My favourite Catalan expression, used when talking about something so overpriced that no-one can afford it, or so pretentious that no-one can understand it, is "una gran tocada dels collons", which freely translated means "a great tickling of the balls". The present downturn in contemporary art prices exposes how some fancy people's balls have been tickled. To borrow the words of Meredith Whitney who (according to Michael Lewis, here) caused the market in financial stocks to crash. "If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale."
It may be premature for artists with something to sell apart from their signatures to cheer, but you are allowed to grin.
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