The New York Contemporary art sales totaled $1,703,991,563 this season. It’s a very large number but only fully comes into focus once one sees it in relation to the previous years’s totals. Above is a chart of the New York Contemporary art sales from the Fall of 2004 until the week we just saw pass. You’ll notice that totals increased dramatically in 2012, finally surpassing the 2007 peak of the previous market. But even with the increase in the Fall of 2013 and the Spring of 2014, nothing could prepare us for the leap forward taken this season.

For convenience sake, we’ve broken the charts down into two eras and provided an average total volume for that period. For the four years from 2005-2009, the average sales volume was $523m. From 2010-2014, the average volume was nearly double at $1.003bn.