Dubai – It was business as usual for Christie’s once the pre-sale reception and social chatter ended, and the sale got off the ground Tuesday evening — with thirty of the prime offerings skimmed off for a Part I sale.

The 29 world records set would seem an insane number in a sale of Western contemporary art, yet one must remember that a large proportion of the artists included in the sale were making their debut at auction, therefore, by default, whatever price they fetched would be a world record.

This being Christie’s 13th go-round in Dubai, all the players knew their parts.  From the coy bidders standing at the back of the salesroom, holding out as long as possible, and jumping back in just as the gavel was about to fall to the banks of telephone representatives coaxing their clients to weigh in with one more.. (Why does one always picture these clients calling from yachts?.

The highlight of the evening was the sale of Modern Egyptian master Mahmoud Said’s Pecheurs a la Rosette, which topped its high estimate selling for $818,500, with no fewer than five bidders both in the room and on the telephone getting into the action.

Said’s lesser work in the sale, an oil sketch of delirious dancers, Al Zar, flatlined at a low estimate $150,000 + premium, possibly due to condition problems and the fact that it was by all accounts a poor cousin to Said’s masterpiece Whirling Dervishes which set the bar for Modern Middle Eastern painting when it soared to $2.6 million in a previous sale.

Things clipped along as the sale moved into the Contemporary section — although it was clear that bidders were selective in their choices of MENASA art-stars Farhad Moshiri, Shrin Neshat, Lalla Essaydi and Reza Derakshani.

For example, when bidding starts on Lot 13, one of Moshiri’s iconic abstract calligraphic images in gold and black, called 8N619VT, four bidders immediately joined the action — two on the telephone and two in the room, with the work eventually knocked down at $210,000, near the high estimate to Christie’s representative, Isabelle de la Bruyere’s buyer on the phone.

However, two lots later, when Moshiri’s Keith Haring-esque The Sky Climber, a sort of kitsch image of a goofy figure in the night sky crosses the block, interest is tepid.  The bidding halts  for a long pregnant pause at $120,000 on the telephone (estimate: $150,000/200,000) and is knocked down for $146,500, just eking over its its reserve.

The next lot The Triangle,  by Iraqi, Hayv Kahraman (also the subject of a concurrent show at the Third Line gallery in Dubai) Pylkannen opens the bidding with the words, ‘Well, we have a great deal of interest in this lot.” — referring to the commission bids he already had in his book.

And he was right, at this affordable level (estimate $25,000/30,000) bidders immediately pitched battle quickly moving the price to an above estimate: $98,500, and starting this young (born 1981) elegant artists works of vaguely Orientalist women in monochrome Geisha-like groupings into the top tier.

Lot 16, Turkish, Ramazan Bayrakoglu’s photographic “Sandra” was announced by Pylkannen with the words: “Huge interest here for an artist making a first appearance at Christie’s””.

The work, estimated at $30,000/35,000 starts its ascent with two commission bids of $75,000, eventually selling at twice its high estimate for $92,500. The next, a work dismissed by Pylkannen as “the plexiglass object” by Turkish Irfan Onurmen is quickly dispensed of: “unsold” says Pylkannen to a room exhibiting little interest, at $28,000 (estimate $30,000/40,000).

And then another test of the Moshiri market, this one for a highly estimated ($200,000/300,000), Striped Jar on White, another instantly recogizable subject by the artist,  a large gold urn, delicately painted with shimmery colored crackelature. The work sells, but for a knockdown of $190,000, below the low estimate, potentially pointing to a cooling of the hot ardor for anything by the Iranian painter previously offered.

The next lot is by another Iranian artist, the lyrical abstract painter, Reza Derakshani. The vaguely cubist study in greens, called Sensibility Green/Summer Serenades (estimate: $70,000/90,000) starts at an opening bid of $50,000 and quickly climbs in $5,000 increments, yet stalls at $70,000, knocked down for its low estimate.  The sale then seems to lose momentum, as the next several undistinguished works by Azade Koker, Ahmet Elhan and Murat Germen, fittingly titled “Once Upon a Time in Dubai, are unsold.

Then an nteresting test comes up with works by now ubiquitous (at least in the Gulf) photographs of women covered with calligraphic writing by Shrin Neshat and Lalla Essaydi.  The Neshat, Unveiling (From the Women of Allah Series) , ekes out a low-end $50,000 final bid, and then the Essaydi of a woman reclining in a take of the contemporary harem girl, Harem #16 also sells, but at the low estimate, demonstrating that perhaps the auction house’s attempt to continue to push the prices on these artists has now reached its water-level, and no further speculative buying is predicted for the future.

The sale concludes with a nice round of applause, and can be characterized as a more than solid success,

Yet perhaps a good thing it was not a frenzied speculative affair, but more a sober reckoning of a market on the rise.