In a goodbye to summer and a kickoff to the fall art season, Sotheby’s is hosting a party tonight at the Bridge, a golf club in Bridgehampton, to preview the works in Damien Hirst’s upcoming auction, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.”

The sale, which will take place in London on September 15 and 16, includes 223 works, all made specifically for the auction. There are numerous works from each of Mr. Hirst’s most popular series, including spin paintings, butterfly paintings, pharmaceutical cabinets, and animals suspended in formaldehyde. The sale is expected to realize more than $120 million.

Only 10 works, all paintings, will be on display tonight. A similar exhibition of highlights opened yesterday in Mumbai, India. The entire collection will be exhibited at Sotheby’s London beginning September 5.

“It will be on view much longer than a traditional auction preview is,” one of the hosts of tonight’s party, a Sotheby’s chairman, Lisa Dennison, said. “It will be literally and truly an exhibition.”

That Mr. Hirst decided to bypass his dealers, including Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling at White Cube, to do a large-scale exhibition and sale at an auction house has caused much chatter in the art world. (This is not Mr. Hirst’s first foray into the auction world, or his first collaboration with Sotheby’s: In 2004, he auctioned the contents of his restaurant, Pharmacy, at Sotheby’s, bringing in more than $20 million. Last year, he partnered with Sotheby’s and Bono on the (RED) Auction, which realized more than $42 million.)

Some have speculated that Mr. Gagosian and Mr. Jopling are not as supportive of the sale as they claimed to be in statements included in Sotheby’s press release. The Art Newspaper reported last week that Mr. Jopling currently has more than $180 million in unsold Hirst work in his gallery.

Still, whatever one thinks of his work, it’s hard to deny that Mr. Hirst, like an innovative C.E.O., is forging new business models and avenues to potential audiences. In an interview printed in the catalog for the sale, Mr. Hirst noted that it can be difficult or intimidating to buy works from galleries.

“But anyone who’s thought, you know, ‘Maybe I’ll get a Damien Hirst,’ will definitely have the chance to get one from the auction,” he said. “So I think it will just bring loads more people in and will just make it, you know, much more dynamic and exciting.”

“There’s no smarter businessman in the art world than Damien Hirst,” Sandy Heller, who advises the hedge fund manager and collector Steve Cohen, said. “And I think Sotheby’s is very in touch with Damien’s market. They know how big it is and how broad it is, and it’s not necessarily all reached by his primary dealers.”

The Sotheby’s specialist who coordinated the sale, Cheyenne Westphal, described Mr. Hirst as “a cultural phenomenon.” His works “are in every country in Europe, the United States, Asia, China, the Middle East,” she said. “Everyone finds him so accessible.”

Sotheby’s chose to have tonight’s event in the Hamptons because they knew that most of their clients would be out there anyway. “We were concerned that doing something in August on York Avenue might not have the widest audience appeal,” Ms. Dennison said wryly.

The Bridge, a slightly unconventional golf club built on an old racetrack, with an avant-garde clubhouse designed by the architect Roger Ferris, seemed like the perfect venue, Ms. Dennison said. “It’s one of the most beautiful views in the Hamptons, overlooking Peconic Bay,” she said.

Although most of them will be taken down tomorrow night, the club is usually hung with numerous works of art relating to golf or car racing, including a Larry Rivers painting, a César sculpture, and a couple of works by Richard Prince, who is a member. (The club has only around 150 members. When it opened in 2006, the annual fee was $600,000.) The club’s principal owner, Robert Rubin, is a former commodities trader turned architectural historian, and a significant collector of architecture and design.

The works in “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” plumb the same themes of opulence, material richness, and death that were so stark in the diamond-encrusted platinum skull (“For the Love of God”) that he put on sale for $100 million at White Cube last summer.

The top lot in the sale is called “The Golden Calf”: a gold-plated steel tank on a Carrera marble plinth, containing a calf in formaldehyde with 18-carat gold hooves and horns, and a gold medallion suspended above its head. It is estimated at $15.8 million to $23.69 million. There is also a black sheep in formaldehyde with 18-carat gold horns, a zebra, a colt, a tiger shark, and other assorted dead animals.

In an interview posted on Sotheby’s Web site, Mr. Hirst said that he is going to stop producing his popular butterfly and spin paintings. Some dealers have worried that these pieces were getting numerous, threatening their value.

“I still advise to buy Damien Hirst — I think he’s one of the greatest artists alive, period,” Mr. Heller said. “The issue really becomes more about what should you pay for a Damien Hirst. If I’m looking at a catalog with 40 butterfly paintings, maybe I shouldn’t pay $2 million [for one]; maybe I should only pay one million.”

Still, Mr. Heller said he predicted that the sale would be very successful. “I’m interested in maybe five pieces, maybe 10 pieces,” he said. “And I’m just one guy. If you’ve got a community of 500 people who are getting these catalogs, and they have that same attitude, then I tell you this is going to be pretty good.”