NEW YORK—The stock market was down, it was up a little, then it was, well, way way down. In response, a New York artist made some “Zero Dollars.”

What’s to become of the art market? There were ominous signs of a downturn here, too. Sotheby’s saw mixed results for its sale of modern and contemporary Asian art in Hong Kong. The company’s stock fell 21 percent. On the bright side, the auction house announced that they will open an office in Doha, Qatar. Meanwhile, Singapore is gearing up to buck any downward spiral.

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, for one, has “a lot of faith in the art market”: He’s consigning the last of his paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a 1982 depiction of a boxer, to Christie’s, which is putting it up for sale in New York on November 12, and guessing it could bring $12–16 million. And so does the Russian luxury goods firm that just acquired auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Co.

In Damien Hirst news, his Sotheby’s sale may turn out to be iconic in at least one way — a recent study in England found it to be the peak of the U.K. art market; Peter Maxwell Davies, the Queen of England’s composer, compared Hirst’s goods to Liberace’s “tatty stage costumes.” Paris's Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier will sell Hirsts for the low low price of only $2,700 to $54,000.

Brit street artist Banksy set up a mock pet supply shop in New York; a member of Italian parliament is trying to block some antiquities from being sold at Bonhams in London next week, because they may have been illegally exported; and New York gallery Historical Design is suing Enron’s former COO of global markets for trying to extort money after claiming a painting he bought was a forgery. Canadian artists protested against arts funding cuts, and New York’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum will expand.

Greek archaeologists discovered two ancient Roman sculptures on an island in the Aegean Sea; they had been used to build a wall. A Paris funeral parlor is being converted into a contemporary art center, and a Louise Bourgeois exhibition made of an art critic “the victim of a brutal emotional mugging” with a “comprehensive assault on my sense of wellbeing.”

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction. She blogs at "The Appraisal."