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PARIS, Oct 24, 2008 (AFP) - The years-long frenzy to buy contemporary art appears to be coming to an end as the crunch bites, but the market held steady in Paris this week when top gallery owners gathered for the FIAC art fair. Shrugging off falls on London's once juicy market and a slowdown at its Frieze Art Fair, dealers reported it was basically business as usual Friday at the yearly four-day gathering of 189 leading world galleries, closing at the weekend. "It's not the feeding frenzy you'd see in Miami of people rushing through the doors and grabbing everything, but there is a lot of serious interest and a lot of serious collectors," said Daniel Lechner of New York's Cheim & Read, which notably has a Joan Mitchell for sale at 4.5 million euros. "Crisis, what crisis?" said French gallery-owner Yvon Lambert. Deals, however, "are perhaps taking a little longer to clinch," he added. "Some buyers are thinking harder. Before you'd get impulse buying, now people are really talking art." Many gallery owners agreed, with New York's Lachner saying that "people are focusing more on essentials, on building a collection." "In the end this may make the market more healthy." Staged inside the eye-stopping lacy metal-worked Grand Palais, as well as the Louvre museum, the fair showcases works by top contemporary artists such as Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Bridget Riley or Marc Quinn as well as moderns like Picasso, Picabia or Calder. Works on sale by Britain's Quinn -- famed for a 2006 sculpture of Kate Moss in yoga position and another this year of the model in solid gold -- sold like hot cakes at well over 100,000 euros a shot. "These are not speculative purchses," said Hopkins-Custot gallery. "Great works sell whatever the times." Among smaller galleries showcasing emerging artists the mood was much the same, with gallery Chemould Prescott Road of Mumbai shrugging aside reports that currently inflated contemporary Indian (and Chinese) works would be in the frontline of financial fire. "Our sales have been on a par with last year, though buyers are a little hesitant in making a final choice," said a spokeswoman for the firm. But Paris' Patrick Seguin, who is specialised in high-end designer pieces running in hundreds of thousands of euros, said the market had been changed by the global financial crisis. "Things are not at all as they were a few weeks ago," he said. "Deals are still being made but less quickly and less spontaneously." In London last week, two big sales fell short of previous highs just a month after a record-shattering auction of works by Damien Hirst. While Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were among modern artists whose works prompted bidding frenzies -- Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich paid around 60 million pounds for one painting by each in May -- a Bacon portrait last weekend failed to reach its reserve price at a Christie's sale. A portrait of Bacon by Freud fetched 5.4 million pounds, but even this was well short of its upper end estimate of seven million pounds. It was a similar story at Sotheby's in London last weekend, where its contemporary art sales made under 44 million pounds, compared to an estimate of at least 55 million pounds.