On Thursday alone, $635m of Contemporary art traded hands. That's more than half of the $1.15bn in Contemporary art sold during the week and nearly the same total as the first Rockefeller evening sale. In a fortnight that saw ~$2.7bn in public art transactions, that $635m might seem just a solid day's trading. But the shape of the sales total—nearly $400m at Christie's; $131m at Phillips and $107m at Sotheby's day sale—points to the culmination of a greater trend in the art market as a whole and the Contemporary market in particular.

We have arrived at the end of a long road of art market growth. Looking back, one can seem similarities between this sales season and the peak of the market in 2007 and early 2008. But there are important differences too. Where that market culminated in a sense of euphoria, this one is cautious. Prices are full. Buyers are wary. Yet the totals remain mind-bogglingly strong.

We will have much greater detail on the day sales for AMMpro subscribers when we analyze the auction results in the coming weeks. For now, let's focus on the Evening sales at Phillips and Christie's which made for one very long night broken into two parts.

The mood at Phillips and Christie's could not have been more different from each other and from the previous evening uptown at Sotheby's. Where the Sotheby's Evening sale surprised nearly everyone—like a spontaneous street party—both Christie's and Phillips played closer to form. Still finding their feet even as they advance their numbers, Phillips posted a strong total despite a few setbacks. A handful of big lots were either withdrawn, failed to generate bids or had consignors too stiff-necked to take advantage their best opportunities.

At Christie's, the art-trading juggernaut barreled through another big sale with Jussi Pylkkänen, surely the most skilled and comfortable auctioneer of this generation—or, perhaps, any other. Over the hump of Rockefeller sale where he seemed tense; and, after watching Adrien Meyer relieve him for the Impressionist and Modern Evening sale while maintaining the momentum; Pylkkänen teased, mugged and cracked jokes throughout the sale.

It started early on with the bidding for a François-Xavier Lalanne design work where Pylkkänen, not unlike a teacher separating rambunctious students in a class, admonished Loic Gouzer and Alex Rotter that they were standing too close together while bidding on the same lot. Rotter later came in for some skeptical questioning. Pylkkänen had turned toward Rotter in the middle of the bidding on the Lalanne to find the co-Head of Contemporary art turned half away from the proceedings, simultaneously chatting on a landline and scrolling through his phone.

"Alex, are you texting or are you bidding?" Pylkkänen asked patiently.

Rotter was indeed bidding. "We're trying to figure that out," he responded before offering $3.3m for the mid-sixties Lalanne bar.

"With a text at $3.3m," Pylkkänen announced as he turned toward the other telephone bidder. "It's a first."

Working every possible advantage, Pylkkänen proceeded to egg on the other phone bidder to "put paid to this texting."

It worked. Fifteen lots later in the sale, George Condo's Nude and Forms came up with eleven telephone bidders eager to participate. The initial flurry of bids outnumbered the biddable increments, driving the price  through the estimate range of $2.2m to $2.8m. In the sale room din, specialist Andrew Massad called out $2.9m in a loud, clear voice that exceed the volume of the other bidders.

For a moment, the other specialists were silent either because the number had caused their clients to reflect or simply out of startlement. Once another bidder had responded with $3m, Pylkkänen went back to Massad for a bid but adding the conspiratorial question, "surprised yourself with a shout?"

The room chuckled together. But Pylkkänen sensed another opportunity. He nudged Massad along. "Shout three-two," he said. "Amuse us all. Go for it."

Pylkkänen got the bid but not the shout. "Dammit," he exclaimed, with mock chagrin. Eventually, Massad got left behind as Francis Outred and Xin Li Cohen bid the work to $5.2m. The $6.1m premium price advanced Condo's record—set only in November—by 50%.

Even then, Pylkkänen wasn't finished with Massad. At the end of the long 65 lot sale, with the room empty and the staff getting punchy, Pyllkänen began to do a buddy act with Massad. Imagine Pyllkänen as Dean Martin, the dry debonair straight man with impeccable comic timing, and Massad in the hapless Jerry Lewis role.

The bit worked. Pylkkänen got the laughs; Massad won each of the last lots.

For all of Pylkkänen's japes, and despite the good business done up and down the price spectrum, Christie's sale did the most to leave an impression of the market coming to grips with a significant change. Christie's $397m Evening sale total was only $5m more than Sotheby's even though the perception going into the sales was that Christie's was in a commanding position.

Judd Tully was able to get the apt quote from Andrew Fabricant on his way outside of the room:

Christie's Impressionist and Modern Evening sale continues several themes already visible last week and reconfirmed in Sotheby's sale on Monday. The market, especially the market for high-quality or distinctive works by name artists, remains quite strong. But it is stronger at the lower levels—a theme that is not new in the broader art market but may be newer in a Impressionist and Modern market flush with fresh supply—but selective at the upper reaches with sellers asking the fullest value upfront.

The two top lots in Christie's sale, the Malevich and Brancusi, are a case study. Both were offered with the same estimate level, a very considerable $70m. Both had impeccable museum credentials, the Brancusi had been on long-term loan at the Met for decades and the Malevich had been at the Stedelijk museum before it was restituted in 2008. Both sales can be rightly considered once-in-a-generation opportunities at a time when art buyers have more money than opportunities to buy world-class works.

The works also offer a contrast in selling strategies. The Brancusi was sold by the heirs of the original buyers who purchased the work in 1955 directly from the artist for a few thousand dollars. "This is what you call fresh to market," Judd Tully remarked drily in his ARTnews report. Despite the incontestable windfall, the family chose to take a third-party guarantee. They locked in their gains with the trade-off of leaving some money—$187,500, to be precise—on the table. (Update: Several experts on guarantees, including the advisor who worked on the Brancusi guarantee, have pointed out that the consignors did not sacrifice the $187,500. That money comes from the auction house's premium. And they are correct. We regret getting carried away with the rhetorical construction.)

The Malevich was took the opposite tack. A seller comfortable with risk, the Nahmad family, offered the work without any financial guardrails. Selling "naked"—to use a term the art market likes to pretend is common parlance—was seen as validating the market, as this quote from Katya Kazakina's Bloomberg piece illustrates:

Helena Newman was clearly nervous last night as she began the Evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art at Sotheby's. A seasoned auctioneer and art market professional, Newman's demeanor in the box is usually more commanding and operatic. The immediate question forming in viewer's minds was whether Newman had a tell. Eighteen lots later, it appeared that she did. The Evening's focal point lot, Modigliani's Nu Couché sold to its guarantor for $157m or a price within 8% of the record set by Liu Yiqian two and half years ago for another Modigliani nude.

Throughout the run-up to the sale and during its immediate aftermath, it has been easy to find any number of opinions on the sale and whether the painting would or should get a bid in advance of the pre-determined one Sotheby's had arranged.

Because it seems to matter, we can add to that debate a question—heightened in this era of extensive or pervasive Irrevocable Bids and third-party guarantees—about whether the atmospherics of the auction room with its frisson of drama and voyeurism matter to bidders, the majority of whom participate by hearsay clutching a phone and listening to a play-by-play narration from their representative.

As far as the lot of the evening goes, there was clearly some confusion about who would bid and how much. It is worth noting that the scene at Sotheby's was nearly identical to last week's scene at Christie's when auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen stood at the podium eyeing a specialist during the crying of the top lot from the Rockefeller sale.

Both Pylkkanen and Newman, with so much riding on their respective transactions were tense (though with Pylkkanen's armor of insouciance it is harder to see when he is perturbed.) Both lost some patience waiting for an expected bid that never materialized finally calling out the specialist's name in the vain hope a bid would materialize.

The much-anticipated first Evening sale of the Peggy and David Rockefeller estate posted an dramatic record for a single-owner sale with $646m in sales against an array of art mostly reflecting the Rockefeller's personal tastes after the numerous gifts of other works to various museums but mostly the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

From the moment the sale was announced attention has been split between the art itself (and how it would perform in the marketplace;) the value of the Rockefeller name in an increasingly global art market that often values art differently from previous eras; and, the inside baseball conjecture about the deal Christie's struck and what strategy it would pursue to cover the substantial cost of putting on the sale of the century.

On all three points, the results last night were somewhat different from what seasoned professionals might have expected—and what the chatter running up to the event was predicting. For all of the attention lavished on the sale as an epoch-making event, few participants felt the need to show up at Rockefeller center. The event was well-attended but the bidding mostly took place on the telephone, another reminder that the global art marketplace has changed the nature of even the biggest, most glamorous events.

Even if the sale was a little glamour and drama deficient, it was hardly anything but a huge success. Just think about the gamble that Christie's took six years ago when the deal for the Rockefeller estate was first negotiated. The art market in 2012 had yet to see the updrafts of 2013-15 when nine-figure prices became less of an outlier and more of an objective.