
Hughes on the changing face of the international art market:
The problem is that although art has always been a commodity, it loses its inherent value when it is treated only as such. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of contemplating it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning and visual experience under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one’s sense of literature — the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.
MORE: View a complete index of Robert Hughes’ writings for TIME