The poor bonus season on Wall Street hasn’t hurt Greg Fowler, a 46-year-old real estate and private equity investor based in Santa Barbara, California. Instead, he thinks he’s benefiting from the thinning of the art-buying ranks.

Fowler began collecting contemporary art four years ago and now owns dozens of works, including pieces by emerging artists like Meredyth Sparks and Christoph Schmidberger as well as by stars like Richard Prince. In the high-stakes art world, he’s still a beginning collector, unused to V.I.P. status. Yet he suddenly finds himself topping prospective-buyer lists at several Manhattan galleries.

“I know from what I’m being offered that I’m moving up the list rapidly, places I never thought I would be offered primary work,” Fowler says, referring to artwork that is sold directly by an artist through a gallery and that is usually reserved for the best clients. He believes he knows why. “I work with a lot of New York investment banks, and people are crying the blues a little bit now that bonuses aren’t what they were.”

Wall Street bonuses, usually awarded between December and February, are down 25 to 30 percent this year, according to Alan Johnson, managing director of Johnson Associates, a compensation-consulting firm based in New York City. The weak stock market, the credit crunch, fears of an approaching recession, and the housing-market meltdown are all to blame.

While the decline “is not a disaster,” Johnson says, “it makes you pause if you are going to buy expensive art.”

Some art insiders are wondering how that pause might manifest itself—especially in the contemporary-art market, which has been pumped up in recent years by newly minted spenders from investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. At a cluster of galleries in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that specialize in contemporary work, owners say they are seeing a shift from ebullient spending to careful deliberation—even bargain-hunting.

Perry Rubenstein, president of three eponymous Chelsea galleries, recounts a recent phone conversation with a client who’s a partner at a major investment bank. The client was interested in a Warhol painting that failed to sell at the Christie’s contemporary sale in London in early February, with an estimate of $1.4 million to $1.8 million. The banker speculated that, if he was patient, he would be able to swoop in and buy the Warhol at a discount. Even as recently as last season, such buyers wouldn’t have hesitated to snap it up at the top of the market.

“I’ve heard much more intelligent conversations this January than I did last January,” Rubenstein says. “This year, if you were from Merrill, Bear, or Citigroup, you’re lucky if you made the cut and got a bonus. And for every successful hedge fund manager, there is a colleague whose fund blew up. That didn’t exist a year ago.”

Rubenstein says the “ridiculous” estimates placed on contemporary artworks at auction couldn’t last, citing the case of Rudolf Stingel, an Italian artist who had three paintings at the same Christie’s sale—one of them priced as high as $1.4 million. Stingel’s previous auction record had been $734,400, for an untitled piece of insulation board, sold at Phillips last May. This time, nothing sold.

The primary market, where artists have greater discretion over the pricing of their pieces, is not immune either.

“We definitely think things feel slower, and so do our gallery colleagues,” says Robert Goff, whose gallery, Goff & Rosenthal, opened in 2004. (Goff has also blogged for Portfolio.com.)

Goff & Rosenthal has become more conservative in pricing, and is encouraging artists—even those with successful track records—to avoid raising prices. In the past, works were tagged as high as $60,000 to $80,000, but at the gallery’s current exhibit, featuring objects and paintings by Japanese-born Chiharu Shiota, the prices are more affordable: $2,000 to $10,000. Goff says they resisted the impulse to bump up prices, even after Shiota sold out a show in Belgium last year. “Some artists at other galleries are selling at auction for less than what they’re selling for in the gallery,” he says. “We don’t want this to happen, and we’re young enough that we can set this off at the pass.”

Some observers are more circumspect. Todd Levin, who for 10 years has curated the collection of hedge funder Adam Sender, hasn’t seen diminished bonuses affecting the market yet. “The story is that at the moment there truthfully is no story. It’s wait and see.”

Several dealers point toward a number of upcoming shows as the real tests of the market: the Art Dealers Association of America show in New York in late February; the Armory Show, a leading contemporary-art fair, in Manhattan in March; and the Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips contemporary sales in May.

If all else fails, says Judith Selkowitz, founder of Art Advisory Services, an art consulting business in Manhattan, “the Russians are still buying. They have plenty of cash. There certainly are still a lot of very wealthy people.”