Courtesy Sotheby's

The sales did see one success: The jewel- and gem-adorned Pearl Carpet of Baroda sold for $5.5 million, beating the world record for a carpet or rug.

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Wednesday evening, the house's first sale of international, Arab, and Iranian contemporary art in the Middle Eastern city earned $4.3 million, less than half of its pre-sale estimate of $13.8–19.7 million. Of 51 lots on offer, 55 percent sold. A purple stainless-steel mirror sculpture by Anish Kapoor from 2003 took the evening's top price, $974,500, the lot's low estimate.

“While the contemporary art market is thriving at adjusted levels as we saw in our sales of contemporary art in London in February, tonight’s sale was not supported by the international market place to the extent we had hoped,” Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s chairman of contemporary art for Europe, said in a statement after the auction.

Yesterday, Sotheby's first Arts of the Islamic World auction also failed to reach its estimates, with only five of 18 lots selling. Those that did sell fared well, however, earning $4 million with fees against the sale's pre-sale estimate of $4 million at hammer prices.

The house did see one success in Doha this week, when an Indian carpet made of pearls and gems that had been given its own catalog sold for $5.5 million, beating its low estimate of $5 million and the world record for a carpet or rug, set at Christie's New York in June 2008. The Pearl Carpet of Baroda, which measures 5 feet 8 inches by 8 foot 8 inches, was commissioned in 1865 by the Maharajah of the former Indian state of Baroda, possibly as a gift for the tomb of Mohammed at Medina.