My lifelong friend, the writer Barnaby Conrad III, author of Absinthe and Ghosthunting in Montana, commissioned his friend Ed Ruscha, in 1989, to paint a buffalo. The 5 x 4 foot painting was done in Ruscha's then-new shadow style, a controversial change for Ruscha at the time (but now iconic), and cost Barnaby $60,000.

For years, as Barnaby traveled the world chronicling the good life as it used to be defined (cigars, martinis), the Ruscha painting served as a talisman for the writer, the anchor of his taste and connections. When they "make it," creative types often buy that one great work of art to validate themselves: the painter Peter Halley purchased a Warhol Electric Chair, for example, and Louisa Chase, a big painting star of the 1980s, had a giant Guston above her bed in Noho. Larry Rivers used to play sax in his 14th Street studio in front of a Barnett Newman.

Barnaby got hitched a few years back and the Ruscha Buffalo took pride of place above the fireplace in the San Francisco home he shares with his bride. She is a dealer and an avid collector who often wondered how many colorful pieces might fit in the space dominated by the gloomy and brooding Ruscha. Then contemporary prices shot up and dollar signs swished like a flip book through Barnaby's mind. Perhaps that Ruscha could be the down payment on some far-off lodge or bungalow.

A year ago he shipped it to Martin Muller at San Francisco's Modernism gallery to be photographed. Much to the relief of Mrs. Conrad, the Ruscha has yet to return and her fireplace is studded with the new fruits of Chinese contemporary. The Ruscha appeared in a full-page ad in the December 2007 Art and Auction magazine.

"I want a million dollars for it," Barnaby told me, "or I'll just keep it." Modernism is shopping it for $1.2 million. Now let us do the math: 20 years of pleasure from a piece by a friend who is a contemporary star plus the pleasure its absence gives your wife and the promise of a bucolic hideaway for an aging scribe. All you need is an avaricious buyer to write that big check. Multiply that equation tens of thousand times and you have the contemporary art world of 2008. The Buffalo awaits!

CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).