The Supermodel and the Brillo Box

Don Thompson is an economist who writes about the contemporary art market, and this follows his earlier book The Twelve Million Dollar Stuffed Shark. It examines how prices are formed in a market with no intrinsic value anchor.

His analysis identifies the mechanisms. Branding: the identity of the artist, the dealer, the auction house and the previous owner all carry price information independent of the object, and Thompson traces how each is constructed. Scarcity engineering: dealers ration access to artists' work, maintain waiting lists and select buyers, which converts purchase into a privilege. Auction house practice: guarantees, in which the house or a third party commits to a minimum price, irrevocable bids, and the strategic placement of lots within a sale. Chandelier bidding, in which the auctioneer calls bids that do not exist, up to the reserve. And the freeport storage system in which works are held untaxed and never displayed.

Thompson covers specific sales and specific price movements, including the Brillo Box and the Damien Hirst auction that bypassed his dealers. His broader argument is that contemporary art functions as a positional and financial asset whose price depends on the confidence of a small number of participants, and that the market's opacity is deliberate and defended. He writes as an amused outsider with good access. The book is anecdotal rather than quantitative, and readers wanting return data should go to the academic art market literature.