ART CLASS
by Ben Davis



In recent years, the ubiquity of the market has become an ubiquitous theme. In May, ARTnews magazine, not exactly a bellwether, featured the cover story, "Are You Looking at Prices or Art?" In these pages, Charlie Finch, Donald Kuspit and Jerry Saltz have all taken time out to address the issue, in their own distinctive ways -- and with the recent market turmoil, it’s even more important to understand the effects that money has had on art of late. Saltz, for his part, says that in order to grasp the effect of the market on art we need a new theory of how the art market works, something that "isn’t just a rehash of Marxist ideology."

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