Copyright Yale UniversityA color plate from Josef Albers’s “Interaction of Color.”

“Interaction of Color,” the landmark 1963 book by Josef Albers — the German-born artist and educator who taught at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University over the course of his storied career — isn’t just for aspiring artists. Its mesmerizing illustrations are a revelation for anyone interested in color theory and human perception. On Thursday, to mark the book’s 50th anniversary, Yale University Press, the publisher of the original edition, will offer a fresh way to engage with Albers’s lessons by releasing the “Interaction of Color” App for the iPad. The $9.99 app bundles the book’s full text and more than 125 of its original color studies with more than 60 new interactive plates that allow users to perform their own experiments with color, along with a new color palette tool and video commentary that explains Albers’s principles. There are also interviews with the graphic designer Peter Mendelsund; the artists Brice Marden and Anoka Faruquee; the architect Annabelle Selldorf; the textile designers Denyse Schmidt and Christopher Farr; and the director of sourcing and product development of Fab.com, Brian Mullan, all of whom talk about the use of color in their professional practices; as well as Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Albers Foundation. In addition to the app, a 50th anniversary edition of the book is available in paperback for $18.

In the video below, the designers involved in the project talk about the importance of color and the influence of Albers.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 24, 2013

Jeffrey Deitch is expected to resign as director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art imminently, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The prices have been record breaking, and startling.

More than $70 million for Rothko’s “White Center” in 2007, a high-water mark for that artist.

More than $20 million later that year for a Damien Hirst pill cabinet, then a record for a living artist.

And $250 million for Cézanne’s “Card Players” in 2011, the highest known price ever paid for a painting.

Given the secrecy of the art market, few knew at the time who had laid out such unprecedented sums.

But it has become increasingly clear that those masterpieces and many more have been purchased by Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf country with enormous wealth and cultural ambitions to match: it is buying art at a level never seen before.

“They’re the most important buyers of art in the market today,” said Patricia G. Hambrecht, the chief business development officer for Phillips auction house. “The amount of money being spent is mind-boggling.”

The purchasing is directed through intermediaries by Sheika al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority and a sister to Qatar’s new emir. At age 30 she has become one of the most influential players in the art world.

No one knows exactly how much Sheika al Mayassa has spent on behalf of her family or the museum authority since she was named chairwoman by her father, the former emir, in 2006. But experts estimate the acquisition budget reaches $1 billion a year and say the Qataris have used it to secure a host of undisputed modern and contemporary masterpieces by Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

Where all this art will eventually end up remains something of a mystery. But it seems clear that, just as Qatar has used its oil riches to boost its influence in the Middle East with ventures like arming Syrian rebels, its wealth is also being deployed to help the country become a force in the world of culture.

This effort to create a first-class contemporary art collection, essentially from scratch, has buoyed the international art market, experts say, and contributed to some of the escalation in prices.

Until Qatar’s 2007 purchase, for example, the most expensive Rothko ever sold at auction (“Homage to Matisse”) had drawn $22 million in 2005, less than one-third of the price Qatar paid. In 2011 the $250 million spent for “Card Players” was four times the highest public price ever paid for a work by that artist.

“When they finish their buying program and withdraw from the market,” said David Nash, a New York dealer who spent 35 years as a top executive with Sotheby’s, “they will leave a big hole which I don’t see anyone else ready to fill at their level.”

In recent years the Qatar Museums Authority has created three high-profile museums in the capital, Doha, by the architects Jean Nouvel, I. M. Pei and Jean-François Bodin. But each of these projects — a new home for the National Museum of Qatar now under construction; the Museum of Islamic Art; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art — is focused on regional art and artists. So experts expect that a good portion of the Western collection being amassed will become part of a new contemporary art institution in the country, though officials have yet to announce that.

The annual acquisition budgets of major museums typically amount to just a small fraction of what Qatar is spending. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, spent $32 million to acquire art for the fiscal year that ended in June 2012; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $39 million.

While other gulf states like Abu Dhabi and Dubai are also trying to become cultural capitals, those two members of the United Arab Emirates have teamed up with existing institutions — namely the Louvre and the Guggenheim — to establish themselves. Qatar, meanwhile, is going it alone.

“They see themselves as an international center for many cultures,” said Allen L. Keiswetter, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It establishes them as another reason to be a destination for travel, for business. If you want to attract people, you need to have a reason to go there.”

Sheika al Mayassa declined to be interviewed for this article, but she has made limited remarks about the role art will play in Qatar’s future.

“We are revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development,” she said in a 2010 TED Talk. “Art becomes a very important part of our national identity.”

In an interview that year with The New York Times, the sheika suggested that establishing art institutions might challenge Western preconceptions about Muslim societies.

“My father often says, in order to have peace, we need to first respect each other’s cultures,” she said. “And people in the West don’t understand the Middle East. They come with Bin Laden in their heads.”

Sheika al Mayassa appears to combine Western and Muslim influences. Sometimes she dresses like a stylish business executive; sometimes she wears a traditional black abaya, which covers everything but her round face. She speaks French and English as well as Arabic.

The sheika does not have a formal background in art history, having studied political science and literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Both she and her husband, Sheik Jassim bin Abdulaziz al-Thani, also did postgraduate work at Columbia University before returning to Qatar.

“The sheika has a very grand vision and is a very educated woman,” said Leila Heller, a New York dealer with many Middle Eastern artists. “She wants to make Doha a hub for art in the region, where people don’t necessarily have to fly to New York and to Paris and to L.A. to see great shows. Doha has an ambitious plan of opening close to 20 museums of different kinds.”

As to the guiding principle behind the buying, art experts say the sheika is simply trying to amass the best of the best, whatever the price. The pace of her purchasing during the past three or four years has vaulted her, many say, to a place among the art world’s most powerful figures. She has been written about by publications like Forbes and Vanity Fair; The Economist recently pronounced her “the art world’s most powerful woman.”

And yet her profile within the places where art is bought and sold is all but nonexistent. The sheika does not visit art galleries. She won’t be found in the auction room on sale nights among the other major collectors for whom the business is something of a high-society fraternity.

Auction houses and galleries will often wine and dine these collectors before a big sale. Significant works will be flown to their homes. The Qataris don’t take part in this. They delegate their purchasing to a handful of experienced art advisers who do it for them — initially the dealers Philippe Ségalot and Franck Giraud and now Guy Bennett.

Mr. Bennett, a former co-head of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern art department worldwide, is known as a master dealmaker. He is just one of a number of Christie’s alumni who have taken on roles with Qatar. In June 2011 Edward Dolman, the auction house’s former chairman, was named executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority. Jean-Paul Engelen, the director of public art programs for the authority, is also a Christie’s veteran.

The Qatar team typically buys from dealers, though some of its most major purchases have been at auction. Experts said that another intermediary may act on Mr. Bennett’s behalf so that the sales cannot be traced to the Qataris, who want to keep their buying private to prevent driving up the market and fueling speculation about their plans.

“They are very secretive about their purchases and activities in the art market and I am not quite sure why,” Mr. Nash said.

American art institutions could be expected to be frustrated to see so many important pieces leaving the United States. But some museum executives say that’s just how it goes.

“Sure, there are lots of works of art that we have absolutely wanted,” said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art. “But if Rothko and de Kooning and Kline, among others, end up circulating in Moscow, Qatar and Shanghai, that’s not so bad — it’s a projection of American culture and importance that is meaningful.”

With a small army of workers painting gallery walls and installing lighting fixtures this month, the new Pérez Art Museum Miami is getting ready to welcome thousands of visitors into its 200,000 square feet of bayfront space when it opens in December, in time for Art Basel.

And now, the museum has tapped a chef to feed all those hungry art aficionados:

Stephen Starr, the Philadelphia-based restaurateur whose empire includes 31 dining destinations and exclusive catering contracts at seven cultural institutions, will lead the still-unnamed restaurant at Pérez Art Museum. The catering arm of Starr’s organization also will handle food and drinks for all of the museum’s banquets and private events. Starr's contract with the museum runs for seven years.

“Stephen really appealed to us because of his experience at other institutions as well as with his restaurants,” said Hollie Altman, the museum’s director of special events and sales. “We met with a lot of groups who were either very good at catering or had successful restaurants. But Stephen really has this young, dynamic team that’s able to come to Miami and bring its culinary experiences from both aspects.”

Starr’s restaurant in the new Herzon & de Meuron-designed museum will be open during museum hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, in addition to extended evening hours, until 10 p.m., on Thursday. It will seat about 70 people inside, under a slanted ceiling, and about 30 outside; both dining areas feature views of Biscayne Bay.

The restaurant’s aim is to “lengthen the stay of museum guests, but also of course to raise their overall satisfaction,” said Simon Powles, president of Starr Restaurants Catering Group.

“We hope to provide everything visitors could want during regular museum hours, which primarily will focus on a lot of great lunch dishes and snack items,” Powles said. “We’ll also be open one night a week, and we’d love to take advantage of that by offering beer dinners, wine dinners, cooking demos. And I really hope we can make Sunday brunch a destination opportunity: Come have brunch down by the waterfront; spend the morning with us.”

The restaurant’s menu, like its name, is still a work in progress – Powles said his team has a team trip planned to Miami in early August to hammer out those details – but expect at least some influence from Starr’s flagship restaurants, Buddakan and Morimoto.

“We’ll definitely incorporate some signature Starr dishes, like dim sum from Buddakan and sushi from the Morimoto and Makoto menus,” Powles said, adding that the fare and price points will be family friendly.

In addition to serving the restaurant, Starr’s kitchen will have the capability to handle on-site banquets of up to 400 people at the museum.

“We pride ourselves on delivering restaurant-level cuisine at all of our private functions,” Powles said. “The best feedback we get from clients is when they tell us their food didn’t taste like a mass-produced, catered dinner.”

Museum leaders also have talked with Starr about rotating in seasonal dishes based on the background of exhibiting artists. Starr and his Asian-leaning cuisine should have no problem finding food to fit with the works of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who will be featured at the museum from December through March. But what about when the spring-summer “Caribbean: Crossworlds of the World” installation comes to town? Does he have recipes in his repertoire to complement Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes’ fall exhibit?

Leann Standish, the museum’s deputy director of external affairs, smiled.

“Something we love about Stephen was how creative he is,” Standish said. “He’s very flexible and able to respond to what Miami wants.”

The three-level Pérez Art Museum is located in downtown Miami’s Museum Park, the new name for Bicentennial Park. The space is about three times larger than the Miami Art Museum’s former Flagler Street home and will face the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, set to open in 2015.

The $220 million museum project is being paid for with about $100 million in public money, which Miami-Dade voters approved with a 2004 general obligation bond, and about $120 million in private donations (including $40 million in cash and art from developer Jorge Pérez, the naming donor, and $1 million from Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross).

Starr’s restaurant at Pérez Art Museum will be his third in South Florida; he opened Steak 954 at the W Hotel in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 and Makoto at the Bal Harbour Shops in 2011. Having been named Bon Appétit magazine’s 2005 Restaurateur of the Year, Starr’s reach includes 20 restaurants in Philadelphia as well as others in New York, Atlantic City and Washington, D.C. His permanent catering gigs include New York Botanical Gardens, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Pérez Art Museum restaurant will be Starr’s first partnership with a Florida cultural institution – bringing his number of exclusive contracts nationwide to eight – and will mark his foray into the region’s catering and special-events market.

Powles said the catering group is looking at two or three potential spaces for a commissary kitchen in Miami to prepare food for non-museum jobs. Starr will have a staff of seven managers at the museum, plus another team for off-site catering.

Bonnie Clearwater, the art world powerhouse credited with raising the profile of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, announced Wednesday that she is leaving the institution to head the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale.

The 75,000-square-foot facility at 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., which is owned by the private Nova Southeastern University, has been searching for a new executive director since Irvin Lippman retired last year.

Though Clearwater said the Fort Lauderdale museum had approached her repeatedly over the years, she wasn’t ready to make the move until now.

“The bones are there, the support is there and what they really need is exactly what I can bring them,” she said, describing her role as “defining its purpose, its vision and taking it to beyond not even the next level but he next level beyond that.”

Clearwater said leaving MOCA, where she has worked since 1993, was a “very, very” difficult decision. But she said she is leaving the museum in good hands, with an enthusiastic board, able staff and well-regarded young new curator in place, Alex Gartenfeld.

“I feel very confident in the museum’s future,” she said. “It’s really [because of] the fact that there is such a strong and educated board and a creative, smart, resourceful staff that I feel confident that this is a good time for me to take this opportunity.”

She will start in her new position as director and chief curator on Sept. 3, but said she would still curate the Tracey Emin: Angel Without You exhibition at MOCA in December.

George L. Hanbury II, president and CEO of Nova Southeastern University in Davie, said the university has not been able to fully integrate the museum since acquiring it in 2008. He said Clearwater will be tasked with making the museum an academic asset for students at the university and at the K-12 University School.

Clearwater stood out, he said, because of her knowledge of South Florida and connections with art supporters in the region.

“We have been an underappreciated museum, I believe, for many years,” said David Horvitz, chair of the Fort Lauderdale museum’s board of governors and a friend of Clearwater. He cited the museum’s large size, its three permanent collections and its architecture as assets that often go unnoticed.

“Couple that with now being a part of Nova and their real desire to build an academic portion of this museum to integrate everything the museum does to the student life and the academic experiences of Nova,” he said.

James Turrell

A scene from "Aten Reign."

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

A video at the Paul McCarthy exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory on June 20.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Visitors take in an installation at Paul McCarthy's exhibit on June 20.

Video by exmk000

Audience reactions from "The Exorcist."

At screenings of his film “The Tingler” (1959), buzzers installed under some seats jolted spectators at a moment in the film when the titular monster is announced to have gotten loose in the real-life theater.

Video by NineInchNailsVEVO

Nine Inch Nails - "Came Back Haunted"

Video by salival

Sunn 0))) - Berlin, Volksbühne 2006

Video by alexomat2

The Flicker (USA 1966, Tony Conrad)

Video by thecultbox

Irreversible (2002) - Official Trailer

Universal Pictures, via Associated Press

Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film "Dracula."

Simon Kane/Sam Rudy Media Relations, via Associated Press

Reed Birney and Marin Ireland in a scene from Sarah Kane's "Blasted" in 2008 in New York.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Visitors rode the "Mirror Carousel" at the “Carsten Höller: Experience" at the New Museum in 2005.

Video by EmilysVideoReactions

Emily's Video reaction

Erik Piepenburg is an editor in the culture department of The New York Times.

Jay-Z greets art-world guests before a taping of the music video of his song “Picasso Baby” at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea.

“I have no idea why I’m here,” the artist Marilyn Minter said, as she sat in a temporary V.I.P. room at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea on a steamy Wednesday. “I’m just a fame whore.”

Ms. Minter was one of hundreds of fans and art-world types — Kalup Linzy; Lawrence Weiner; Andres Serrano; George Condo; Yvonne Force Villareal; Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum; and Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president emerita — invited to take part in a live filming of Jay-Z’s music video for “Picasso Baby,” the art-centric song off his new album, “Magna Carta ...Holy Grail.”

The rap marathon was inspired by the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” said the art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who is Jay-Z’s art adviser and was a host of the event along with the film director Mark Romanek. “Jay has been wanting to do something durational for some time.”

The video shoot added a welcome frisson to Chelsea as the dozy season hit its annual doldrums. And it livened up a corner of the Web, where the topic of art-world fame whores racing to sell out can be counted on to set the thumb-tappers in motion.

Stephanie Theodore, a Bushwick gallery owner, tweeted a wry suggestion that the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei divorce his wife, marry Ms. Abramovic and form a megacult. Why not invite James Franco, the art blog Hyperallergic added, and make it an unholy threesome?

At a mere six hours, the taping was a water-cooler break by the usual standards of Ms. Abramovic, who during the run of “The Artist Is Present,” spent the equivalent of 30 full days sitting immobile in the museum atrium, while spectators took turns sitting opposite her. Still, as Mr. Linzy, a performance artist, said, “It’s epic.”

Dressed for the performance not in the Tom Ford suits he favors, but a pair of black jeans, white sneakers, a white short-sleeve shirt, a heavy gold chain, a gumball-size pinkie ring and a wristwatch from his collection of six-figure timepieces, Jay-Z rapped from a platform facing a bench reminiscent of the set of Ms. Abramovic’s original artwork.

Like Ms. Abramovic, he was a mesmeric presence, shifting spectators around as though they were iron filings drawn by a magnet. With his usual braggadocio, Jay-Z rapped lyrics like: “I want a Picasso, in my casa ... I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel,” and “What’s it gonna take for me to go, For y’all to see I’m the modern-day Pablo Picasso baby.”

He reminded his listeners that, like most every self-respecting millionaire mogul these days, he is an avid collector of contemporary art, although he alone turns the pursuit to his singular ends in lyrics that knowingly name-check everyone from Jeff Koons to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In “Picasso Baby,” Jay-Z’s grab bag of references includes Mr. Condo, Art Basel Miami Beach, Francis Bacon, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and Andy Warhol. He cites Basquiat twice, preening his insider knowledge by lyrically incorporating both the artist’s given name and Samo, his original graffiti tag.

To some spectators, it was particularly bracing to watch a hip-hop god colonize a white cube world that must once have seemed as distant as Mars from the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, the projects where Jay-Z grew up (and where he was known by his given name, Shawn Carter). “For a young black man in America to be on his level of success and rapping about art, and not what he’s wearing, is the coolest thing,” the artist Mickalene Thomas said.

“People have to realize he’s referencing artists who have been shape-shifters in themselves,” she added. “They have to know that a young person hearing him saying ‘I am Picasso,’ is going to look up Picasso.”

Ms. Minter, whose lush photorealist paintings comment on glamour and decadence, said, “Jay-Z speaks to the times we live in.”

An Mr. Weiner, an austere conceptualist, added, “Jay-Z speaks with the times he lives in.”

Unquestionably, Jay-Z manipulates our credulous times as deftly as he did a crowd that also included Judd Apatow, the designer Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming, Adam Driver and the artist Marcel Dzama, who came to the filming wearing a cow costume he constructed for a recent video.

“It’s great how he has really recreated the whole MoMA feel,” Mr. Dzama said. And it helped that Ms. Abramovic herself was on hand, arriving theatrically an hour into the event and emerging from a stretch S.U.V. with a turbaned chauffeur. Wearing one of the floor-length black dresses that a friend, the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, creates for her, Ms. Abramovic stepped from the vehicle and glided into the gallery with the hypnotic gravity of some loopy space priestess from a sci-fi kitsch classic of the ’50s.

Cameras in her wake, she parted the crowd — “Queen of Outer Space” meets the hip-hop monarch — crossing the gallery to mount a low platform, where she and Jay-Z engaged in a pas de deux sure to go down as among the oddest moments in the annals of performance art.

Two minutes later, the dance had already been posted to Vine and gone art-world viral. “OK the video in Infinite Jest that entertains you to death has finally come and it is the Vine of Jay-Z & Marina Abramovic,” wrote @LindsayZoladz. “R.I.P. US ALL.”

Don’t close the coffin lid quite yet.

Like Ms. Abramovic, whose stare-downs at MoMA left so many participants in tears that it inspired the blog “Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry,” the Jay-Z video was too sincere, even in its cynicism, to be all bad.

To a large extent, that was owed to the hip-hop artist’s way with the crowd, both mellow and collaborative. When a generator cut out, taking with it the background music, Jay-Z called out: “Anyone got unusual talents? Anyone can do something awesome?” He then invited a ballet dancer to perform some pirouettes; the performance artist Jacolby Satterwhite to show off his vogueing; and Kiah Victoria, a music student, to blow the roof off the gallery with her a cappella rendition of a torch song.

“I just love the way Jay-Z riffs on what Marina did,” said Roselee Goldberg, the performance art historian and founder of Performa.

That the boo-birds on Twitter failed to share the love will doubtless help Jay-Z’s cause or, anyway, his record sales. The shock and peril that once characterized much performance art had been co-opted by a marketing wizard, turned, as the bloggers carped, into a tool of aesthetic predictability.

Here it seems proper to resuscitate both Andy Warhol’s famous observation that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” and to paraphrase an aphorism often attributed to the actual Picasso: mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.

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When Miami Beach commissioned German artist Tobias Rehberger to design a $500,000 sculpture for South Pointe Park in 2010, he envisioned his Obstinate Lighthouse rising five stories above an open lawn, unobstructed on all sides.

In May, when he found out the City Commission made his sculpture the centerpiece of an off-leash area for dogs, he wrote to the city’s planning department complaining: “If the public art project was for a dog park I would not have considered the invitation.”

The city’s Art in Public Places Committee shared similar concerns, telling the City Commission last month that surrounding the off-leash area and sculpture with a planned landscape buffer would compromise the integrity of the artist’s intent and concept.

However, the city’s Design Review Board on Tuesday approved the landscaping plan 4-1, with Jason Hagopian dissenting, essentially plowing the way for 450 feet of landscaping on three sides of the lighthouse.

Megan Riley, chairwoman of the Art in Public Places Committee, warned the board that the off-leash dog area and landscaping buffer could put the city in violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act, a federal law that protects visual artists against distortion or destruction of their work.

Patricia Fuller, also on the committee, told the board that “the base of the sculpture is very integral to the sculpture.”

“In fact it’s not a base,” Fuller said. “It’s part of the sculpture. It’s an important part of the vista that you see and establishes the relationship between the verticality of the lighthouse and this open flat lawn area that [Rehberger] was asked to address.”

“We need to consider that if we want to work with major international artists and spend the money of the city wisely on important works of art for the collection, we need to respect the relationship that we have with the artist.”

The city’s planning department wrote in a staff report for the Design Review Board that “any form of perimeter landscaping material or additional park signage in this focal location … would distract from and have a significant adverse impact upon and detract from the design integrity of the lighthouse sculpture as well as its intended ‘open lawn’ setting.”

However, though assistant city manager Mark Taxis described the landscaping as a “physical barrier,” he said, “I don’t think [the landscaping] will have a detrimental affect on the viewing of that art piece.”

The buffer, not to exceed 42 inches in height, would consist primarily of muhly grass and spartina (or cordgrass), which are both native, and firecracker plants as accent.

The Design Review Board considered the landscaping buffer at the request of the City Commission due to safety concerns arising from dogs running out of the off-leash area and chasing passers-by.

Parks and Recreation Director Kevin Smith stressed to the board that the off-leash hours are limited, that leashed dogs are allowed in the park at any time the park is open, and that the area is not a “dog park” but rather an “off-leash dog area.” Smith said dogs can run leash-less in the area from sunrise to 10 a.m. seven days a week, and 6 to 9 p.m. on weekdays. He also mentioned it’s a pilot program that expires at the end of the year. The nearest dog park is two blocks away.

The planning department also wrote in the staff report that having off-leash dogs near the seating at the base of the sculpture “will almost certainly result in an unsanitary condition for park users, especially children and tourists.”

While the material near the base of the sculpture is treated for graffiti, it has not been treated for urine.

LONDON — The spring auctions here, which ended on Thursday night, were a sharp contrast to those that recently took place in New York. There was not a night in London over the last two weeks when sales reached nearly $500 million, as happened in May at the Christie’s evening sale of postwar and contemporary art in New York.

In fact, that one Christie’s auction almost eclipsed the total from all five of the evening auctions in London.

It’s been generally a struggle for Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips to gather property to sell. Unless a big estate comes up, or a collector is in financial trouble and needs cash, people these days are hanging on to their art rather than investing in the financial markets.

The London auctions also followed an unusually jampacked spring calendar that piled art fairs in Hong Kong and Basel, as well as the Venice Biennale, on top of the New York sales. Collectors seem tired. Many experts grumbled that the quality of what was sold in London paled in comparison with New York, and said that the auction houses should have considered canceling their June London sales.

Even the auction houses acknowledged some problems. “After New York and Basel, it was a challenge to keep clients focused,” said Brett Gorvy, Christie’s worldwide chairman of postwar and contemporary art.

Still, London is one of the world’s art capitals, attracting buyers from other parts of Europe as well as Russia and the Middle East. And the diversity of collectors was more pronounced than ever this season. On Wednesday, for example, Sotheby’s reported that at its contemporary auction, bidders came from 38 countries, its broadest participation ever, with one in 10 registered bidders from what Sotheby’s calls “new markets.”

Here are some of the high and low points of the London sales:

BACON STARS AT SOTHEBY’S Two paintings by Francis Bacon — one of the artist’s favorite female model and another of a man peering at the viewer from behind a pair of delicate glasses — were the stars of Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art. Both Bacon canvases were being sold by William Acquavella, the New York dealer, according to several dealers familiar with the works. The better of them — “Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne” — was a 1966 triptych of Rawsthorne, an artist, who was Bacon’s confidante and model.

Two bidders fought for that painting, which was purchased by Alex Corcoran of the Lefevre Gallery in London for $17.3 million. It had been estimated to bring $15.5 million to $23.3 million. Mr. Acquavella had bought the triptych at Christie’s in London nine years ago for $4.2 million.

The second Bacon — “Head III” — a 1949 canvas of a man’s head peering eerily out, was bought by an unidentified telephone bidder for $16.1 million, well above its $10.8 million high estimate.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

STRONG ABSTRACTS Abstract paintings have been all the rage recently, and two works by Lucio Fontana commanded high prices at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night. His “Concetto Spaziale, le Chiese di Venezia,” a 1961 canvas inspired by the mosaics, frescoes, glass and stone of churches in Venice, which was expected to fetch $6.2 million to $9.3 million, went to a telephone bidder for $6.8 million. And Fontana’s 1965 “Concetto Spaziale, Attese,” a white canvas with his signature slashes that was expected to bring $5.1 million to $7 million, sold for $6.7 million to another telephone bidder.

Another top seller was de Kooning’s “Untitled XXVIII,” from 1983, which was auctioned at Christie’s. The abstract canvas of swirling ribbons in reds and blues had sold for $4 million in November 2011. This time around, it was estimated at $2.8 million to $3.8 million and brought $4.4 million.

POPULAR IN LONDON David Hockney is always a favorite here, especially after his blockbuster exhibition last year at the Royal Academy of Arts. At Sotheby’s, two works brought higher-than-expected prices. “A Small Sunbather,” from 1967, depicting one of his famed swimming pools, had belonged to Stanley J. Seeger, the celebrated collector who died in 2011. Although it was expected to bring $467,000 to $780,000, it sold to a telephone bidder for $1.7 million. Mr. Seeger had bought the painting at Christie’s in New York 13 years ago for $270,000. A later Hockney work, “Double East Yorkshire,” a colorful landscape from 1998 that had been estimated to sell for $3.1 million to $4.6 million, went to another telephone bidder for $5.3 million.

The sale also included five photographs by Andreas Gursky depicting stock exchanges around the world. They were being sold by Greg Coffey, a former hedge fund manager living in London. Among the best was “Chicago Board of Trade III,” which was estimated at $935,000 to $1.2 million and went to a telephone bidder for $3.3 million.

MIXED RESULTS Jean-Michel Basquiat was a big seller at Christie’s on Tuesday night when a painting from 1982 went for $29 million. But at Sotheby’s, “Quij,” a 1985 canvas featuring a large yellow windmill, failed to sell. It was one of the evening’s biggest casualties, as was “Hoax,” a 1983 collage on canvas, also by Basquiat.

LOW BIDS Damien Hirst continues to lose his luster. At Christie’s, “Soulful,” a 2008 circular work made up of hundreds of butterfly wings on canvas, failed to sell. It was expected to fetch $980,000 to $1.3 million. “Zinc Chloride,” from 2002, one of Mr. Hirst’s spot paintings, was expected to bring $460,000 to $750,000, but sold for $432,320, or $521,679, including Christie’s fees.

But “My Way,” from 1990-91, one of the artist’s early medicine cabinets filled with old drug bottles, did well. Two people were interested in the piece, which was estimated to sell for $1.1 million to $1.4 million and brought $1.3 million.

At Sotheby’s, two works sold for well below their estimates. “Judgement Day/Atonement,” a canvas filled with butterfly wings from 2004-5, was expected to sell for $780,000 to $1 million but brought $651,537 to a lone telephone bidder. “Girl,” another butterfly painting, this one round and bright blue, from 1997, sold for $535,890, or $651,537, including Sotheby’s fees.

YOUTH SELLS Works by a younger generation of artists had some surprising results. Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture, “Untitled (Negro Sunshine),” from 2005, sold to Ivor Braka, a London dealer, for $299,938, exceeding its high estimate of $234,000. At the Phillips auction on Thursday, younger, high-profile artists, including Rob Pruitt, Kelly Walker, Tauba Aueerbach, Sterling Ruby and Oscar Murillo, brought better-than-expected prices. The South American Mr. Murillo was particularly hot; a 2011 untitled painting by him brought $224,145, nearly four times its high estimate.

BIDDING UP The Scottish painter Peter Doig has been something of a star in London, especially after his 2008 retrospective at Tate Britain. On Tuesday César Reyes, a psychiatrist who lives in Puerto Rico and is one of the artist’s biggest collectors, was selling “Jetty,” a 1994 canvas of a lone figure on a dock at sunset. Four bidders went for the painting, which was estimated to bring $6.1 million to $9 million and was bought by a telephone bidder for $11.3 million.

POPPED Several Pop canvases had mixed results. There were no takers for Warhol’s “Colored Campbell’s Soup Can,” a 1965 painting that had been in the collection of the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend and was being sold anonymously by Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, according to people familiar with his collection. But Lichtenstein’s “Cup of Coffee,” a 1961 painting from one of the artist’s series of a single image with his signature Ben-Day dots in the background, brought $4.3 million, above its high $3 million estimate.

The George Lindemann Journal