The Art Market

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Art has always been bought and sold, and artists have often made the trade itself their subject. Antoine Watteau's Gersaint's Shopsign (1720–21), painted for a Paris dealer, shows elegant customers inspecting pictures while assistants pack a portrait of the late Louis XIV into a crate. In 1919 Marcel Duchamp settled his dentist's bill with the Tzanck Check, a large hand-drawn cheque on an imaginary bank.

Later artists probed value more pointedly. Between 1959 and 1962 Yves Klein exchanged his invisible Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility for gold leaf, throwing half of it into the Seine while the buyer burned the receipt. Hans Haacke's Manet-PROJEKT '74 (1974) traced each owner of a Manet still life, including a powerful banker, and was rejected by the exhibition it was made for. Andy Warhol painted outsized dollar signs in 1981, and William Powhida draws satirical charts mapping the alliances of collectors, dealers and critics.