ABSTRACT
Art as a concept is relatively new. The phenomenon of art collecting occurs when wealthy, powerful individuals begin to want to own objects based on an understanding of who made them. Like other art centers on the European periphery New York witnessed its own secession, when a number of artists decided to compete with the dominant National Academy of Design and hold an extraordinary exhibition involving vast amounts of European modernist art. No single event did more to set in place the modernist art market than an event in Paris in 1863 called the Salon des Refuses. In the Nineteenth Century, Paris had grown in to the leading center of an increasingly global Art World. Outrage among the rejected artists, the Refuses, was widespread, and so the Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte offered the artists an alternate space where they could show their works, and let the public decide.
