Nor could connoisseurs conceal their surprise when Giorgio de Chirico’s The Ghost of 1917 became the next world-record picture, at €11 million ($14 million). It has neither the fantasy of de Chirico’s most inventive pictures, nor the painterly qualities of his most accomplished work. This, one heard, would go to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, a National Museums Agency representative having stated the intention of the French state to exercise its "preemption" privilege.

There was more (some would say worse) to come. Paul Klee’s Garden Figure of 1932 nearly quadrupled its estimate at €4 million ($5 million), propelled by the current vogue of Surrealism in its most simplistic vein.

The cult of the absurd peaked that day when a toilet water flask picked up by Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the Dada movement, brought €8.9 million ($11.5 million). What distinguishes it from hundreds of toilet water flasks sold by the Paris perfumer Rigaud is the label pasted on it. Conceived by Duchamp, it was designed by his friend Man Ray. The phrase coined by Duchamp, "Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette" (Lovely Breath: Veil Water) is a phonetic parody of "Belle Hélène: Eau de Toilette" (Lovely Helen: Toilet Water). In a tiny oval inset, the photograph of Duchamp dressed up as a woman completed this kind of joke called by French high school boys in their late teens a canular, or tongue-in-cheek absurd prank. This was Duchamp’s way of conveying his contempt for the wealthy establishment and its artistic sense — or the lack thereof. The intellectual anarchist that he was never dreamt that his expression of derision would one day be elevated to the status of multimillion-dollar "art." As world records go, this one should hold for a while.

As the two-hour session wound down on February 23, art market professionals looked both dazed and ecstatic. They had witnessed a historic moment. The divergence of the art market from the economy had been established in the field that had been leading the art market for decades, Impressionist and modern paintings and sculpture. Could this be the response of distraught investors seeking a safe haven for their liquidities in a world that seemed to be collapsing around them?

The answer, a firm no, came on February 24, when the spotlight switched to areas where buying requires far greater sophistication and experience. These too gave rise to phenomenal outbursts of enthusiasm, thus dismissing the theory of the panicked investor looking for easy-to-buy art.

The session opened with Old Master paintings, and these were a mixed bag. The first pictures to come up were a pair of panels from 16th-century Germany respectively dealing with the birth and martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist. When offered separately at Christie’s London in 1971, both had failed to sell. This year, the pair soared to €457,000 ($591,312), a gigantic price for mildly interesting anonymous paintings. A Pieter de Hooch interior scene doomed by its distressed condition then crashed unwanted, followed by a rather conventional Portrait of a Lady done by Cornelis de Vos in the 1620s, well sold at €121,000 ($156,561). This led up to the first significant test, the portrait of a man holding a book, signed by Frans Hals, which did not quite have the sharp edge of the Dutch master’s greatest works. But these are no longer seen at auction and bidders went berserk, setting the world auction record for Hals at €3.5 million ($4.6 million).

Two Italian paintings of no great consequence which sold easily served as a transition to the second meaningful test, Gainsborough’s portrait of an Italian singer, famous in his time, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci. Done in the mid-1770s, the Portrait of Giusto Tenducci is a far cry from the formal likenesses of aristocratic patrons by the English painter that occasionally turn up. Nothing like it had been offered in the open market for years. Tenducci sang its way up to €2.9 million ($3.6 million). This too was a world auction record for the artist.

Add a third, stupendous record, €2.1 million ($2.7 million), which greeted the oval portrait of a young woman by Ingres, the Comtesse de la Rue, done in 1812 in a dry precise manner, and the session could not have done better at the height of the market.