When gallerists are confident about demand for an artist’s work, they wouldn’t dream of surrendering it to the first comer or the highest bidder. They compile a list of interested parties so they can place the work in the most prestigious home. It’s an essential part of managing the perception of their artists.

makes a good dealer, he leans back and thinks for a moment. “You have to have an eye—a savantish ability to recognize work that is symptomatic of an artist with real intelligence, originality, and drive.”

He told me that coming back to the exhibition was a little bit like returning to the scene of the crime. It was difficult because “you start questioning some of the decisions you’ve made.”

“It’s usually about an individual’s radically idiosyncratic interpretation of the world.

Asher’s overriding artistic goal has always been, in his words, “to animate debate.”

Charles Saatchi has manipulated perceptions and gleaned headlines for work by artists he owns by inflating prices by the millions.

You are materializing—taking something from the inside and putting it out into the world so you can be relieved of it.”

That would make Marlene Dumas one of three living women artists to trade for over $1 million—the other two are Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin.*

On the topic of what makes a good artist, she was willing to point to perfectionism: “For me, you care one hundred percent about what you do. You can’t say, ‘It’s okay like this but it could have been a different way.’ You have a total vision of how things have to be—it has to be just right.”