Charlie wastes no time and parses few words. When he's on the field and in the game it's like watching Wayne Rooney thug a goal - I love it. In this article he describes how we are all experiencing a contact high from the torrents of smokey cash that fills the art world air. Charlie, who's been there - done that, adds his own worldwise perspective to this conversation. "Damien Hirst summed it up succinctly in a recent Artnet Magazine interview with Joe La Placa, "Art is the most fabulous currency." From the celebrated Hirst to the failed painter in the garret, money constantly whispers in the ear of the artist. We all have known artists who squirrel away unwanted works, only to finally get a show. Then these artists wildly overprice their canvases so that nothing will sell." I've got a few friends that fell for this overpricing thing - and regretted it after - when they realized that they had been counting money that didn't even exist yet. A lot of the galleries foster this sort of avarice as well making big claims about who they are in with and what they can do. In this abstract world people begin to believe their own delusions. But that's the vicious thing about money and abstraction isn't it? It isn't real until it is - which is a very strange thing to say about an abstraction and right on the money about - well - money.

In today's art world money is really unreal. Yet most everyone continues to believe in its power, hoping that their belief makes everything it touches real - the lavish lifestyles, the breathless press coverage and the overwrought value of the works being bought. But like all blind beliefs they eventually burn away under the glare of the empirical visual world. All it takes is one black swan in a world of white ones to destroy an idea, a belief, a political regime, power, glory and the meaning of money & life. In the Showtime series The Tudors (one of my current favorites) Woolsey's power and life are done in by a "snip of a girl" who creates an abstraction of love, lust and fecundity for a desperately DNA challenged king who falls for the illusion hook, line & sinker. Suddenly one abstraction is replaced with another and everything changes as heads roll. Charlie imparts a bit more wisdom to us "Huge amounts hedged on art made last week are the symptom of a new art-world dynamic, the living buyers grasping at totems of life from living artists." It is the collectors' urge to find an abstration of life in the midst of their abstraction of money which burns holes in their hedge fund pockets. Art is the Ann Boleyn of this desperate fund driven world promising love, lust and fecundity, but always failing to deliver on the big promises of the abstraction - continuity of the DNA. Ann lost her head when she failed to deliver, what will become of these POMO pretties when the visual world wakes up.