All the modernists need to do is see to it that major works by Pollock and Rothko and DeKooning sell for $10,000,000 every few years, and it perpetuates the illusion that the market is strong for such works and that they, or ones like them for less money, just may be good investments.
It will take an increasingly cacophony of ridicule to solve this problem. When people are ashamed to have such works displayed in their homes or on the walls of their museums, then the bottom will start to fall away.... must be how that happened to the academic artists when their market evaporated early in the 20th century.
The dirty little secret about most modernist works today is that nobody has really made any money on them since the late 1980's when they peaked out. Meanwhile the prices for 19th century academic have grown 5,000 to 10,000% since the late 70's and 300% in the past 7 to 10 years.
Fred
