Has the bubble burst?

I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few years ago. Then it was confirmed. Cynicism seemed to ooze out of every millimetre of his vast, shiny sculpture. It was vividly apparent that this artwork wasn’t about beauty or transcendence or emotion. It was about money.

Don Thompson’s The Orange Balloon Dog (the title is taken from the name of a Koons piece) is ostensibly about the contemporary art market. He details recent auctions, using the autumn 2014 sales — where buyers spent $1.7 billion in two days at Sotheby’s and Christie’s — as his starting point. But, as the subtitle would suggest, this is really a book about money: who has it, where they spend it, how they hide it. The same names crop up again and again: the artists Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst; the dealers Larry Gagosian, who ‘accounts for about 2 per cent of the world contemporary art market’, David Zwirner and Iwan Wirth; and the collectors Peter Brant, Eli Broad and Steven Cohen.