‘Buying art gives get a psychic reward.’

Sociologist Mitch Abolafia, who has studied Wall Street financiers’ methods, states sometimes money speaks for itself. As a trader told her, with glee in his eyes, ‘Well, you can’t see it, but there’s money everywhere in this room.’ It was probably a generalized excitement about money that she could also feel.

And that’s exactly the excitement we all draw from expensive art. One ardent collector, who believes that art should be purchased for art’s sake, acknowledges happily basking in the ‘glow of prosperity’ his purchases exude once their value has gone up. “We don’t really consider art an investment.

In fact, we get a psychic reward,” reveals Eli Broad, a renowned collector based in Los Angeles. (He bought some early Cindy Sherman photos for a modest $150,000 at the Basel.) In a way, aesthetics forms the solid bedrock the art market. But, for lack of any other reliable yardstick, they tend to get tallied in dollars. A major dealer in New York once told Velthuis, the respected Dutch sociologist, art collectors ‘permanently have to explain to themselves as why they spend so much money on it, sometimes up to 40 percent of their net worth.’

When you’re looking for great art, you may spot it simply by its price tag. Of course, top collectors aren’t simply shoppers like anyone else. If they spend right, they can buy the status of cultural patron. No one looks up to you for buying a fleet of Bentleys, but do possess a flock of Richard Serras, and you well become a supporter of culture, Blake Gopnik concludes in a recent essay published in The Newsweek magazine courtesy The Daily Beast.

In effect, it can be argued that most collectors spend their surplus millions on art because they have a genuine belief in its aesthetic value. And the easiest way to gauge the aesthetic ‘sense’ of an art purchase is to check out the ‘cents’ the thing is selling for.