The art market in 2008, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

AUCTION rooms will be less fun in the year to come than in the year gone by. Throughout 2007, stories of astonishing sales records tumbled out of the press offices of Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Christie’s boasted the highest half-yearly sales in art-market history; Sotheby's claimed the highest global turnover in the company's history “by a wide margin”. Some enthusiastic players in the game came to believe the boom would go on and on. But it can’t, and it won’t.

Art fairs, such as the one in Miami at the end of November, still do brisk business, but a dose of realism dictates that the boom is over. This has yet to show in hammer prices, but it is a bad moment when dealers notice that clients have started to think before they spend.

Some dealers will look nervously toward the credit markets. No one, to your correspondent’s knowledge, has yet speculated about the impact of the credit crunch on the financial arrangements made by auction houses to ease a big sale, but it is hard to imagine them continuing to sweeten deals as though there was no tomorrow.

In 2007, much of the best business was fuelled by guarantees that let sellers transfer the risk of a sale not going through. By November, guarantees had reached giddy heights (as much as $800m, according to one estimate).

When “Wheat Fields” (pictured), a late painting by Vincent van Gogh, failed to meet its reserve price, Sotheby's got scorched fingers. They are reluctant to confess to error in public, but it is inconceivable that they will underwrite sales so generously in the future. They would not tell The Economist by how much they will reduce guarantees, but by half sounds right in the trade.

Any such squeeze will inevitably affect the quality of work coming onto the market. (Incidentally, not everyone believed that “Wheat Fields” deserved its guarantee of around $25m at auction in November. I stood behind a senior executive of Sotheby’s as he scrutinized the painting at a pre-sale exhibit in London. He declared the fields on the skyline to have been clumsily done. So, apparently, did the people who decided not to buy it.)

If the works on sale at the upcoming Impressionist and contemporary-art sales are any indication, the quality of paintings for sale in 2008 looks set to decline as well. The usual suspects are lined up against the wall: one of Warhol’s ubiquitous celebrity pin-ups (Judy Garland this time), a few Picassos, and a clutch of French Impressionists at Sotheby’s, plus later paintings by van Dongen and van Jawlensky, and a group of interesting German Expressionists. The highest estimate—£18m-35m ($35.8m-69.7m)—is for “Study of a Nude with Figure in a Mirror”, which Francis Bacon painted in 1969.

A charity affair, the (Red) Auction, held at Sotheby's in New York City on February 14th, will likely provoke more excitement than any early sales at traditional houses. Organised by Damien Hirst, a British artist and provocateur, and Bono, a pop-singer, to raise money for AIDS relief in Africa, this all-star contemporary show has contributions for everyone who is anyone in art now: Baselitz, Johns, Hodgkin and Koons, to name just a few. Mr Hirst shows himself to be a generous fellow, placing seven pieces valued at $9m in the auction. Perhaps the most memorable is one of his trademark pill-cabinets filled with phials of retroviral drugs.

Bono declared, “What we have here is a real moment of art history.” Anyone feeling the need of a helping of hype will surely get good measure in New York, where the lots go on pre-auction show at the Gagosian Gallery on February 4th.