NEW YORK — Billionaires worried about plunging stocks are feverishly looking for alternative assets, the pundits told us this week. They want solid, tangible stuff. Luckily, these days contemporary art is becoming incredibly tangible.

Take Christie’s sale on Tuesday, which began with 26 “Works From the Peter Norton Collection.”

One glance at a color spread adorning the Christie’s catalog was enough to tell buyers that those assets with a physical reality that some badly wanted were there. It showed a group of white fiberglass dogs with big floppy ears set up on wooden stilts. Called “Dogs From Your Childhood,” the assemblage was produced by Yoshitomo Nara in 1999 in an edition of three with two artist’s proofs.

Behind the fiberglass pets, an aluminum plate hung on a panel. Four lines in big block lettering read, “Want/To Be/Your Dog.” That was Christopher Wool’s contribution to art in 1992.

Further to the right of the color spread, a tall figure with a tomato in lieu of a head and goggle eyes stared down, pondering the deeper meaning of the scene. The creature dubbed by its maker, Paul McCarthy, “Tomato Head (Green),” was executed in 1994 in an edition of “three unique variants.” Tomato Head solemnly gazing at the droopy white dogs with a panel proclaiming in the background “Want to Be Your Dog” gave the whole installation photographed by Kate Carr in the Milk Studio, Los Angeles, a sense of gravity that touched a chord with bidders.

Mr. Wool’s “Want to Be Your Dog” made $1.53 million, beating by nearly half the high estimate. “Tomato Head (Green),” enthusiastically fought over, climbed to $4.56 million, setting the first of the week’s several world auction records.

Mr. Nara’s droopy dogs were the only work of contemporary art sold at a bargain price — they cost a mere $422,500, well below the low estimate. Perhaps the underprivileged millionaires who go in for the cheaper varieties of contemporary art lacked the vast residences with suitable display space for Mr. Nara’s beasts.

Soon, the works that were physically tangible rose to levels that Christie’s experts themselves never dreamed of.

Mona Hatoum’s “Silence,” made of glass in an edition of five dating from 1994, bears an uncanny resemblance to a piece of furniture. A nursery crib springs to mind. The impracticality of the fragile device alone warns you that this is art. “Silence” climbed to $470,500, three and a half times the high estimate.

The Norton collection neatly sold without a single failure for $25.8 million, substantially exceeding the high estimate of $16 million. This must have made Mr. Norton a happy man, even if he did not spend many years contemplating his beloved artists’ contraptions — there are just so many times you can rapturously gaze at a panel proclaiming “Want to Be Your Dog.”

After the Norton collection, the really, really serious works turned up.

A gigantic bronze Louise Bourgeois “Spider” cast in 1998 in an edition of six made $10.72 million. That was a world auction record for Bourgeois, who died last year. Even if you are insensitive to art, you cannot miss the monstrous arachnid. Having it on the grounds of your residence conveniently allows you to state your wealth without having to spell it out. Instant recognition is guaranteed by the public display of another cast at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan in 2001, and various exhibitions of other casts in such exalted institutions as the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

Indeed, the impact of the invaluable insurance policy provided by such museum credentials to investors in search of safe havens for their millions cannot be overstated. It was verified again and again in the course of Christie’s two-hour session.

Roy Lichtenstein’s early Pop Art picture of 1961 “I Can See the Whole Room ... and There’s Nobody in It!” resembles the cartoon on which it is based. Its importance in contemporary art is demonstrated by its various appearances at the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fort Worth Art Museum and other great institutions. Accordingly, the outsized comic-strip-style picture set one more world record at $43.2 million.

Consecration over time is the other selling argument that sways those seeking safety. “Contemporary art” never does as well as when it is no longer contemporary — that is, made by living artists.

Andy Warhol has been hailed for so long that doubts concerning the artistic nature of silkscreen ink work based on snapshots would hardly ever arise these days. Add the name of a famous showbiz character and triumph ensues.

“Silver Liz” in acrylic, silver-screen ink and spray enamel on canvas was painted by Warhol in 1963. It looks like a poster for a movie featuring Elizabeth Taylor, which is no surprise: Advertising was Warhol’s thing before he turned to art. The poster-like portrait made $16.32 million.

By the end of Tuesday evening, believers in contemporary art had spent more than $247 million on sundry works. Whether the low 10 percent failure rate reflected their love of white dogs or their monetary worries is a moot question.

On Wednesday, Sotheby’s rode to sweeping victory with a $315.8 million score, its third highest total realized in a contemporary art sale.

Perhaps the most extraordinary prices had as much to do with distrust in the financial markets as with pure passion for art. They invariably greeted artists long sung in the media.

Within the first half hour, a world auction record was set for Clyfford Still with an abstract composition titled “1949-A-No. 1.” The canvas had in its favor monumental size, museum approval — in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1979-1980 retrospective — and its six-decade-long career on the national scene.

The next abstract picture by Still also had a cryptic title, “1947-Y-No. 2.” Artists who paint nothing in particular, using the “abstract” label, prefer it that way. So do newcomers.

Abstractionism, easy to look at, does not require meditation, and buyers to whom time is money do not waste it by looking too long at what they settle for. The second Still, while smaller, was vastly superior in its composition and color scheme, but made only $31.4 million. By comparison, the enormous price seems almost modest.

That evening, Abstractionism was propelled to unmatched heights, regardless of school and period. Yet another world record was set when one of Gerhard Richter’s “Abstract Pictures,” dating from 1997, went up to $20.8 million. Huge, the canvas displays a sense of rhythm and color nuances in purplish reds and blues that possibly helped it to rise so high.

Immediately after, though, another of Mr. Richter’s abstract compositions, “Gudrun,” done 10 years earlier, aroused almost as much excitement and made a thumping $18 million. Confused, it does not remotely compare with the record picture.

This week, such differences were evidently irrelevant. Mr. Richter is a true master of the brush, perhaps the only one among the officially acclaimed living artists. But the consecration that his oeuvre has received through the retrospective now at Tate Modern in London is what matters to safe haven seekers.

Names, not art, were the targets this week. Warhol’s “Mickey Mouse” close up, which could not be more different, did well at $3.44 million. With it, however, came a warning. This is perhaps not quite enough to satisfy the consignor who paid $1.91 million for the cartoon painted seven years ago to the day, also at Sotheby’s, New York. With the charges to buyer and vendor, and taking into account the loss of buying power incurred by the dollar, “Mickey Mouse” may not have paid the interest on the capital outlay in real terms.

Add that 11 works were unsold out of the 73 that were offered at Sotheby’s, despite the bullish market, and the alternative assets of contemporary art seem a lot less safe than one might assume.

The recent steep rises in contemporary art are linked to perception. And if one thing is apt to change without warning, that is what the eye can see — or imagines it sees.

Recently, she has been working in porcelain, casting cheap toys and curios — grinning snails, fake Barbies from China, thumbnail-size pencil sharpeners molded into world monuments — in ghostly white ceramic, and creating tiny tableaus from them. Next week, she is installing “Folly” at the Jane Hartsook Gallery on Jones Street, setting 50 miniature landscapes on a wall painted bright turquoise. It looks like the wallpaper in an English country estate, pastoral and graphic, except that the three-dimensional landscapes cast spooky shadows and, as your eye adjusts, you find all of Ms. Katleman’s favorite kitschy objects rendered as precisely as Lladro figurines.

I know this is old history, but before the Kohler center’s invitation, had you ever worked in toilets before?

I had not! For a while, these were the things I was best known for. I thought, Oh no. I’ll be forever known as the toilet artist. I have one set in our apartment. Sammy and Natasha, my 8-year-olds, think everyone’s mom makes toilets.

To clarify, Kohler invites a few artists a year to use their factory to make sculpture; it’s called the Arts/Industry program. It doesn’t have anything to do with their product line, but I just really wanted to make a toilet.

I’ll bet toilets pose special challenges as a medium. What were they?

Well, when they are fired, they are like liquid glass. I think they fire at 2,500 degrees. They hand it to you right out of the mold, and I just piled stuff on. They told me none of it would come out, that the toilet would warp or bend. When it didn’t, the Kohler engineer brought his boss to the studio. They couldn’t believe it hadn’t collapsed. Yes, it’s a challenging medium.

Your new medium puts you in terrific company, with artists who mess around with wallpaper and also with toile, which your landscapes recall. I am remembering when Virgil Marti made wallpaper from the school photos of boys who had bullied him in junior high, and the toile embroidered by Richard Saja, a Brooklyn textile artist, who stitches cockroaches and flames and other impish images onto pillows and sofas.

There’s been a tradition of artists inspired by wallpaper. It’s so polite. It’s domestic and cozy. You think, English country houses. You feel comfortable. You are used to feeling like it’s in the background, and that it’s safe. So, as an artist, you can use that to mess with people’s heads. Wallpaper puts people’s defenses down, and you can exploit that a little bit.

Where do you find all the gewgaws for your pieces? Do you have a favorite flea market?

Since the 26th Street flea markets are no longer, I shop online. I get immersed in these weird subcultures, like the fairy garden Web sites where little old ladies who make fairy gardens find the tiny bridges and such.

The World War II diorama sites are good, and ones for souvenir miniatures — there are whole Web sites devoted to miniature buildings. My miniature buildings are from pencil sharpeners. Friends will e-mail me, “There’s a sharpener of Mount Rushmore on eBay!”

I also collect vintage Playmobil plants. I find contemporary ones in my kids’ toys, and at kids’ birthday parties. You don’t want to invite me over.

“Folly” runs from Jan. 20 to Feb. 17 at the Jane Hartsook Gallery, at Greenwich House Pottery, 16 Jones Street, second floor; Ms. Katleman’s “Folly” sculptures will be for sale ($2,400 to $4,500 each). Information: (212) 991-0003, greenwichhouse.org or bethkatleman.com.

Europe may be a drag on our economy, but at least it continues to send us some of its better art fairs. Miami’s version of Art Basel, returning next month for its 10th edition, has been enormously popular; a stateside London’s Frieze will have its debut on Randalls Island this spring. And now the Pavilion of Art and Design, which began in Paris 14 years ago and expanded to London in 2007, has made a high-profile, auction-week entrance at the Park Avenue Armory.

The fair, known by its acronym PAD, is more design focused than its aforementioned peers. Although there’s plenty of 19th- and 20th-century painting and sculpture on hand, it’s often upstaged by bold pieces of furniture and decorative artworks.

The mix caters to a new kind of shopper, one who’s just as apt to be looking for a sofa to go under the painting as a painting to go over the sofa. And it acknowledges a certain blurring of the traditional categories, at the auction houses, on Web sites like 1stdibs (which is a sponsor of the fair) and at institutions like the Museum of Arts and Design.

As the collector Adam Lindemann writes in a preface to the fair’s catalog, “What used to be called the ‘decorative arts’ has now been dubbed ‘design’ and is often marketed as limited edition ‘art,’ or sometimes referred to as ‘design/art.’ ”

All of those labels seem to fit Beth Katleman’s three-dimensional “wallpaper,” called “Folly,” at Todd Merrill. A clever take on the classic toile-de-jouy pattern, it floats tiny porcelain sculptural tableaus on a turquoise wall and incorporates elves and Barbies in lieu of frolicking aristocrats.

Just across the aisle the dealer and interior designer Chahan is exhibiting two bold, architectural ceramic sculptures by Peter Lane. And around the corner Barry Friedman’s booth highlights Ron Arad’s “Restless” bookcase: a swollen and warped grid of stainless steel.

Most of the 54 exhibitors hail from Europe; only about a fifth are from New York. Many pride themselves on being international tastemakers, showing you not only what to buy but also how you might live with it. The prominent booth of L’Arc en Seine, for instance, is a minimalist fantasia of pale-wood furniture set against ivory walls and carpeting.

Some exhibitors have created highly specialized tableaus, the equivalent of period rooms. If you are looking for French Art Deco, Vallois has nearly an entire booth of Ruhlmann furniture and archival photographs to match. And if you’d rather turn the clock back to the Vienna Secession, Yves Macaux can supply a stiff-backed living room set by Josef Hoffmann.

The art, by and large, is more conservative than the design. But much of it is of museum quality: a wintry Monet landscape at Boulakia, a Morandi still life at Robilant & Voena and a Modigliani double portrait (“Bride and Groom”) at Landau.

And although Pierre Bonnard, Jean Metzinger and Christian Schad may not be quite as sought after, all are at their best in paintings at Custot, Béraudière and Macaux. These three works show women seated in front of windows, though the similarity ends there.

The contemporary art is strictly blue chip or safely contextualized (as Wade Guyton’s inkjet prints are with Koons and Warhol, at Stellan Holm). But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun; at Van de Weghe, Duane Hanson’s “Bus Stop Lady,” a scarily lifelike sculpture of a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., shopper, is flanked by a punchy yellow-orange Frank Stella and a late Warhol that reads, “Somebody Wants to Buy Your Apartment Building!”

Some diversity would have been welcome, beyond the two booths offering African sculpture (Entwistle and Alain de Monbrison) and the smattering of Latin American modernists, including the Venezuelan Op-artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, at the Mayor Gallery.

And at times I wished that the fair’s organizers, the French dealers Patrick Perrin and Stéphane Custot, had embraced a more expansive definition of “good taste.” Many of the booths look as if they had been plucked from the pages of Elle Décor or Architectural Digest: a Gio Ponti here, a Richard Prince there.

I found at least one riotous exception at Jason Jacques, where a swirly Art Nouveau fireplace by Hector Guimard — made from reconstituted lava — shares space with spiky, animelike creatures by the contemporary Danish ceramicist Michael Geertsen.

And I marveled at the audacity of Gmurzynska, where paintings by the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters and an assemblage of a wagon wheel and a cigar-store Indian by the Pop artist Robert Indiana sat incongruously in a gray-walled booth designed by Karl Lagerfeld. The combination suggested a jet setter with some classic modern baggage and an American accent — which is not a bad description of this newly arrived fair.