If Broach’s radical impatience was unique, he wasn’t alone in being genuinely horrified at a perceived wasted opportunity (“That money could have rebuilt a whole African village,” was a typical comment). But this sentiment also reflects the fact that for a number of working artists what happens in the auction houses and what happens in their studios exist in two different realities. For them, the art market is a forced pairing between two quite separate components: the art and the market. Judith Solomon, a maker of painterly abstractions, put it like this: “People buy art for two different reasons—one is for investment and the other is on the basis of a strictly visceral experience.”

If these artists don’t benefit from the burgeoning art market, they also aren’t remotely concerned about the market bubble bursting. “Whatever the market is doing—going up, down, or around—people are always going to buy art,” is Solomon’s simple analysis. And it seems to sum up the view from Queens.