ABSTRACT
Scholars of art enjoy claiming that markets for fine art are irrational; so for example Robert Hughes, art critic for Time, once declared that “The price of a work of art is an index of pure, irrational desire.”1 These scholars take a dim view of analysis of market outcomes; thus Robert Rosenblum, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum, told the Wall Street Journal, “I immediately distrust anybody trying to detect patterns … in art, especially in terms of economics.”2 Even worse, in these scholars’ view, examining art markets is not only misguided, it is actually counterproductive, for it distracts us from issues of real importance; recently Michael Rooks, a curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, explained that “There’s a real sense that when you start quantifying artistic output in dollars and cents, those things are tangents to what we really should be talking about.”3
