Daniel Grant

What does an artist do with work that isn’t quite up to his or her standards? Throw it out? Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg both tried that, putting artworks they didn’t like out with the trash, only to find them on sale in galleries a few years later. Some artists preemptively destroy works they don’t like. 'There's enough bad art in the world,' Indiana painter Charles Mundy said. 'I want to spare the public bad art, especially if it's mine.' The solution for most artists is just to keep their misfires in storage, which only postpones a decision.

Every year, tens of thousands of visitors flock to the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, in order to see where he lived and wrote. Many famous writers’ homes are preserved for visitors, some of whom are devoted readers (and some who know they are supposed to read his or her books). Twain, we can imagine, sat in that chair while writing Huckleberry Finn. However, only a small portion of the objects one sees were actually there when the writer lived in the house. Most of the original pieces were either sold off or dispersed to family members. The cost of building this 1874 house and furnishing it, in fact, was too much for Twain, and he and his family needed to sell most of it and move abroad in 1891.

Tapestries once had a place of honour in fine art, but that was during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Oil paintings, for a time, were viewed as the poor man’s tapestry. Now, that equation may be turning round. ‘Tapestries serve a lot of purposes,’ said Donald Farnsworth, president of Magnolia Editions, which has produced tapestries for artists such as Chuck Close, April Gornik, Alex Katz, Ed Moses, Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, William Wiley and others. ‘They absorb sound and add warmth to a room.’ But can they also be taken seriously as works of art? They are certainly priced like them.

When collectors want to purchase an expensive work of art, they contact their lawyers to write up a contract with the dealer, spelling out pages of contingencies and indemnity clauses. ‘We have a steady stream of business writing agreements for collectors and galleries,’ said Jo Backer Laird, a Manhattan arts lawyer and a former general counsel at Christie’s. ‘We didn’t see much of this just ten years ago.

Homes may continue to lose value, the euro becomes shakier by the day, the unemployed stay unemployed and even the Chinese economy shows signs of overheating, but the international art market seems to know only one direction: up. For the first half of 2011, Christie’s sold $3.2 billion in fine and decorative art (an improvement of 25 per cent on 2010), while its rival Sotheby’s auctioned items worth $3.4 billion (up 38 per cent on the previous year). The bubble appears to be far from bursting, and the autumn sales promise to provide plenty of entertainment for those who like to see big prices on both sides of the Atlantic.