Art dealers and galleries in New York operated under their own restrictive code, and they wouldn’t deal with just anyone, no matter how much money he or she had. You couldn’t simply walk into a gallery and write a check for a Monet to hang on your penthouse wall. The gatekeepers of the art world understood that the exclusivity of their product depended on not allowing rich hedge fund managers from Greenwich to buy whatever they wanted. It was a form of discrimination, in a sense, but it was also simple market economics: In order to generate demand, you needed to control the supply. In
...more
