It will take some time for the impact of last week’s Contemporary art sales to fully sink in. The three auction houses cleared $974,452,350 worth of art and, in the evening sales alone, there were record prices for 31 artists. Sotheby’s achieved the highest price for a work of Contemporary art when they sold a Francis Bacon triptych for more than $86 million; Christie’s established the record price for a living artist — $33 million — with Lucian Freud’s portrait of a civil servant.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. If you had read the commentary leading into the sales, the last thing you would have expected was an injection of adrenaline into the Contemporary art market. Forget the crash, what’s driving the market forward? Some immediate impressions emerge from the fact that the sales had such range, depth, and made so many different types of records.

The obvious conclusion is that there are a lot of collectors out there with money set aside to buy art. The Contemporary sales ran deep with buyers looking at numerous different artists. Indeed, the sales last week reinforced the idea that the art market is driven by dozens of micro-markets in different artists and within the different veins of an artist’s body of work.

Not every painter saw their work rise in value. Even with sales achieving high sell-through rates–Christie’s was 95%; Phillips, 86%; and Sotheby’s, with almost half as many more lots than Christie’s, hit 88% — some artists failed to achieve lift off in prices. Joan Mitchell seemed poised to break out to new level but didn’t. Warhol and Koons made good sales, but nothing that would change their well-traded markets.

At much lower levels of the market, long-term trends in Rudolf Stingel and Anselm Reyle cooled as solid but unexciting examples of their work were sold with little fanfare even though these same names were the focus of the cognoscenti just a few months ago.

For the overall market, that’s good news. The appearance of different micro-markets is a measure of the overall health of the art market. With so many buyers out there, the broader market has more opportunities to coalesce around different works.

We saw that in all of the artist records. The list is instructive. Just at the three evening sales, records were established for: Andre, Bacon, Bas, Baselitz, Beuys, Bradford, Condo, Flavin, Francis, Freud, Gober, Gottlieb, Grotjahn, Halley, Hofmann, Indiana, Klein, Kobe, Krasner, Mangold, Manzoni, Marden, Murakami, Newman, Oldenberg, Prince, Rauch, Richter, Smithson, Wall, and Wesselmann (twice).

Many of these records represent new interest in a particular artist’s work. Other records were driven by the appearance of works of exceptional quality. Murakami’s work has not been a market leader recently. But “My Lonesome Cowboy” is an extraordinary — both beautiful and disturbing — work, and it appeared on the market as the artist has an important museum show in Brooklyn. Observers pointed to hedge fund manager Steven Cohen as the likely person to have paid $15 million for the sculpture because the Brooklyn Museum show reveals the depth of his holdings in Murakami. But there are more than enough buyers out there. After all, it takes two bidders to achieve any record price.

The two works by Yves Klein that sold at Sotheby’s for record prices reflect the same once-in-a-collector’s-lifetime effect. Klein’s prices have been rising dramatically in Europe and what appeared here were three works of exceptional provenance, new to the market and of great significance both within the artist’s body of work and as milestones in late 20th Century art. The Klein and Piero Manzoni records are part of continuing re-appraisal of the late 20th century in art.

European artists are not the only ones receiving new interest and attention. Adolph Gottlieb, an artist caught somewhere between the Abstract Expressionists and the Color Field painters, is emerging at record prices for the same historical reasons Hans Hoffmann, a Color Field painter with growing momentum, had several works in the sales. Lee Krasner’s big sale at Sotheby’s re-affirms her place in the pantheon of Abstract Expressionists.

For all of the success of the last week, it won’t be long before attention turns to the next cycle of sales coming up in London, at the end of June, where we’ll get a better sense of the long-term meaning of this week’s exuberance.