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\n\tWhen the play was first performed, in Paris in 1994, the art market was in a similar place: in the hangover from the go-go 1980s, with a headache brought on by the confusion of aesthetics with market value. The \u201980s saw numerous headlines about unprecedentedly pricey paintings splashed across the front pages of newspapers: Ryoei Saito paying $82.5 million for Van Gogh\u2019s Dr. Gachet! Pace\u2019s Arne Glimcher selling a painting by Jasper Johns (a living artist!) to the Whitney for a million. Those headlines were attended by hand-wringing that aesthetics was indeed being confused with market value.<\/p>\n
\n\tThings have only ramped up in the intervening decades. We\u2019ve seen the boom of the early 2000s, the even bigger boom from 2011 to 2023 with a painting attributed to Leonardo going for $450 million, and the rise of speculation on wet-paint artists. No one\u2019s worries back in the \u201980s and \u201990s were anywhere near as intense as, to take a random example from the litany of such complaints we hear these days, critic Jason Farago\u2019s in the New York Times in 2022. Under the headline \u201cCatch a Rising Star at the Auction House<\/a>,\u201d Farago wrote that watching young artists\u2019 works go for millions at the marquee spring evening sales \u201cwas \u2026 like anaphylactic shock. Even after years of being inured to artistic price tags as arbitrary as Social Security numbers (one tries, as a critic forming a judgment, to pay them no mind), I watched the total, and possibly permanent, supersedure of the old establishment by speculative hype as if I were no longer alive at all.\u201d<\/p>\n