Natalie Naccache for The New York Times

DOHA, Qatar — The art-world equivalent of McDonald’s golden arches, Damien Hirst’s candy-colored spots, now covering the exterior of the exhibition space Al Riwaq, glaringly mark this Persian Gulf city as a player in the increasingly branded art world. And the exhibition inside, which includes all the touch points in the career of Mr. Hirst, 48, is just one of a constellation of openings organized to attract a who’s who in the art world (or at least a who’s afraid of being left out).

Dealers, auction house experts, museum directors, collectors and artists from around the world descended on this city last week, ostensibly to support the many artists whose exhibitions were opening here but primarily in the hopes of doing business of their own. It was as if Chelsea and Mayfair had been transplanted to this overheated city of shiny skyscrapers and waterfront promenades. There was Jeffrey Deitch, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and gallery owners like David Zwirner, who represents Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian-born artist who is having a show at Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art. Alberto Mugrabi, the New York dealer, came too, along with Aby Rosen, the Manhattan real estate developer and collector, and Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate in London. (The Qatar Museums Authority sponsored a retrospective of Mr. Hirst’s work at the Tate last year.) Even the artist Jeff Koons made an appearance.

The culturally engaged and deep-pocketed Qatari royal family, along with a new generation of moneyed collectors living in this oil-rich city, are making it an increasingly frequent stop on the global art tour.

Christie’s, which holds auctions in Dubai and exhibitions in Doha, reported last year that sales in the Middle East were approaching 10 percent of its annual turnover.

“Our numbers are probably similar,” said Alexander Rotter, who runs Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York and was in Doha last week, too. Sotheby’s opened its office here in 2008 and had its first Doha auction the next year. In April it had its first auction of contemporary art here with works by artists from the United States as well as the Middle East and Asia. “There is a new breed of collector here that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” said Mr. Rotter, who organized the sale and was its auctioneer. “And they are in it to win it.”

Last week Sotheby’s took over a gallery in the Katara Art Center — a collaborative cultural village of galleries with an open-air theater — where it showed highlights from next month’s important contemporary art auctions in New York. On view were two major Warhols: “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz),” a 1963 image of Elizabeth Taylor on a bright-yellow background that is estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million, and “5 Deaths on Turquoise (Turquoise Disaster),” painted the same year and expected to bring $7 million to $10 million. While the seller was not named and officials at Sotheby’s declined to comment, the paintings are part of a larger group of works, which also includes an abstract canvas by Gerhard Richter, being sold by Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, whose company, SAC Capital Advisors, is fighting criminal charges of insider trading. Sandy Heller, an art adviser who works with Mr. Cohen, declined to comment on the sale, but art experts familiar with Mr. Cohen’s collection identified the works as his.

In Doha, seminal images of Pop Art, like the Warhols, might be familiar, but most of the public sculptures, and the new art in museums and galleries is not. For the first time Middle Eastern audiences can see the breadth of Mr. Hirst’s career on their home turf. Last Monday “The Miraculous Journey,” 14 monumental bronze sculptures by the artist were unveiled in front of the Sidra Medical and Research Center on the outskirts of Doha. Charting the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus from conception to birth, the suite of bronzes includes a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy.

Three nights later, “Relics,” Mr. Hirst’s retrospective, opened at Al Riwaq. Organized by Francesco Bonami, an independent curator who lives in New York and Milan, it includes three of the artist’s giant sharks submerged in tanks of formaldehyde; two of Mr. Hirst’s human skulls encrusted with thousands of sparkly diamonds; a room of stainless-steel medicine cabinets filled with drugs; and an array of paintings.

Weeks before the show opened, the Qatar Museums Authority was flooded with school groups requesting visits. “It is totally booked through November,” said Jean Paul Engelen, the organization’s director of public art and exhibitions, who estimates thousands of students from local schools and universities will have seen “Relics” by the time it closes on Jan. 22.

During the last three years Mr. Engelen, together with Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 30, the Qatar Museums Authority chairwoman and a sister to the new emir, have overseen the installation of outdoor sculptures around the city by an international array of artists. Some have been more popular than others. Last week when a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Mr. Abdessemed depicting one soccer player head-butting another was installed on the Corniche, the popular waterfront promenade, some residents called for its removal, claiming it offended their sensibilities. Other works have been embraced, including one of Louise Bourgeois’s monumental spiders at the Qatar National Convention Center and “7,” an 80-foot-tall sculpture by Richard Serra that sits on a plaza extending 250 feet into Doha Harbor at the tip of the Museum of Islamic Art Park.

The Qatar Museums Authority has also tried to open up a dialogue with the public about some of its shows. Last week it installed booths in two shopping malls where people could view images of one of Mr. Hirst’s sharks and his diamond skull and give their opinions, which can be found online; users can also express their opinions directly on a Web site. (Tweets are also encouraged.) Another exhibition inviting comment on the Web site is “The Museum of Crying Women,” in which streams of tears are added to portraits of Hollywood stars, first ladies, fashion celebrities and pop-culture figures; the creator of that show, which opened last week in Katara, is Francesco Vezzoli, the Italian artist and filmmaker.

Asking for public opinion is a novelty in this absolute monarchy. But the Qatar Museums Authority seems to be drumming up feedback even more aggressively than most American museums do.

“We try to learn who our audience is,” Mr. Engelen said, “where we can do better, and how we can reach even more people.”

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A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar.