Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Takashi Murakami Keith Haring Jeff Koons Investors Indulge Appetite for Luxury Dasha, Gaga, and Gago Party for MOCA Crazy for Koons

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Economists assure us that markets operate in cycles and good times will come again, yet it seems unlikely that the heady days of the naughts will return any time soon. Their apotheosis, you may recall, came last September with the Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby’s London. "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" was what that now-graying enfant terrible called the sale, which circumvented his dealers and ultimately reaped an improbable $200 million-plus. His self-flattering phrase would likely have resonated with the wizards at Lehman Brothers, whose own gorgeous cerebrations begat some of the exquisitely complex credit derivatives that were inflating global markets to impossible dimensions. Until, that is, their artful machinations bankrupted their firm — ironically on the very first day of Hirst’s anomalous sale — driving those markets to the precipice of collapse. As for the contemporary-art market, après the "Beautiful" auction, it was indeed le déluge.

So the days leading up to our anniversary have been sobering ones. And yet there is much to celebrate. Art+Auction is still here, for one. And when we look back on where the magazine started — a mere black-and-white pamphlet with a cover story on "Russian Works of Art," which then meant Fabergé miniatures and religious icons — we can only sigh with satisfaction at how far we, and the art world, have come. For if the art market has shriveled, the art world continues to burgeon. Consider Berlin, Moscow and Beijing today. Back in 1979, they were the incubators of Cold War intrigue, not art stars. And for all its oil wealth, Dubai was a cultural backwater, with not even the glimmer of an ambition to be the future-forward metropolis it has become, much less one with the dynamism and diversity to fuel an original visual-arts scene.

The first issue of Art+Auction included an amusing report on a Sotheby Parke Bernet auction of gnus, giraffes and hartebeests in South Africa, but there was not a single story about postwar or contemporary art. Indeed, during that first decade the contemporary-art market rarely figured in our pages, which were filled with reports on those for Old Master paintings, English furniture, antique Persian rugs, jewelry and silver. And rightly so. Although it was already booming, contemporary art was largely the domain of dealers, not auction houses. It would have been inconceivable then to predict that in 2007, the Christie’s postwar and contemporary department would achieve nearly $1.6 billion in sales, eclipsing all the house’s other departments in revenue.

The factors that shaped the current contemporary-art market are too many to discuss here. But I will mention one: Andy Warhol. His intensive multimedia production (from Polaroids and silkscreens to film and a magazine), along with his branded celebrity, expanded the notion of what art and an artist can be for a new generation. Warhol not only pioneered Pop art but also popularized art itself. The careers of market heavyweights Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami would be impossible without him. In 1986, when Warhol’s protégé Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop, he was derided by critics, curators, collectors and artists alike for selling inexpensive T-shirts, posters and toys decorated with his iconic cartoons, with only a small minority championing his vision. Yet some 20 years later, a replica of Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki store, which purveys paraphernalia adorned with his signature imagery, was included in the artist’s tellingly titled retrospective, "© Murakami," at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. What’s more, a pop-up Louis Vuitton boutique stocking the wildly popular wares Murakami created for the luxury brand was installed in MOCA's mezzanine. The show certainly raised hackles, but it nevertheless traveled to an international roster of museums.