Damien Hirst Sotheby’s show a success despite economic crash

Damien Hirst got away with it. The artist's recurring nightmare - reported here yesterday - that the Sotheby's auction of his work would attract no bids turned out to be just a bad dream.

In the event, a total of £70.5m was raised last night - a comfortable margin over the £65m estimated - as buyers refused to be put off by the nightmare on Wall Street. With 56 lots sold, and another 127 to be auctioned today, Sotheby's are already claiming a record for a sale dedicated to an individual artist.

Hirst did not attend the auction – he was apparently playing snooker with Ronnie O'Sullivan in Camden Town – and nor did any of the starry crowd, including Bono and Dasha Zhukova, who attended his pre-sale party on Saturday. But Hirst said afterwards: "The market for art is bigger than anyone knows. I love art and this proves I am not alone." (Continued below)

Sir Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, who controversially introduced Hirst's first pickled shark to a wider public in the 1997 Sensation show at the RA, said: "Banks fall over, art triumphs.” Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby's, who benefited from Hirst’s decision to bypass his dealers, collecting a 12 per cent buyer’s premium on all sales, called it "a truly historic occasion".

Most of the crowd filling Sotheby's were there for the entertainment rather than to buy and the star lots went either to telephone bidders or to wealthy buyers hiding away in Sotheby's private boardrooms. So the public has little idea yet who exactly felt confident enough to splash out millions on modern art on the day world financial markets were crashing.

Star of the evening was The Golden Calf - a bull in a tank of formaldehyde, with its head crowned by a gold disc - which sold for £10.3m, a record for the artist at auction, though well short of the top £12m estimate. The Kingdom - a tiger shark also in formaldehyde - sold for £9.6m, well above the pre-sale top estimate of £6m.

Fragments of Paradise, a wall case filled with shelves of thousands of "manufactured diamonds", attracted one of the longest bidding battles before selling for £5.2m, more than three times the top estimate.

Before last night's sale - which Hirst called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever - the world record for a sale dedicated to a single artist was set in 1993 for works by Picasso. They went for a total of £11m.