular spot paintings—grids of colored dots with chemical titles—were on the block. Two sold within their estimates, at $1.2 million and $1.3 million, respectively. The third canvas, with a $3.6 million low estimate, failed to find a buyer. But these seemingly weak sales of Basquiats and Hirsts don’t necessarily indicate the market is doomed—rather, they signal that collectors have found their comfort level for these particular paintings, and it may be a while before prices move again.

“There’s lots of little micromarkets going on,” says Sotheby’s Outred. So while collectors may have lost their passion for Hirst’s spot paintings, his Eternity, a kaleidoscope pattern of painted butterflies, which Phillips de Pury estimated at $5 million to $7 million, went for nearly $9.5 million.

Indeed, today’s micromarket may be tomorrow’s market mover. Four years ago, Contemporary Chinese painting didn’t exist as a sales category. Two years ago, Sotheby’s sold $14 million worth of Contemporary Chinese art around the world; so far this year, they’ve hauled in $133 million.

So what do the London sales really tell us? They’re not as much like financial markets as some would like to think. Financial markets ultimately reflect the health of the underlying economy, but the art market only measures the willingness of the wealthy to spend their disposable cash on art (a commodity with no intrinsic economic value). With $353 million worth of art changing hands in London among the three auction houses—a huge number for an off-season sale—we know that the art market is still very healthy. But we also know that it is fickle.

Consider the art market more as a voting machine, and right now collectors are casting ballots for Contemporary Chinese art. But that shouldn’t overshadow significant sales in London, at multiples of their high estimates, for Europeans like Anish Kapoor, Anselm Reyle, and Beatriz Milhazes; or the solid sales for established Americans like Cecily Brown, Richard Prince, and Ed Ruscha, who saw their work bid above aggressive estimates too. These micromarkets are just as robust as that for Chinese art. That is, until the next round of sales in New York or back in London in December—when what attracts collectors’ dollars will be anyone’s guess.