“That rarefied practice of collecting high art — from canonized old masters to contemporary works by both international art stars and marketable young upstarts — is experiencing a surge it hasn’t seen since the explosive moment in the late 1980s when the market ballooned to a thinly stretched bubble, before bursting, finally, along with the stock market, in the 1990s. According to Artprice, a Paris-based information service that lists auction prices from more than 300,000 artists, prices for contemporary art alone had risen 40 per cent this year, pushing past even the heyday of the ’80s explosion… Contemporary art, traditionally a tough sell, has also caught the fever… Put simply, the art world is in a full-blown boom.”