The most apparently foolproof formula in contemporary art, shark+tank+Hirst, added up to substantial sum last night, when the latest fish off the production line sold for £9.6m , well in excess of the top estimate of £6m, and further confirmation that some people remain immune to the credit crunch.

All 96 lots in the first session of the most hyped art sale of the year sold, confounding the pessimists who wondered if Damien Hirst had finally pickled one shark too many.

Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby's, described it as "a truly historic occasion", as the night's total sales came to £70.5m, comfortably ahead of the original £65m prediction for the entire sale, including the buyer's premium of 12% .

Hirst stayed away last night, but afterwards said : "The market for art is bigger than anyone knows. I love art and this proves I am not alone."

"Banks fall over, art triumphs," Sir Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy said.

But the prices were huge rather than insane, and auctioneer Ollie Barker had to work hard for them.

Bidding opened at £6.5m on the star lot of the evening, the Golden Calf, but it eventually sold - like the shark to a telephone bidder - for £10.3m , a record for the artist at auction, but well short of the top £12m estimate. Theology, Philosophy, Medicine and Justice, four small sharks in two tanks, sold for £2.35m, below the lowest £3m estimate. People began to drift away from the saleroom, which had been standing room only long before the auction started.

There was a late flurry of excitement over Fragments of Paradise, a wall case filled with shelves of thousands of "manufactured diamonds" - cubic zirconium, the auctioneer explained kindly - which after one of the longest bidding battles finally sold for £5.2m, more than three times the top estimate.

Like asteroids on an inexorable collision course, the spectacular sale had converged on the most spectacular bank collapse of the century: in the buzz of chatter in Italian, German and French before the sale, the question was whether there would be any millionaires left in the swirling clouds of space dust for Hirst to pick off . There were, but they were hiding at the end of telephone lines or in the private boardrooms sheltering some of Sotheby's very favourite customers. There was no sign of celebrities such as Bono or Daria Zhukova, Roman Abramovich's gallery owning girlfriend, who came to the pre-sale party.

On the big lots the bidders in the room, almost all with mobiles clamped to their ears as they gambled somebody else's money, dropped out pathetically early at a bout the £1m mark, leaving the battlefield to the anonymous voices on the banks of phones.

Hirst described the collection as his "greatest hits", and the very first lot, Heaven Can Wait, was almost a parody compilation of his trademark motifs: spins, paint splashes, butterflies, scattered diamonds. It was estimated at up to £500,000, and sold for £850,000.

Sotheby's knows Hirst well as a buyer: recent purchases, which may end up in his dream project of a vast country house museum of contemporary art, include a Francis Bacon self portrait, and a £3.2m steel sculpture by the American pop artist Jeff Koons.

After last year's hysteria over the diamond skull - at £50m the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold albeit where two-thirds went to an investment consortium and the rest to a group including the artist himself - the big question was what would Hirst do next. The answer was this auction, carefully constructed for maximum sensation, from the three volume £200 boxed catalogue to the big queues for the exhibition which, unprecedentedly for a single artist, filled all of Sotheby's Bond Street galleries. Eventually more than 21,000 came to see the show.

Normally Hirst is represented by two of the biggest names in the contemporary art business, Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery in Britain and Larry Gagosian in New York. Both have gritted their teeth and insisted the auction has their blessing . Jopling was present last night but not buying, in public at least.

Today, although more major pieces are to be sold, the bargain basement stuff will be offered: scores of spots, spin pictures and butterflies; crates of skulls in painted plastic estimated to start at a mere £15,000. Many have raised eyebrows at the army of unacknowledged craft workers in Hirst's workshops, but the drawings are his own work. The sketch of the Golden Calf is estimated at up to £30,000 - but also carries a note which may be the artist's enigmatic message to whoever paid so much more for the finished work last night: "don't go worshipping false idols! dont go chasing waterfalls!"

Sale highlights

· The Golden Calf, with solid gold disc between gold horns, gold hoofs, in gold plate framed tank, on marble plinth. One of Hirst's four key pieces: estimate £12m, sold for £10.3m

· The Kingdom, below, the biggest of the new shark pieces and first of the new stuffed animals in tanks to be sold: estimated at up to £6m, sold for £9.6m

· Fragments of Paradise, wall case of manufactured diamonds, estimate £1.5m, sold for £5.2m

· Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, glass cases of stuffed fish and fish skeletons, top estimate £3.5m, sold for £2.95m

· The Black Sheep with the Golden Horn, top estimate £3m, sold for £2.6m

· Memories of/Moments with You, gold plated steel and diamonds diptych, estimate £1.2m, sold for £2.6m