In perhaps the greatest art-marketing campaign in history, Sotheby’s and Damien Hirst pulled off an extraordinary feat on the evening of September 15 and the following afternoon, selling £111.5 million ($200 million) worth of the artist’s freshly minted work in less than 24 hours against a backdrop of global financial ruin. To put this monster tally in perspective, consider the November 1997 sale at Christie’s of the Victor and Sally Ganz trove of modern masterpieces, assembled over nearly 50 years and fabled for its significant holdings of Picassos, Johnses, Rauschenbergs and Stellas, which fetched $207 million.

The Hirst pieces, offered in a sale titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, are the result of more than two years of planning and careful execution by Hirst and his 160- man production company, Science. The evening, which netted the artist as much as $100 million for his high-stakes gamble, was remarkable in other ways as well. All but five of the 223 lots sold, for an average price of £511,306 ($920,881), with 48 fetching in excess of $1 million and 5 bringing more than $5 million. Of the handful of rejects, the double shark tank Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, Justice and the star-shaped, fly-encrusted Devil Worshiper, both made in 2008, were acquired after the auction by a seasoned Swiss dealer who couldn’t believe his luck.

“[The sale] represents a complete and utter paradigm shift for the art market,” says Tania Buckrell Pos, head of the London arts consultancy Arts & Management International. “The artist is circumventing the dealer process and going directly to [his] audience.” Pos didn’t bid during the £70.5 million ($126.5 million) evening session, because her clients decided against it.

Like Pos, the London dealer Helly Nahmad, although an early supporter of Hirst, refrained from bidding at the evening sale. “I prefer to be in something that has a lot less risk,” he says. Nahmad feels the entire sale was indicative of the art-market “moving closer to a business model.” He characterizes Hirst as being “between a superstar artist and a luxury brand” and terms investing in his latest oeuvre as “much easier than buying a modern picture— all you need to know are two or three facts: It’s Hirst, it’s Sotheby’s, it’s luxury. . . . You could have a Hirst company as large as LVMH .”

Indeed, Hirst demonstrated his überconfidence— and skill—as a brand maker the night of the evening sale. Instead of attending, he listened to the proceedings via a speakerphone while playing snooker with the world-champion, Ronnie Sullivan, in downmarket Camden, as if the high-stakes auction were just another YBA lark.

A number of seasoned players have been trying to make sense of the sale’s massive numbers and determine its import for the market. Some pundits have even alleged that Hirst’s powerhouse dealers—Jay Jopling, of White Cube, and Larry Gagosian—cooked the results with secret assurances to Sotheby’s made in return for special terms to buy the vast array of brand-new property. Like all conspiracy theories, this contains a grain of truth: Jopling openly bid on 20 of the 56 lots offered and is known to have acquired five, including the gory triple cabinet of anatomical parts The Triumvirate (est. £1.5– 2 million; $2.7–3.6 million), for £1,721,250 ($3.1 million), while Gagosian’s Stefan Ratibor bought at least one. However, those actions are less collusion than business as usual.

What is curious is that Sotheby’s has declined to release its usual geographic breakdown of buyers. Why the secrecy? Was market manipulation at work here? Or was it more a case of Sotheby’s being bashful about the paucity of American buyers and the abundance of new-wealth taste from other parts?

There was significant bidding by the Russians. One of the telephone client services’ specialists, Alina Davey, who speaks fluent Russian, bagged at least five lots. The Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk has said he bought works for his museum in Kiev. The one statistic Sotheby’s did release was telling: 35 percent of the bidders in the evening session were new to the contemporary department.