By the end of Sotheby's pioneering two-day auction of new Damien Hirst works only one thing was incontrovertibly clear the artist has enjoyed a spectacular triumph.

Against a backdrop of carnage in the global financial markets Hirst walked away with £95.7 million last night for two years' worth of pickled animals, spot paintings, dead butterfly collages and stubbed-out cigarettes. But what the sale means for his dealers, other artists and the art market in general is anybody's guess.

At the elite end of today's art market, where records have been tumbling for years, the stakes are now so high that nothing is ever quite as it seems. Last year Hirst unveiled and apparently sold the world's most expensive piece of contemporary art, a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of a human skull. It turned out, however, that he was part of the consortium that had bought it for £50 million.

At Monday's evening sale a coloured triptych with butterflies called Heaven Can Wait, sold for £850,000, far above its £500,000 estimate.

The buyer who set the tone for the night was Jay Jopling, founder of White Cube, Hirst's London gallery. Although White Cube and Gagosian Gallery in New York were the ostensible losers from Hirst's decision to cut them out and sell straight to the open market, they also have significant holdings of his work that would have fallen in value if the sale had floppped. A spokesman for White Cube told The Times that Jopling had bid on 20 of the 56 lots sold on Monday night and he was at Sotheby's again yesterday.

Successful White Cube bids included a portrait, Young Damien, that more than doubled its £500,000 upper estimate and Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, a cabinet of fish skeletons and stuffed fish that made £2.95 million. White Cube helped to drive up the price on the evening's biggest surprise, a steel cabinet of manufactured diamonds that was estimated at up to £1.5 million but sold for £5.2 million to an anonymous telephone bidder represented by Sotheby's best Russian speaker.

The auction house was praised widely yesterday for extracting every last ounce of value from the sale. Its strategy hinged on mining the new markets in Russia, India, China and the Middle East, which have added unprecedented depth to the pool of “trophy buyers”. One in five of the buyers on Monday night was new to Sotheby's and one in three had never bought contemporary art there before, a pattern repeated yesterday.

After the £70.55 million taken on Monday night, a morning and afternoon sale on Tuesday brought in £41 million. With the buyer's premium added the sale comfortably exceeded the £98 million upper estimate, with 24 of the 223 lots selling for more than £1 million and fewer than one in ten failing to make the low estimate.

A statement by Hirst said that “the future looks great for everyone”. Ollie Barker, the Sotheby's specialist who helped to plan the sale and was the auctioneer, said that his team was overwhelmed by the response and was expecting further artist-led auctions.

“We don't know where this is going to lead to in the future. This company is 250 years old and this is the first time we've worked with a living artist in this way but it is bound to present further opportunities.”

Who will provide the work? Frank Dunphy, Hirst's manager, has said they have no plans to hold further auctions and few living artists have Hirst's fame, productivity and collectability.

Richard Shone, editor of the fine art magazine Burlington, said he thought that the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale would ultimately prove an “entertaining distraction from the real business rather than a structual shift in the art market”.

The real business might be about to stall. Even with an influx of fresh collectors many lots at the Hirst sale were contested between only two or three bidders, evidence of a slowdown. Charles Dupplin, an art expert at the specialist insurer Hiscox, said: “A year or so ago you had frenzied bidding for lots. Now there's a smaller number of bidders because there isn't the same degree of depth to the market.”

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