Speaking of art and money—and aren’t we always these days?—I recently came across the 1977 RAND Corporation study, “The Monetary Appreciation of Paintings,” that Don Thompson briefly refers to in his book. The study’s author, John Picard Stein, is a very smart fellow (bachelor’s degree from Harvard, master’s from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago) who applied a lot of exotic mathematical formulas to the business of art investment. The data available for his study were limited, he notes, because, among other factors, “most of the very high quality works suitable for museum collection [are being] sold privately through negotiation rather than at auction.” Stein found that in Britain between the late 1940s and the late ’60s, paintings in excess of a certain moderate price appreciated by about 10.5 percent per annum. Con-currently, the British stock market went up 14.3 percent a year. His implied conclusion: You would have made less money sinking your fortune into art than you would have risking it at the bourse.

But the real zinger buried in the study is that the gap between paintings and the stock market included a “nonpecuniary” return of 1.6 percent for the enjoyment of looking at pictures while they appreciated. In other words, this economist actually quantified the pleasure principal, if you will. It’s hard to know exactly how he arrived at that figure—his study is as abstruse as it gets—but an Australian consulting firm called Caslon Analytics comments on its Web site: “[Stein’s article] in the Journal of Political Economy offered an even bleaker view for economic rationalists, arguing that on average, fine art provides a net return for durable services (less insurance and maintenance costs, adjusted for tax and liquidity considerations) of 1.6 percent.” All of which seems to mean that there’s really no way to fit the irrational pleasure of looking at art into a rational system of monetary appreciation except to pull some figure like 1.6 percent out of a hat and call it “durable services.”

The study and its ramifications took on a different light after a little thank-you dinner I recently attended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, hosted by the museum’s president, Emily Rafferty. The guests were people involved with the museum: trustees, “new audiences” leaders, curators, friends and—ahem!—an art critic. In the middle of dessert in the terrace dining room—whose big, slanted windows opened to the evening sky—Rafferty announced a surprise treat: We could all wander “alone” through the Met for the rest of the evening.

At the suggestion of curator Gary Tinterow, I went first to see Jean Dupas’s giant Art Deco gold and black mural, reverse-painted under glass, from the SS Normandie, once the largest and fastest ship in the world. (Her lavish furnishings were removed to storage when, while being converted to a troop ship, she caught fire and sank in New York Harbor in 1942.) The symbolic classical figures posing amid a crowd of churning vessels are stunning, in a semicamp sort of way, but not quite me cuppa. So I hurried off to the early Flemish paintings—if I’ve got full run of the ages, they’re my favorite—and finally to the wonderfully reinstalled 19th-century galleries, where you now get a satisfyingly complete picture of how modern art came up the river from Orléans, so to speak.

Being “alone” (a guard lingered at a discreet distance) with art like that is totally different from seeing it in a crowd. It’s delicious, intoxicating, dizzying or any one of a number of adjectives that describe altered states. I imagined myself in a silk robe with a whiskey—neat—in one hand, having gotten up in the middle of the night to commune in my mansion with my Manets. And I had a thought: All things considered, it’s better to be a billionaire. Especially when you’re venturing out to invest in art.