Art and Finance, do they go hand in hand?

As I settle down all too comfortably to read The Twelve Million Dollar Stuffed Shark, The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, it quickly becomes apparent that the answer is a resounding Yes! This is a book for all Art World skeptics and artists of the outer salon, le Salon Des Refusés, which, though it originally took place in 1863 (and can be read about in Wikipedia, naturally, if you want to know more) is alive and well in 2009.

Did you you know for example that if you are painting in an outer suburb, a small town, a village, you are essentially off the map! It is time you moved to NEW YORK, or LONDON, or ...BEIJING. You can do that or change your name to Jeff Koons or Damien Hurst. This is called rebranding. Hopefully I spelt both their names wrong. You might run into copyright issues if you call yourself by exactly the same names, but then again this could be construed as a creative act and it would fit nicely into the whole debate of collage, and sampling, and recontextualizing, almost like taking a kitschy toy and having it built (by Italian artisans) on a grand scale. THEN what you do is open an auction house and call it Sothebie's or Cristy’s. Use my spelling because who can afford the boringly inevitable lawsuits that would ensue if you were to be so foolish as to call yourselves say: Sotheby's or Christie's. Anyway the point being once you have become a brand you can do ANYthing and call it ART! Its GREAT! That’s what I do! Trouble is nobody appears to be aware of my brand! I have not been successful in selling my brand to the broader public. That is a battle for another day. I am planning my method of attack, because it is a vicious game. Perhaps I’ll break a painting on the walls of the Academy in some public act of defiance/stupidity and by so making it public gain...notoriety, or, at the very least, a little publicity.

Read any book on Contemporary Art these days and a vast percentage of the wordage is taken up with issues of branding, selling, finding the right buyers, snubbing the right people, withholding the right number of artworks so as to not saturate the market or, conversely, saturating the market and making that very act ones brand. So it goes. Very little seems to concern itself with issues of quality, or intelligence, depth, ...spirituality, or ... philosophy, ...humanity, ...feeling, ...meaning...(snooze)
What? What? Oh, so sorry. Where was I? Oh, yes. It is hard isn’t it—you know—deciding which Art is good? So much easier to be told by your financial consultant the best Art to buy. Don’t trust your instincts. They are outmoded, outgunned, and definitely unable to come up with the kind of funds that buy influence in the Contemporary Art Market. Trust you financial advisor instead.