"Sometimes calamitous events can effect auctions, but in this case the worst news was in the U.S. and the sale was in England," said Kimball Higgs, senior vice president of Gurr Johns, an art appraiser and consultant in New York. "Obviously the buyers were not nervous enough to discourage activity."

Sotheby's has not yet released a breakdown of buyers by nationality, but people who attended the sale noted a conspicuous absence of American buyers. Alina Davey, a Russian-speaking Sotheby's employee from the private client-services department, snatched up the most lots of any single buyer, for a total of $23.2 million—presumably for Russian clients.

But some doubt that the art market is immune to financial crisis.

"This looks like a repeat of 20 years ago, when global markets crashed and the art market kept chugging along for another year and then it crashed," says Todd Levin, director of the Levin Art Group in New York. "I've seen this before—people talk about there being all this global money, that's there's so much more wealth now—but I think that's nonsense. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop."

He points out that Edward Ruscha's 1979 work I Don't Want No Retrospective, sold for $4 million at auction earlier this year—only for the buyer to later renege on the purchase.

Hirst's decision to sell directly through Sotheby's was highly unusual: Living artists typically sell new work through dealers and galleries. While the terms of Sotheby's agreement with the artist have not been made public, selling through the auction house cuts out dealers' commissions, which can be as high as 50 percent, making Hirst extra millions.

"It was an unusual situation, where the artist could sit down with the auction house before the work was even made—with zero transparency and 100 percent control—and orchestrate exactly how many works, of what kinds, and in what price ranges the market could bear," Levin says. "There is simply no way that Sotheby's would get themselves involved in such a massively epic opportunity for failure without calculating for every last possibility."

That includes, he says, accounting for a struggling world economy.