The relationship of art to corresponding monetary values seems to have been a vexed question perhaps not forever, but surely since early-Victorian times. The sense that art is “pure” and should remain unsullied by grubby considerations had been elevated to the status of dogma and is reflected in works as disparate as the visionary landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romanticism, almost by definition, eschewed practical, value-based judgments that might cast shadows on its endeavor for spiritual purity. So firmly was this conviction rooted in nineteenth-century ethics and aesthetics that it has prevailed to this day, its survival immeasurably aided by Marxist and neo-Marxist politics. (“Art belongs to no man but to every man,” so goes the well-worn mantra). Today, paradoxically, one never hears such dated cant repeated in Russia, Eastern Europe, or China: post-Marxist countries whose nabobs seem to be driving the art market ever higher.

It is a generally accepted truism that the value of a work of art transcends the costs of its materials. This is equally true of money, whose value derives from the social consensus that makes money acceptable for use in exchange. Any commodity can be called into use. Primitive money ranged from rat traps (in the Congo) to woodpecker scalps—not forgetting the famous stone money of the Pacific island of Yap, each “coin” so large it couldn’t be moved. Even in ancient Greece, the exchange value of the first coins did not exactly match their