He spoke softly, and the people in the pretty empty room turned around in their seats to watch.

"O.K.," he waved finally, "65."

"Sold," the auctioneer said, at a bid of $65,000. And that pretty much sums up the drama.

The March contemporary art sales held last week at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips de Pury are the Off Off Broadway of auctions. Ignored by the broader world, they are where damaged or failed works go, where ideas are tried out, where works by veterans whose careers have stalled often end up. These sales are the little-noticed counterparts to the May and November biannual orgies of excess, when financiers and Russian oligarchs drop millions on famous art. They give clues to what's really going on in the art world, and sometimes offer bargain-basement deals for collectors. But one thing's for sure: these are sales no artist wants to be in.

"It's sort of insulting not to get into the big one," said P.P.O.W. gallery co-owner Wendy Olsoff. Young artists in particular are nervous to be sold "midseason," Ms. Olsoff said. They "don't want it to look like no one wants their work."    

Artist Robert Longo had a handful of his pieces on the block in the March sales (most of which sold). "I don't want to think about it--it can drive you nuts," he wrote in an email. Even an artist as noted as Mr. Longo, whose works hung in the grand hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009, admits to feeling "powerless in this situation."

How low-rent are these sales, exactly? "I believe there's a painting in the midseason catalog that's upside down," said consultant Lowell Pettit of Pettit Art Partners. "It was published incorrectly." Last year's May contemporary art sale at Sotheby's brought in $243 million; its March version brought in not quite $9.5 million.

"If you're a serious collector," said Sikkema & Jenkins gallery principal Brent Sikkema, "you'll look at March as much as May. But if you're more of a socially inclined collector--and part of the market today is driven by that phenomenon--then maybe you just pay attention to the more glamorous auctions."

But it's this low profile that makes them important to trend watchers. Dealers will usually make sure their artists' works don't fail in the spotlight of a bigger auction, but won't bother underbidding in these low-profile sales. So you can see where demand is real, not manufactured.

Who won and lost this round? Dash Snow art-partner Ryan McGinley had four works up for sale at Phillips de Pury; three of them sold, one quite strongly. (A work by Snow, who passed away unexpectedly in 2009, also sold well above its estimate.) A Peter Saul went for $86,500, more than double its expected price at Sotheby's. (The powerhouse Mary Boone Gallery has just arranged to represent the artist.) Banksy soared, too, as a 2008 aerosol-paint-on-cardboard portrait of Abe Lincoln brought $68,500. A Glenn Ligon work, estimated at about $200,000, sold for $374,500. It helps that his retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last week.

Who didn't fare well? New York artists Ross Bleckner and Barry McGee, and a handful of works by German artists, indicating that that recent collecting fad may be over. Buyers seem weary of auction darling Takashi Murakami: One small, bargain work of his, offered for about $3,000, sold for $1,000.

For artists, the stakes for these midseason sales are higher than they used to be. Websites like Artnet and Artprice now make auction results (and failures) instantly accessible to collectors.

But, while artists might not like it, the March sales can make for good bargain-hunting. The value of a particular work is, of course, subjective, but at Christie's last week, a 1953 Yayoi Kusama painting sold for $52,500; a slightly larger one made that same year sold three years ago for well over twice that.

"There are things you can pick up at a less intimidating price point," said Sotheby's senior specialist Erica Barrish, who ran the company's sale of contemporary art last week. If an artwork surpasses its estimate, it can help raise the value of other work by the artist. "Plenty of artists have had careers launched at midseason sales at any of the three auctions," she said.

Such sales are about offering "a forum that's accessible, approachable. So maybe you're 27 years old, but a banker, or 60, but never bought contemporary art before," said the head of the "First Open" contemporary art sale at Christie's, Sara Friedlander. "Works that would be put in the back of the catalog in May have a chance to stand out." These can include minor works from big names, such as early paintings from Alex Katz and Mark Rothko or collages by Joseph Cornell, she said.

Mr. Sikkema said he frequently advises collectors to donate smaller works by his artists and others to teaching museums and take a tax write-off instead of going to auction.

But donation may be easier said than done. Many museums' storerooms are already overcrowded. Indeed, with some of the midseason artworks, you can't give them away.

"With the pressure museums are under financially ... it would have to be a very special, unique work," Mr. Pettit, the art consultant, said.

For an artist like Karl Haendel, who said his drawings typically don't sell well at auction partly because they're black and white, "I would actually rather see--or not see, in this case--my work sit in storage [at a museum] than go to auction."

For an artist, there's something worse than being included the March sales, said Ms. Olsoff. Being in the bigger May or November sales--and not selling.

 rcorbett@observer.com

The Ponzi King deserves, not commentary done on a deadline, but vitriol made gross and lurid through paint. Mr. Saul’s finicky style, with its innumerable pats of oversaturated color, is inherently anti-immediate; we’ll have to wait for his definitive take on capitalist excess and arrogance. But then, topicality isn’t Mr. Saul’s forte. Bile is.

For the last 50 years or so, he’s thrived on the stuff, and created a body of work that stands as a monument to garish, adolescent overkill. From his early, not un-fond forays into AbEx pastiche to the pseudo-pointillist cartoons for which he’s gained a significant following, Mr. Saul has trained his scatological eye on humankind’s failings and follies. Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, O. J. Simpson, Donald Duck, Jeffrey Dahmer and Newt Gingrich—in mortal combat with Little Orphan Annie, no less—have met with his ire.

Mr. Saul has worked on themes both grand (totalitarianism, the ubiquity of racism and genocide) and trivial (zit-popping, nose-picking and Marcel Duchamp). Either way, he invests a given motif with gleeful and raucous overstatement. “I like the way [a] picture presents problems you have to deal with,” the artist, in an understated mood, told BOMB magazine. If there’s no particular breadth to Mr. Saul’s maliciousness, its unflagging nature is impressive in its purity.

Which is a not-so-roundabout way of saying that the exhibit is more of the same. The fleshy and contorted figures; the electric palette; the Silly Putty–like elisions of space; and an endearing weakness for the easy mark—Joe the Plumber no less than Bernie Madoff—the recent work demonstrates that Mr. Saul is as reliable a stylist as he is a misanthrope. Stalin and Mao make an appearance, as does the artist himself, brandishing a large pickle and running through a bowl of what appear to be SpaghettiO’s.

A keen, if dyspeptic, student of art history—Mr. Saul is, for example, a fan of 19th-century academic painting—he knowingly parodies Willem de Kooning’s slash-and-burn methodology in a canvas titled (what else?) Better Than De Kooning. A homage to Max Beckmann’s The Night simultaneously simplifies and amplifies that masterpiece’s grotesqueries without necessarily tapping into the German painter’s philosophical gravity. But that’s kind of the point: Mr. Saul prides himself on his amorality. He trades in across-the-board vituperation. He’s refreshingly un-p.c. that way. That’s why charges of, say, misogyny don’t phase him.

Not that he doesn’t ask for them. The unabashedly puerile Viva La Difference (2008) is a case in point. A kneeling man in purplish-pink pajamas—he resembles Derek Jeter, though the folks at Nolan emphatically state that it’s not—crouches by a bed, putting his arm around a multiethnic lump of flesh with six breasts, six vaginas, blond hair and no face. In the catalog interview, Mr. Saul’s posits the canvas as a bedroom emollient for the collector ready to snap it up. There’s no accounting for one’s tastes in aphrodisiacs. But neither is there any doubting the integrity of an artist who is, in the end, less cantankerous or scabrous than just plain lovable—at least for those of us with a weakness for exuberant ill will.

“Peter Saul: New Paintings” is at David Nolan Gallery, 527 West 29th Street, until May 23.

mnaves@observer.com

Mr. Portnoy had the idea-if I may be permitted to use the word "idea" as loosely as this curator uses the word "grist"-of inviting nearly 20 artists, or would-be artists, to create works of art, so to speak, that would "define and create the meaning of critics and criticism." In principle, this is not an altogether uninteresting agenda for an exhibition. Artists as different as Daumier and Arthur Dove succeeded brilliantly in satirizing the critics of their time, and more recently Benny Andrews produced an entire exhibition devoted to the subject.

In practice, however, the gaggle of aspiring talents that Mr. Portnoy has assembled for this show isn't-with a single exception-up to the challenge. And this single exception-a painting on canvas by Peter Saul called Art Critics' Suicide (1996)-was well-known and talked-about in certain quarters of the art world several years before Mr. Portnoy undertook to organize the debacle currently on view at the White Box.

It may also convey something of the character of the Critic as Grist show to know that in addition to Mr. Portnoy's services as curator, the exhibition lists Marianne Vitale as its "curatorial engineer." This is a job description that is new to me. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to assess Ms. Vitale's contribution to the show, for on the day that I saw the exhibition not all of its engineering feats were functioning. Some of the television monitors weren't working, not all of the sound systems were audible, and some of the slide shows were not projected. Ah, the hazards of technology! It was owing to such technological failure that I did not get to see or hear Claude Wampler's video, Interview with Peter Plagens at His House . I regret missing this, for Mr. Plagens can usually be counted upon for his intelligence and wit, and this is a show that desperately needs every scrap of intelligence and wit it can muster.

I did get to see and hear the work that Paul D. Miller devoted to the criticism of Lucy Lippard. This is something called Glitch Music , which consists of abstract computer images on a screen accompanied by a sound track that combines a Philip Glass–type endless hum and what may or may not be the noise of fingernails scratching on a blackboard. I've certainly had my differences with Ms. Lippard's criticism over the years, but she has never been guilty of producing anything as mindless as Glitch Music.

Arthur Danto doesn't fare much better in Xar Taplik's mixed-media installation of a steel table, a water tank, a computer screen, and a variety of words and numbers; and Robert Hughes fares a good deal worse in Fairsbie Tabs' installation of what looks like an overlighted corner of an abandoned cellar. What any of this has to do with the content of criticism is anyone's guess.

By a process of elimination, then, Peter Saul's painting Art Critics' Suicide has become the show's primary attraction. It could be that I am prejudiced, of course, because I am one of the picture's two principal subjects. The other is Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic of The New Yorker . Exactly why we should be linked for the honor of serving as Mr. Saul's principal villains is a matter I can only guess at. Mr. Schjeldahl's critical views on most things are very different from my own. About the only thing we have in common as critics is that we both write moderately readable prose, which so many other critics on the current scene do not. And in my own case, to be sure, I have at times written very unfavorably about Mr. Saul's work. I cannot recall whether Mr. Schjeldahl has also been disobliging about the artist's accomplishments. Is it possible that Mr. Saul objects to readable prose?

According to the legend inserted into the upper left-hand corner of the painting, Mr. Saul seems to be under the impression that both Mr. Schjeldahl and I are "TOO STUPID TO LOOK AT PICTURES THEY THINK ABOUT ART." I cannot speak for Mr. Schjeldahl, of course, but I will confess that I do not spend a great deal of my time thinking about art, especially when I am looking at specific examples of it. I can well understand why this annoys Mr. Saul, for his own pictures do not bear much thinking about. They always introduce an element of sordid violence that is far in excess of what is appropriate to his subject, and the same goes for all the gun play in Art Critics' Suicide .

This penchant for sordid violence is something that Mr. Saul seized upon in the days of the Vietnam War, and in one way or another he has gone on re-fighting that war no matter what his current subject may be. For this artist, apparently, art criticism is war by other means. He doesn't really have another subject, and that is something that is more to be pitied than objected to.

Still, compared to the claptrap in the rest of Critic as Grist , Mr. Saul's picture at least gives us something to look at. But it is only in such dismal company that he can be mistaken for a serious artist.

Critic as Grist remains on view at the White Box, 525 West 26th Street, through Oct. 17.