The woman and her companion joined hundreds of other well-heeled visitors standing in line at the Park Avenue Armory, as if waiting for a starting gun, rushing forward clutching their Birkin bags, through security and into flower-decorated corridors leading to carpeted halls filled with material wonders of every era, NYT reports.

This has been happening with some regularity for the past decade, when the European Fine Art Foundation “lands” in Manhattan from its home in Maastricht, the Netherlands, staging a billionaire version of the classic TV game show Supermarket Sweep.

And if the atmosphere this time felt especially charged, it may have been due to a rebounding stock market — or the servers circulating with trays of complimentary rosé Champagne.

During several walkthroughs of the fair on a bright spring afternoon, it appeared — at least superficially — that wars, inflation, oil blockades and government stagnation had little impact on the group most likely to be affected by the proposed pied-à-terre tax: the billionaire class.

“Money, money, money, money, money,” said Wendy Goodman, design editor of New York Magazine, as she looked across the vast interior of the Armory, which that day echoed with lively conversations in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and both American and British English.

Art sales and atmosphere

Auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips plan to sell more than $2.6 billion in art over the next week.

Much of it consists of works with impeccable provenance and unmatched quality. Pieces from the estates of publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse, philanthropist Agnes Gund, and dealers Marian Goodman and Robert Mnuchin will all go under the hammer, and this rare convergence of collections has energized a market that had recently been in decline.

Eleven lots are conservatively estimated to fetch more than $50 million each.

“Our entire system of status has shifted toward money,” said art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. “I’ll probably be killed for saying this,” she added, standing at the entrance of her Salon 94 gallery booth. “But we used to privilege culture, and that system is disappearing, and we need to talk about that.”

Inside the fair

Meanwhile, why not stop for an oyster?

Moving through the 55,000-square-foot drill hall — where 88 galleries from around the world are exhibiting under a vast barrel ceiling — men and women in leather aprons, chain-mail gloves, and intimidating oyster shucking tools circulate through the crowd.

From aluminum buckets strapped to their waists, they extract and deftly open briny oysters. “It’s called Oystertainment,” said one waiter, Haydn Harvey. And indeed, Oystertainment is a registered trademark of New York-based catering company Red Oyster.

Conversations about wealthy buyers

Harvey was shucking oysters right beside a booth run by Galerie Chastel-Maréchal, a Paris-based antiquities gallery specializing in elite 20th-century French decorative arts.

Near the entrance stood Alexandre Maréchal, a descendant of the family that owns the gallery. Asked about the differences between collectors of the past and today’s growing class of billionaire buyers, he answered in one word: “advisers.”

“The new rich have one, two, three advisers,” he said. “And they think more about the investment value of what they’re acquiring, what it will be worth at resale in three years.”

And what about aesthetic value? “They still love the art,” he said.

An art adviser’s view

Simona Fantinelli, a Zurich-based private art adviser, said the appeal of fairs like TEFAF for ultra-wealthy buyers goes far beyond transactions.

“The pursuit of beautiful things is still a magical aspect of our world,” she said. “It is much more than finding the right art for your mantelpiece.”

She was pitching a rare pierced aluminum work by Lucio Fontana to a client, offered by Milan’s ML Fine Art for just over $1 million.

“People are cautious, of course, and risk-averse, and I understand that,” she said. “But you should not forget how much walking into a room surrounded by beautiful objects can change your life.”