The art-market bubble didn't pop at New York's major spring auctions—it burst at the seams. The two weeks of sales ending today raised a robust total of $1.5 billion—nearly a record. "Be brave," Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer urged bidders at the company's sale of Contemporary art Wednesday night, and they were—but perhaps also foolhardy. The people who attended these sales may someday be able to brag that they were there at the top of the art market.  

"Going in, there were questions over whether the economy, a recession, would affect the market," said Simon de Pury, chairman of boutique auctioneer Phillips de Pury, which raised an impressive $59 million Thursday night at its sale of Contemporary art. "But it was strong at every level," he said. Four out of every five artworks sold; now the issue is figuring out what's hot, who bought it, and whether they will regret it.  

First, the records: Works by more than two dozen artists hit new price levels, including Edouard Vuillard, Joan Miró, Claude Monet, Robert Gober, and Francis Bacon. Bacon's Triptych, painted late in his life, brought $86.3 million. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, by another British artist, Lucian Freud, set an auction record for a living artist when it sailed to $33.6 million at Christie's. A Cubist painting by Fernand Léger sold for $39.2 million at Sotheby's, yet another record.

But the air is thin up there. Few artworks had multiple bidders, indicating that the auctioneers had aggressively presold the works to interested parties, but that there's not a broad underpinning of the market at these lofty levels. Another red flag: At its Impressionist sale, which totaled $277 million, Christie's fell $10 million short of its own lowest guess of what it would raise. Sotheby's raised a record total of $362 million Wednesday, but the number of lots was smaller. And the auctions overall were fairly light on works by superstars of recent years like Matthew Barney, Cindy Sherman, Cecily Brown, and Lisa Yuskavage, leaving something of question mark on how they would have fared in this climate.       
 
Buyers included New York real estate developer Aby Rosen and dealer-collector Jose Mugrabi; they bid for a $3.1 million Cy Twombly and Warhols, respectively. Dealers Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch bought too. At the David Zwirner Gallery, Miami collector Rosa de la Cruz bought a work by German Leipzig School painter Neo Rauch. (Rauch had a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art late last year, a rare endorsement for a living artist.) Private art dealer Philippe Segalot bid aggressively for several works, winning a Carl Andre and a golden $23.6 million Yves Klein. He declines to discuss his clients, but he has bought for luxury-goods billionaire and Christie's owner Francois Pinault in the past.

The biggest surprise was the appetite of American buyers, said Christie's deputy chairman Brett Gorvy. Despite the strength of the euro and the furious efforts to fill the sales with art that appealed to European and Russian tastes, more than two-thirds of the pieces sold to Americans. Part of that was due to a learning curve, Gorvy said. New collectors who have entered the market in the past couple of years hadn’t felt confident enough to make big purchases until now. As for the foreign players, "Russians have been buying steadily and Gulf buyers are in, just beginning to collect," in the contemporary market, de Pury said. (The Art Newspaper reported earlier this month that the buyer of the record $72.8 million "Rockefeller Rothko" at Sotheby's a year ago this week was the Emir of Qatar.)

So where do the market and the collector go now? The collector parsing these sales as an investor might analyze that the Dow would be buying works by artists who attracted bidding frenzies: Giacometti, Robert Gober , and buzzy L.A. hairstylist and abstract painter Mark Bradford, who made his auction debut at Phillips on Thursday. Phillips auction house introduces a couple of young artists to the evening sales every season, and they have a history of becoming stars, like Neo Rauch. Strikingly, the Bradford work brought triple its presale expectations, or $322,900. Similarly, Sotheby's added Indian art to its Contemporary art sale for the first time this season, and Subodh Gupta soared as a result. His Across the Seven Seas brought $788,710, above expectations. Charles Saatchi, known for spotting art stars early, is a Gupta collector.