I read Don Thompson’s “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art” last year. It was published in 2008 (interestingly the day before Lehman went bankrupt) so it felt like I was missing out on some interesting context from the intervening years between publication and my reading. Overall I think it was a decent, if shallow, overview of the market and I learned a lot about one way the rich spend their time and money.

I’d love to see a “tell all” type of story from an insider at an auction house etc but I suspect the gains to be had from publishing are much less attractive than selling art, especially at these astronomical prices.

The connection between money laundering and art sales is hard to discount. https://www.natlawreview.com/article/art-and-money-launderin...

Huh, Fancis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud is the most expensive on the list at $89 million. I can't comprehend these dollar numbers, but it's a stunning painting.

There is a good doco about Bacon's life on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgrO5za0lSY

2021: Beeple sells the NFT for a composite JPG for $69 million dollars. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/03/11/beeple-ar...