There was a recent scandal in the wine market. An enterprising fraudster poured $100/bottle wine into $1000/bottle bottles. The One Percenters buying up this wildly expensive stuff surely couldn't tell the difference between a great wine and a rarefied one. Indeed, the One Percenters were often too drunk to tell the difference between a great wine and plonk.

Consider Duchamp's urinal Fountain. It has been reproduced by artisans because the original, bought by Duchamp in a plumbing store, was lost soon after it was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. Of course, the urinal was a practical joke, an attack on censorship. And the elevation of it to a rare commodity is itself a comment of the perversity of art collecting.

New art is corrupted by marketing theories. Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skull is of course worth a lot of money: It's encrusted by diamonds. But what's its added value? Hirst lost much of his reputation by overproduction. Scarcity is a sacred factor in marketing.