"When elephants wrestle, the ants take a beating." That's from the book I'm reading about the business of art, in which the elephants are Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses. The book's interesting, this entire world has been invisible to me up to now. Two things I've learned--I don't have to worry about any kind of sales pressure at galleries, they'll size me up at a glance and dismiss me. Secondly, in the parlance, I'm a VOP--very ordinary person. That being said, I think this ordinary person might just attend an auction this week of Latin American art at Christie's at Rockefeller Center, see if I can relate what I've learned in this book to real life.

Two ways of looking at winning an auction: one, you, the hunter, brought down the big game and get to pose with it while losers look on in envy. Or, you know for a fact you paid more for something than anyone else in the room thought it was worth.

After a lifetime of not caring for it at all, I'm suddenly falafel-mad!