Sold! The Art Market: Goes Crazy

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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.