Money, Money.

The wealth and prosperity enjoyed by upper- and middle-class Americans during much of the 1980s brought about tremendous growth in the art market, particularly in New York City, as Americans rushed to invest in art. Between 1983 and 1985 more than one hundred galleries opened in New York, seventy-eight of them in the East Village. Gallery sales in 1984 alone exceeded $1 billion. That year 50 percent of all auction transactions were under $1,000; only four years later the average price paid for a work of art had risen to between $7,000 and $11,000. Top auction prices for single works, paid mostly by dealers, hovered at about $3 million early in the decade. By the end of the 1980s individual works were selling to private bidders for ten to twenty times that amount. Sales at each of the two biggest New York auction houses, Sotheby's and Christie's, surpassed $1 billion in...