Sold!
By ROBERT HUGHES
Up to last Wednesday night, Picasso's 1905 Au Lapin Agile was widely expected to become the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. It had been put on the block at Sotheby's in New York City by heiress Linda de Roulet, whose brother John Whitney Payson had sold Van Gogh's Irises for $53.9 million two years before. It was a far better picture than the Picasso self- portrait, Yo Picasso, that had made a freakish $47.85 million last May.
There are, according to Sotheby's CEO Michael Ainslie, about 500 people alive today who might fork out more than $25 million for a work of art. Au Lapin Agile could go, said rumor, to $60 million. But in the end, publishing magnate Walter Annenberg bought it for $40.7 million, and two or three people clapped. It was the third most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.
Only $40.7 million. And was that less or more than the GNP of a minor African state? On the other hand, wouldn't it buy only the undercart of a B-2, and maybe the crew's potty? Or a dozen parties for Malcolm Forbes? That a night's art sale could make a total of $269.5 million and yet leave its observers feeling slightly flat is perhaps a measure of the odd cultural values of our fin de siecle. "Personally," said Ainslie a week before the sale, "I would like to see more price stability -- at present levels, of course."
But what is done is done. The hard lesson of the past decade is that liquidity, to many people, may be all that art means. The art market has become the faithful cultural reflection of the wider economy in the '80s, inflated by leveraged buyouts, massive junk-bond issues and vast infusions of credit. What is a picture worth? One bid below what someone will pay for it. And what will that person pay for it? Basically, what he or she can borrow. And how much art can dance for how long on this particular pinhead? Nobody has the slightest idea.
Every game has winners and losers. The winners of this one are some collectors, some dealers and, in particular, the major auctioneers -- Christie's and Sotheby's -- in whose salesrooms the prices are set. The losers are museums and, through museums, the public.
From the point of view of American museums, the art-market boom is an unmitigated disaster. These institutions voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. "There are many areas where museums can no longer buy," says James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "It's bad for the museums, but it goes beyond that. It's bad for the country." The symbol of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plight is an annual booklet that used to be titled Notable Acquisitions. In 1986 it was renamed Recent Acquisitions because, as the museum's director Philippe de Montebello wrote, the rise in art prices "has limited the quantity and quality of acquisitions to the point where we can no longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago." To Paul Mellon, long the Maecenas of Washington's National Gallery of Art, "everything important is ridiculously expensive . . . I just refuse to pay these absurd prices." And as the museum's buying power fades, public experience of art is impoverished, and the brain drain of gifted young people from curatorship into art dealing accelerates.
American museums have in fact been hit with a double whammy: art inflation and a punitive rewriting, in 1986, of the U.S. tax laws, which destroyed most incentives for the rich to give art away. Tax exemption through donations was the basis on which American museums grew, and now it is all but gone, with predictably catastrophic results for the future. Nor can living artists afford to give their work to U.S. museums, since all the tax relief they get from such generosity is the cost of their materials. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the Government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them. It bales out incompetent savings-and-loan businesses but leaves in the lurch one of the real successes of American public life, its public art collections.
The inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. Without a doubt, the past 15 years in America have been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a series of great and (for this generation of museums and their public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of scholarship and curatorial skill: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Velazquez, Poussin, up to MOMA's current show of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist years and, perhaps, Seurat to come in 1991.
But who can now pay for the insurance? When the Metropolitan Museum of Art's show "Van Gogh at Arles" was being planned in the early '80s, it was assigned a global value for insurance of about $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of Irises, every Van Gogh owner wants to believe his painting is worth $50 million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum imaginable price on a painting to maintain the image of its market value and tempt the owner to sell.
Auction has transformed the very nature of the art sale. In 1983 the old English firm of Sotheby's was taken over by A. Alfred Taubman, American conglomerator, real estate giant and collector. The deal had to be approved by Britain's Monopolies and Mergers Commission. At the commission hearings, Taubman declared that he would be "very concerned" if the public ever got the idea that Sotheby's was centered anywhere but Britain, and that the "traditional nature of the business and of the services offered would be changed as little as possible." Request approved.
Taubman then recentered Sotheby's in New York and, over the next few years, changed its business to such an extent that its lending and other investment services generated $240 million in 1988 -- nearly a tenth of Sotheby's gross income of $2.3 billion. What Taubman saw (and staider Christie's was not slow to pick up) was that an auction house could go directly to the public, not only at low price levels but also at very high ones. In the past, auction houses sold mainly to dealers, who put on their markup and then sold to their clients. People were shy of going to auctions; the whole apparatus of reserves, attributions, codes and bids seemed mysterious and scary. Scratch your nose at the wrong moment, the urban folktale went, and -- yikes! -- you've bought a Rembrandt.
By harping on the investment value of art, by hiring personable young sales cadres to explain the significance of the Meissen jug or the not-quite-Rubens, by creating user-friendly expertise, the auctioneers defused this wariness. By the early '80s dealers were getting cut out of the game by collectors buying directly at auction. And by 1988, when the auction room had been promoted into a Reagan-decade cathouse of febrile extravagance, where people in black tie and jewels applauded winning bids as though they were arias sung by heroic tenors, private dealers (at least those dealing in the work of dead artists) had less margin of resale to work with. Their market share today is still enormous, but the auction houses are after it, and it is shrinking.
The idea that Taubman debased a saintly enterprise with the values of the shopping mall is not true. All he did was shove an already competitive business into the ruthless habitat of the '80s. It is not true either, as anyone knows who has followed the fortunes of the two houses, that Sotheby's is all hustle and Christie's all starch. In fact, it was Christie's that got into trouble with the law over falsifying an auction. In 1985 David Bathurst admitted that four years earlier, when he was president of Christie's New York branch, he had reported selling two paintings that had not, in fact, found buyers at auction in New York: a Van Gogh at a supposed price of $2.1 million and a Gauguin at $1.3 million. Bathurst said he had lied to protect the art market from depression.
The auction practice that has attracted the most criticism lately -- and goes to the heart of the nature of auctions themselves and the ethics of the trade -- is giving guarantees to the seller of a work of art and loans to the buyer. If X has a work of art that auctioneer Y wants to sell, Y can issue a "guarantee" that X will get, say, $5 million from the sale. If the work does not make $5 million, X still gets his check, but the work remains with the auction house for later sale. Guarantees are a strong inducement to sellers.
Loans to the buyer are made before the auction, and completed after it, at an interest rate that may go as high as 4% over prime. A common amount is 50% of the hammer price -- whatever the work reaches.
Guarantees can backfire. Sotheby's guarantee on the recent four-day sale of the collection of John T. Dorrance Jr., the late Campbell's soup heir, nearly did so. According to ARTnewsletter, a trade sheet, the dealer William Acquavella offered the Dorrance estate a guarantee of $100 million, but Sotheby's trumped him with $110 million. Though the sale realized a total of $131.29 million, it did so only because Sotheby's had persuaded the heirs to accept a "global reserve" (the minimum price acceptable to the seller on the whole collection), instead of placing a reserve, or minimum, on each lot, as is more usual. This enabled Sotheby's to meet the bottom line by selling 15 out of 44 impressionist and modern paintings far under its low estimate, rather than not sell them at all -- and gamble on making up the slack over the next three days.
Sotheby's says its guarantee system is "traditional": it goes back 20 years. This is true, if only in the sense that the firm tried it in the '70s but it flopped, because the market was slow and pictures failed to sell. Loans, of course, have risks too. Christie's gives neither guarantees nor loans. "The practice of offering guarantees," argues a Christie's spokesman, "means that in effect you've bought the picture yourself. And loans by the auction house tend to create an inflationary situation, a false market."
The beauty of the loan system, from the point of view of the auctioneer, is twofold. It inflates prices whether the borrower wins the painting or not: like a gambler with chips on house credit, he will bid it up. Prefinancing by the auction house artificially creates a floor, whereas a dealer who states a price sets a ceiling. And then, if the borrower defaults, the lender gets back the painting, writes off the unpaid part of the loan against tax, and can resell the work at its new inflated price.
Most top private dealers dislike the system of guarantees and loans. "It creates an immediate conflict of interest," says Julian Agnew, managing director of the London firm of Agnew's. "If the auction house has a financial involvement with both seller and buyer, its status as an agent is compromised. Lending to the buyer is like margin trading on the stock market. It creates inflation. It causes instability."
Criticism of auction-house guarantees and loans has been particularly widespread in the past few weeks, ever since it was disclosed that Sotheby's had lent Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond $27 million in 1987 to buy what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make it a standard policy to loan 50% against anything. We are not just lending against the object, but to an individual. At the time we loaned to Mr. Bond, he was viewed very differently from the way he is today."
As for the propriety of Sotheby's practices, Ainslie says, "Our procedures follow every regulation required of us. We proudly market our financial services. There is a suggestion that financing is immoral or wrong. That is an elitist view that we frankly find ridiculous."
Sotheby's feels it is being arraigned for the crime of high success. David Nash, head of its Fine Arts division, told the Washington Post that critics, far from being elitist, have "a hostile proletarian attitude toward our business." (Let 'em eat Braque.) But auction-house pretensions to be self- regulating have collided with the skepticism of Angelo Aponte, New York City commissioner of consumer affairs.
In 1985 Aponte decided to review the consumer affairs guidelines on auctions. For more than a year his team pored over Sotheby's and Christie's records, wrestling with such exotic-sounding practices as "bidding off the chandelier" (announcing fictitious bids to drive up the price) and "buying in" (leaving a work unsold because it does not reach the seller's reserve price). By Sotheby's account, the investigators came up with nothing after sifting through thousands of documents.
Aponte's version is different. Consumer affairs found "gross irregularities" in art auction houses, he says. Chandelier bidding amounted to "an industry practice, both above and below the reserve." (A chandelier bid above the reserve violates present rules.) Aponte was also concerned about the practices of not announcing buy-ins and of keeping reserves secret. The auction houses held that if bidders knew what the reserve on a lot was, it would chill the market. Art dealers, lobbying the agency, maintained that the reserve should be disclosed and that bidding should start at it.
The result was a dragged-out battle between the auctioneers and consumer affairs. The auctioneers won that round, but Aponte is getting set for another. Stiffer rules are pending, including those governing loans. The current consumer affairs code says that "if an auctioneer makes loans or advances money to consignors and/or prospective purchasers, this fact must be conspicuously disclosed in the auctioneer's catalog." But did this mean that Sotheby's put a note in the catalog of its November 1987 sale saying it had given one Alan Bond a loan of half the hammer price, repayment terms to be negotiated, on Irises? Think again.
Sotheby's has never said anything specific about its loans in its catalogs, or given any information on its guarantees except that they exist. To Sotheby's, a mere announcement in the catalog that it offers such financial services is enough to comply with the law. But its use to the buyer is nil -- and is meant to be. Disclosure might be chilling to other bidders. Or at least vulgarly explicit. Which auctioneers would rather die than be. One is not, after all, selling rusty tin Mickey Mice and kitchen chairs in a rented hall in Vermont.
"I am not happy from a legal standpoint," says Aponte. "O.K., Sotheby's says in its catalog that it offers financial services, but I'd like to see disclosure of the entire commitment. I would like to know if it is part owner of a painting, and if it has a fiduciary interest, I want to know what it is. If it lends Bond $27 million, I want that fact in the catalog."
Because the auction houses trade in volume and compete intensively for material, they can sometimes be an unwitting conduit for fakes, particularly in ill-documented but now increasingly expensive areas of art. Few forgers would be dumb enough to try to send a fake Manet, let alone a forgery of a living artist like Jasper Johns, through Sotheby's or Christie's. But where fakes abound, some will inevitably turn up at auction; and where millions of dollars abound, fakes will breed.
The growth area for forgery today is the work of the Russian avant-garde -- Rodchenko, Popova, Larionov, Lissitsky, Malevich -- which, as a result of perestroika, is coming on the market in some quantity after 60 years of Stalinist-Brezhnevian repression. Prices are zooming, and authentication is thin. Sotheby's held a Russian sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced to the auction house, but its staff disagreed and the sale went ahead.
Such events remind one that the art market in general, including the auction business, is not a profession. It is a trade, a worldwide industry whose gross turnover may be as high as $50 billion a year. Like other trades, it contains a large moral spectrum between dedicated, wholly honest people and flat-out crooks. It has never earned the right to be considered either self-policing or self-correcting. It needs regulation, but consumer affairs -- overburdened with the million complaints about small and large business violations that arise in New York, which it was created to deal with -- may not be equal to this task.
So is there a case for setting up an independent regulator -- an art- industry Securities and Exchange Commission? Not before hell freezes over, say the auction houses (although Christie's may be wavering a little on the point, since it has no guarantee and loan system to defend). Probably not, say many dealers. But others think the idea is worth serious thought, though none believe it likely to happen while Washington still clings to the conservative catchword of deregulation. Besides, says Eugene Thaw, the doyen of U.S. private dealers, Sotheby's in particular may have enough political clout in New York to defeat a further tightening of the rules.
Julian Agnew, the London dealer, believes that "outside regulators could create as many problems as they solve -- they may not know the market well enough. Ideally, self-regulation is better. But if a dominant firm stretches the unwritten norms of the past, ((self-regulation)) may not be enough."
What drives the art market, some people say, is the desire to invest. Of course, it is more than that; genuine love of art, and even a curious yearning for transcendence, fuel it as well. But does art-investment success have an upper limit? Is there a limit to demand? Economists Bruno Frey and Angel , Serna, in an excellent inquiry in the October issue of Art & Antiques, examine the case of Yo Picasso. Humana Inc. president Wendell Cherry, who bought it in 1981 for $5.83 million and sold it in 1989 for $47.85 million, got a "real net rate of return" (after commissions, insurance costs, inflation and so forth) of 19.6% a year. Handsome, but what about the new owner? If he sells it five years from now, the price must be $81 million before deductions for him merely to break even. And five years from then? Who gets left standing in this game of musical chairs?
This may be why so much of the auction action has shifted to contemporary art. It is a field that can still produce huge unsettling leaps of price that shake a market to its core, as publisher S.I. Newhouse's gesture of paying $17.7 million for Jasper Johns' False Start in New York a year ago proved. (It made sense, of a kind, for Newhouse to buy the Johns: he owns quite a few others, whose book value has accordingly multiplied.)
One of the keys to the transformation of the contemporary market is going to be the discreet dispersal of the huge collection formed, mostly after 1980, by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, whose London firm is now in difficulties. Saatchi bought in bulk, sometimes whole exhibitions at a time. He acquired, for instance, more than 20 Anselm Kiefers, whose prices are now past the $1 million mark, and at least 15 Eric Fischls, which are on or around it. Artists let him have the cream of their work because it was understood -- though never explicitly said -- that Saatchi would never sell; his collection would become a museum in its own right, supplementing the cash- strapped Tate Gallery.
Now that he is pruning his collection, the bewilderment is great. What artists fear is not so much that their prices will falter -- though that happened to Italy's Sandro Chia when Saatchi dumped him -- as that new traders can move in and, by buying blocks from Saatchi, bypass the artists' dealers and force prices up out of all proportion to those of their new work. Robert Ryman, one of whose chaste minimalist paintings made $1.8 million at auction recently (gallery prices: from $50,000 to $300,000), now thinks it "unfortunate" that he ever let Saatchi have twelve of his prime works.
Sean Scully's prices through his regular dealer David McKee have jumped from $90,000 to $140,000 in the past six months, but Scullys are trading on the secondary market as high as $350,000, and Saatchi recently unloaded a block of nine of them on the Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd, who last month spent $70 million at three London galleries (Marlborough, Waddington and Bernard Jacobson) before moving on to the New York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions," Scully says. "Now it turns out that he's only a superdealer. These guys create price levels for themselves. They put one painting in a sale and bid it up to huge levels. And the artist loses control of his work, while his relations with the dealer he has worked with so long go for nothing, absolutely nothing. We are just pawns."
The new kind of raider-dealer is exemplified by Larry ("Go-Go") Gagosian, who a few short years ago was selling posters out of a shopfront in Los Angeles but recently, with massive financing, tried (without success, according to dealing sources) to take over the estate of the senile but still living Willem de Kooning, 85.
His detractors say, perhaps unfairly, that if you put Gagosian and the rest of his ilk in a bag and shook it for a week you wouldn't get an ounce of connoisseurship. But that is not what counts. What does count is the instinct for when to grab the chicken, the hot artist, and get a lock on his or her work.
Can one guess what kind of dealing structure will emerge from this mud wrestling in the '90s? Pessimists think the world contemporary art market, just like the communications industry, could implode into six or seven megadealers, each with an international corporate base formed by gobbling up aging or lesser competitors. The middle rank of dealers will have been squeezed out by the raids on their artists and stock, and at the bottom of the heap a litter of small galleries, treated as seedbeds by those on top, will be kept to service the impression of healthy diversity.
It could be that no more new dealers of the traditional sort will actually come to power, so that the tradition that stretched from Ambroise Vollard to Leo Castelli and Paula Cooper will be lost. Big dealers will have their tame resident critics, as princes their poetasters. There will no longer be much distinction between collectors and dealers, and the collector-as-amateur will be extinct. On the boards of many museums, a new breed of broker, the collector-dealer-trus tee, will hold sway. And art will keep draining out of America toward Japan and Europe. Welcome to the future: a full-management art industry. Most of it is here already.
Nothing is more objective than the new class of European and Japanese investors. What the Japanese are doing has very little relation to collecting as it was once understood. They are, quite simply, investment-buying on a huge scale, with limitless quantities of cheap credit: one zaibatsu offers open- ended loans of any size at 7% (3.5 points below the U.S. prime rate) to Japanese who want to buy Western art.
Nor should one suppose that these are dreaming connoisseurs who have just relinquished the ink block and the brush to dabble in the art of the namban, or round-eyed barbarian. Shigeki Kameyama, representing the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo, last week bought, among other things, Picasso's The Mirror at $26.4 million. The week before, he had also purchased De Kooning's Interchange at $20.68 million and a Brice Marden drawing at $500,000 at Sotheby's. Kameyama is known to other dealers as "Oddjob," after Goldfinger's hat-flinging chauffeur.
Aska International, the Tokyo art gallery that spent $25 million at the Dorrance sale, is controlled by Aichi Corp., a Tokyo firm that last September became one of the five largest shareholders of Christie's stock, with 6.4%. Aichi, in turn, is controlled by Yasumichi Morishita, a secretive businessman who got a one-year suspended sentence in Tokyo in 1986 for securities fraud. Morishita is reputedly worth a trillion yen ($7 billion), and may be planning a takeover of Christie's -- although it is unlikely that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission would approve his bid.
Japanese buyers may be aesthetically unsophisticated -- they buy names, not pictures -- but this will inevitably change. (It did in America, after 1890, while Europe was laughing.) The Tokyo market still has a weakness for yucky little Renoirs and third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances of meaning, and has begun to function like computer-driven investment on Wall Street. Sotheby's and Christie's between them sold $204 million worth of contemporary art the week before last. Of this, American buying represented only a quarter; Europeans bought 34.9% and the Japanese a whopping 39.8%.
This indicates a radically transformed market structure. In art as in other markets at the end of Reagan's economic follies, America sinks and Japan rises. In this context it is fatuous to utter bromides about art's being the Common Property of Mankind. Americans now begin to view the outflow of their own art with bemused alarm -- just as Italians and Englishmen, at the turn of the century, watched the Titians, Sassettas and Turners, pried loose from palazzo and stately home by the teamwork of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, disappearing into American museums. "The Japanese are awash in money," says New York's leading dealer in old-master drawings, David Tunick. "And when something really good goes to Japan, you feel it has vanished into an abyss."
Of course, this would have been exactly the feeling of a cultivated Japanese in 1885, watching his cultural patrimony being politely stripped by American collectors, led by Ernest Fenollosa and the "Boston bonzes." The emerging lesson of the late '80s, which is unlikely to change in the '90s, is that America no longer controls the art market to any significant degree. Mostly, it sells. Its buying power is fading fast.
Some museums, however, have continued to make remarkable purchases. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, under the direction of Edmund Pillsbury, is a leader here (as New Yorkers can currently see from a loan show of its holdings at the Frick Collection). At least one museum, the Getty in Malibu, Calif., with its $3.5 billion endowment and almost limitless spending power, seems unaffected by the rise in price. In May it was able to buy Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier at Christie's for $35 million and last week Manet's acridly ironic view of a flag-bedecked Paris street with a war cripple hobbling along it for $26.4 million.
One recourse for some museums is to raise funds by selling work from their permanent collections, as MOMA recently did. In order to purchase an indubitable masterpiece, Van Gogh's Portrait of the Postmaster Roulin, for an undisclosed price, the museum sold and exchanged seven paintings. But this encourages museum trustees to think of the permanent collection as an impermanent one, a kind of stock portfolio that can be traded at will: not a good omen.
Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, confesses that he (like most of his colleagues) is haunted by the image of the big collector looking at his Van Gogh over the fireplace, the picture that, like thousands of others in America, was promised to a museum -- as Irises had been. "At one time," muses Varnedoe, "he might have looked at it and said, 'Well, there's the Porsche I didn't buy.' Now he says to himself, 'That's my children's education for three generations, a villa in Monte Carlo, a duplex on Fifth Avenue and a fleet of Rolls-Royces -- all sitting over my fireplace.' Then the temptation to respond to a dealer who offers $50 million for it is insurmountable. That's the real danger: the pressure on our trustees and close friends. We will get squeezed out of the package."
Tom Armstrong, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, has a further worry: the growth of private, or vanity, museums. Some American collectors of contemporary art, he points out, think of themselves as institutions, and this would make them reluctant to donate art to a museum even if the tax laws had not been changed. They do not crave the imprint of the established museum. They want the Jerome and Mandy Rumpelstiltskin Foundation for Contemporary Art.
But the ultimate loss to art's hyperinflation may be wider and less tangible than this. Quite rightly, MOMA's Varnedoe rejects the idea that "there was some mythical period, now lost, when art was seen only as the shining purity of aesthetic experience. As long as there has been art to sell, art has been something to buy." But he, like many others, is worried by "the crazy sense of disproportion in the world that puts an extra glow on the art object."
For Chicago's James Wood the damage comes down to a confusion between aesthetic and material value. "When a work of art passes through our doors, it should leave the world of economics," says Wood. "Walking through a great museum is not going to give you a profile that reflects the auction market. You have to educate people to grasp that the money paid for a work of art is utterly secondary to its lasting value, its ability to make them respond to it."
The problem is that although art has always been a commodity, it loses its inherent value when it is treated only as such. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of contemplating it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning and visual experience under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one's sense of literature -- the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.
With reporting by Mary Cronin and Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New York