The news that, in a week of contemporary-art auctions that saw more than a billion dollars’ worth of art sold, the record for the price of a single work sold at auction had once again been broken—this time, with a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars spent on a so-so Picasso, from his just-O.K. later period—couldn’t help sending some observers, with what is technically called hollow laughter, back to 1980 and the conclusion of Robert Hughes’s great synoptic history of modern art, “The Shock of the New.” There Hughes wondered at how a “spiralling market” had made for “a brutalized culture of unfulfillable desire,” producing auction prices that had seen “a mediocre Picasso from 1923” sell for three million dollars. Yesterday’s outrage becomes yesterday’s bargain, as the price spiral extends, upward and outward, with no end in sight.
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