Los Angeles–based artist Karl Haendel attached a similar counter to a piece of his featured in “Price,” but his goes in the opposite direction. Two years ago, around the time Haendel, 32, completed the work in the show—a large realistic graphite drawing of a Cadillac SUV—he began to notice that many of his peers were pulling in sums in the mid six figures, while his own output remained modestly valued. As a conceptual gambit, he decided to tag his drawing at precisely the price of the truck itself, as listed in the Kelley Blue Book, and then let the two depreciate in tandem. The SUV’s value when new was $56,055, which became the work’s title. At first, the high initial price kept collectors from biting. But after Haendel’s show last year at LaMoca, the slowly declining figure no longer looked quite so outlandish. In the end, his dealer, L.A.’s Anna Helwing, sold the drawing to Alberto Mugrabi for $50,000.

Other artists have taken swipes at the secondary market by co-opting the auction process. In his 2002 conceptual piece Invite Yourself, Christoph Buchel went on eBay to auction off his participation in that year’s edition of the Frankfurt festival Manifesta. The winning bidder, at $15,000, was New York–based artist Sal Randolph, who used the opportunity to create Free Manifesta, a space where any artist could exhibit work—a kind of show within a show.

But the brashest such artwork must be that of German conceptual artist Andreas Slominski, who, at a Sotheby’s benefit sale in Hamburg in November 2004, had the evening’s auctioneer, Philipp, Duke of Wurttemberg, put on the block as the final lot the very gavel he had used to conduct the sale. Although the sterling-silver hammer eventually brought €4,400 from the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (where it is currently displayed under a large glass bell jar), for Slominski, his true contribution to the benefit auction was not monetary but metonymic: the highly Duchampian gesture of deeming the sale itself to have been an artwork. He had previously pulled the same stunt in London, where the lot came midway through the sale, forcing the resourceful auctioneer to hammer down the remaining items with one of her shoes.

Art-fair art has become another subgenre. As ArtForum’s Jack Bankowsky wrote a few years ago, artists, under pressure to produce enough new work for all the fairs, have begun to use these venues as sites for special projects. One example was a video that Ryan Gander made for Amsterdam dealer Annet Gelink’s Art Statements booth at Basel in 2005: While a screen shows a car in a snowy field, a didactic child’s voice-over gives an encyclopedia-entry explanation of what an art fair is.

According to Serpentine Gallery curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, some of the most incisive work about the market is being made in new market centers, especially China. “Twenty years ago it was only the West that had art markets, and now we see the extraordinary strength and power of China, India, the Middle East, Russia and Latin America,” says Obrist. “What is happening in these new markets in the past three years is so brutally extreme, and so fast, that artists have begun to reflect on it. In China, particularly, there is a strong consideration of how the art world and the art market function.”

Obrist points to young Beijing-based Liu Ding’s Products, which was shown at the Second Guangzhou Triennial, in 2005. Rather than display his own mainly abstract sculptures and installations, the artist paid a daily wage to a group of traditional Chinese painters to create generic-looking landscapes in assembly-line fashion, recreating the environment in which these artists produce such works for export and reducing art to a mundane commodity.

The Christie’s and Sotheby’s logos—potent signifiers of market muscle—turn up in paintings from Wang Guangyi’s well-known “Great Criticism” series, which integrates brand names (Rolex, Louis Vuitton) with Communist propaganda imagery. And an image of Sotheby’s New York headquarters looms in a painting by Yan Lei, with satisfied customers walking, doglike, on all fours away from the gleaming York Avenue building, Burberry bags gripped between their teeth. As for Zheng Guogu’s “Basel” series, dealer Li says the artist chose to paint the buzzy scene at the fair because it serves as a kind of metaphor for the fierce economic, cultural and political competition among Europe, America and, now, Asia.