«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

In his new book, Art of the Deal, Noah Horowitz, an art historian and professor at the Sotheby’s Art Institute, argues that it’s all happened in the last fifty years -- and that the art market has become a complex, globalized, money-making machine for the well-connected. The story, as Horowitz tells it, starts in the 1950s, when museums, flush with post-war prosperity, began to grow in size and power. Museums bought up all the old art, pushing up prices -- and pushing collectors towards the contemporary art market, where prices soon began to rise, too. At the same time, the global economy became more integrated, and businesspeople got better at putting together complex, international deals of all kinds. That expertise inevitably spread into the art world.

-Boston Globe
March 8 2011