Price Inflation.

"Millennium fever" gripped the art market in the 1990s. The London-based Daily Telegraph Art 100 Index, which traces prices of works by the one hundred top artists in the world, reported a price rise of 26 percent from January through November 1998, double the increase for 1997. "The market is extremely strong," said New York dealer David Nash. "There's a lot of money around, most of it in the hands of Americans and Europeans." Like stock in Internet companies, art works sold for higher and higher prices throughout the 1990s but — as was also the case with internet stocks — prices did not always equate with value. In the early 1990s prices paid for modern masterpieces were already setting records. Constantin Brancusi's 1919 Golden Bird sold for $12 million; Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet was bought for $82.5 million; and Pierre Renoir's Au Moulin de...