David Rockefeller was lavishly installed in a skybox. Al Taubman was grinning like a Cheshire cat in the fourth row. Sotheby's head of client services, Roberta Louckx, situated alongside a bank of phone-addled specialists, took the winning bid via telephone.

Who bought the $72.8 million Rothko (left)?

The New York Times says it was a mysterious bearded collector in a skybox. New York magazine speculates that the buyer was one of the unidentified Russian collectors (along with hedge fund managers) who have taken on the same mystique as those late 1980s Japanese buyers whose feverish collecting met with a rather ugly demise in the early 1990s. Last week the influence of rubles in the art market was legitimized on both Sotheby's and Christie's currency boards--appearing for the first time along with dollars, euros, pounds, Swiss francs, Hong Kong dollars, and Japanese yen.

What was described as a silent boom a decade ago has turned into unmitigated jaw-dropping spectacle. The two-week evening sales of Impressionist & Modern and Postwar & Contemporary art at Christie's and Sotheby's in New York tallied $1.15 billion, just eclipsing last November's record total and attracting everyone from auction veteran Stephanie Seymour (a marigold ribbon tied in her hair) to fledgling art collector Tobey Maguire (turned out in jeans and a baseball cap).

Collectors were hungry for Impressionist & Modern art, but they were "ravenous" for postwar and contemporary works, according to Christie's auctioneer Christopher Burge. Sotheby's set a new $254.8 million record for a contemporary sale on May 15 only to have Christie's break it less than 24 hours later with its stupendous $384.6 million contemporary sale--the second highest total for an auction ever. (Last November's $491 million sale of Impressionist & Modern art at Christie's holds the record.) Artist's records were set for Francis Bacon ($54.7 million), Jean-Michel Basquiat ($14.6 million), Damien Hirst ($7.4 million), and Gerhard Richter ($6.2 million), among others. Rothko's 1950 White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), sold by David Rockefeller at Sotheby's, held its position as the top price paid for a postwar artwork at auction, but nipping very closely at its sherbet-hued edges was Warhol's Green Car Crash (1963), which fetched $71.7 million at Christie's. Before Burge opened bidding on the Warhol at $17 million, market-maker Larry Gagosian traded his cell phone for a Christie's-provided landline. He waited until $61.5 million to raise his hand, just as Burge was about to hammer it down to a telephone bidder, eliciting laughter in the audience and prompting Burge to scold playfully, "Talk about waiting until the last minute." The telephone bidder, speaking to Ken Yeh, deputy chairman of Christie's in Asia, was persistent, however, and Gagosian let it go at $64 million.

Gagosian also tried to snag Warhol's Lemon Marilyn (right) for $24.5 million, then went a step too far when he bid $25.5 million on behalf of a client and called out to rescind the bid. The painting sold to a telephone bidder for $28 million. Gagosian went on to win Jasper Johns's Figure 4 (1959) for an artist's-record $17.4 million and Warhol's Miriam Davidson for $6.3 million. During the sale, even Gagosian could be seen shaking his head incredulously and craning to catch a glimpse of who was in the skyboxes.

Figuring out who bought what isn't voyeurism--it's business. Artworks appear fetchingly at auction only to quickly disappear into anonymous private collections. Dealers and auction specialists at the top of their game spend their careers trying to glean where the most wanted artworks are at any given moment and what price might wrest a coveted object from its owner. Knowing where the bodies are buried is an essential part of the game.

--KELLY DEVINE THOMAS