Pop goes the art bubble

WHAT sound does a bubble make just before it bursts?

We heard it recently at the Art Basel fair in Miami, where the rich flock to stock up on art each December. A Richard Prince “nurse”, hung amid Picassos and Miros, selling for $6.5m (€4.9m); a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet priced at $4m; Julie Mehretu squiggles, barely a decade old, for $2.6m — all for sale at Art Basel, and all with prices so high they are bound to crash-land.

But there were surer, subtler signs of the bubble than those: Paintings by Raymond Parker were nowhere in sight; carvings by Mary Frank were not for sale anywhere; bronzes by David Slivka unrepresented in any dealer’s booth.