The price of a work of art is an index of pure, irrational desire; and nothing is more manipulable than desire. It is no accident that the immense fetishism which sustains the art market should have reached its peak—a delirium whose only historical parallel was the Dutch tulip mania of the seventeenth century—at the moment when the old purposes of art, the manifestation of myth and the articulation of social meaning, have largely been taken away from painting and sculpture by film, TV, and photography. Only when an object is useless can capitalism see it as priceless.
- Robert Hughes, “Blue Chip Sublime,” (1978)
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