“Art investment funds represent something of a revolution in the relationship between art and commerce. A dozen art-only investment funds are now trying to raise money from investors looking to cash in on the art market’s current boom. Last year, Picasso’s ‘Boy with a Pipe,’ which had been sold in 1950 for thirty thousand dollars, went at auction for a hundred and four million, while a Canaletto that had fetched two hundred and eighty thousand pounds in 1973 sold for more than eleven million pounds three decades later. Next to such numbers, those shares of Wal-Mart that haven’t budged in five years start to look pretty dull.”