A conceptual artwork titled “Comedian” sold at auction last November for just over $6 million. The piece consisted of a banana duct-taped to the wall, along with installation instructions and a certificate of authenticity. The buyer was Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency Tron. The artist, Maurizio Cattelan, said he meant it as a satiric commentary on market speculation, describing the auction as the “apex” of the project.
The sale came amid speculation that the contemporary-art market has peaked. “Is the art market coming to the end of the age of eternal growth?” asked The Art Newspaper in April, pointing to sagging sales at global art auctions, including for modern and contemporary art, and tariff turmoil. Global art sales have fallen for the past two years, dropping by 12 percent in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2025. But the sale of a 1997 painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas defied the trend, fetching $13.6 million at auction in May, the record for a work by a living female artist.
If you find art prices difficult to comprehend, you’re not alone, and the experts seem equally confused. As the art world headed to its giant art fair in Basel, Switzerland, in June, the editor-in-chief of Artnet News openly wondered if art prices had become divorced from reality. “This isn’t just a matter of price correction,” she wrote:
It’s a rupture in the logic that once upheld prices as proxies for prestige and demand. Now, $30,000 gets you a resume-light emerging artist, $300,000 a midcareer work no one can flip, and $30 million a lackluster late Picasso. The signals are scrambled. Speculators have vanished. Even seasoned buyers are pausing. The art market has lost its grip on price-setting—and dealers must recalibrate.
For her 2024 book Get the Picture, journalist Bianca Bosker worked as a gallerist, studio assistant, and museum security guard in a bid to understand the landscape. “I took some comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the only person I knew who could rub two brain cells together and yet was baffled by contemporary art,” she writes.
Chicago Booth’s Canice Prendergast has also been studying this strange world, from an economist’s point of view, and has outlined his findings in two papers. Contemporary art is often pitched as an investment, a way to diversify a portfolio with assets that happen to be fun to look at. But it doesn’t work like a conventional market, he explains. A lack of transparency and unusual pricing dynamics complicate collecting—and can ultimately produce a situation where a billionaire will pay more than $6 million for a piece of fruit.
Puzzling prices
In 2004, Prendergast walked into a contemporary-art gallery in Chicago, hoping to find pieces for his new home. His gaze moved from paintings to ready-made sculptures, price tags nowhere to be found. When he asked the gallerist how much several works cost, he couldn’t discern whether they were expensive or a steal.
“I had absolutely no idea where that price came from,” he says. “I was spectacularly clueless about what art was, but more embarrassingly, about how the market for art worked. I’m an economist—I’m supposed to know that.”
Prendergast called his sister, an artist, who helped him pick a piece by Welsh painter Merlin James and an image of a drive-in theater by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. He continued to expand his knowledge of the field, eventually amassing more than 30 pieces, joining the board of two University of Chicago museums—the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society—and overseeing Booth’s art collection. (See “Making sure art can be seen,” below.) He is also a faculty codirector of Booth’s Arts and Creative Enterprise Program. “I realized I really like art for the same reason I like my day job: It’s about novel ways to express ideas.”
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