What do you hope to acquire when you bid at a prestigious evening auction at Sotheby’s? A bundle of things: a painting of course, but hopefully also a new dimension to how people see you. As Robert Lacey described it in his book about Sotheby’s, you are bidding for class, for a validation of your taste.

His most reproduced disaster silkscreen is 1947 White, a news photograph of a fashion model who jumped from the Empire State Building and landed on the roof of a diplomatic limousine.

Hirst’s titles are an integral part of marketing his work, and much of the meaning flows from the title. If the shark were just called Shark, the viewer might well say, “Yes, it certainly is a shark,” and move on. Calling it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living forces viewers to create a meaning. The title produced as

When an artist becomes branded, the market tends to accept as legitimate whatever the artist submits.

“I like the idea of a thing to describe a feeling.

ART PRICE RECORDS THE MOST EXPENSIVE PAINTINGS SOLD AT AUCTION Garçon à la Pipe (1905), Pablo Picasso, $104 million, Sotheby’s New York, 2004 Dora Maar au Chat (1941), Pablo Picasso, $95.2 million, Sotheby’s New York, 2006 Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), Vincent van Gogh, $82.5 million, Christie’s New York, 1990 (resold privately through a Sotheby’s

Branding is the end result of the experiences a company creates with its customers and the media over a long period of time—and of the clever marketing and public relations that go into creating and reinforcing those experiences.

Kirsten Ward, who is a physician and psychologist, says that art has the greatest impact when it makes the thinking part of the brain talk to the feeling part.

In contemporary art, the greatest value-adding component comes from the branded auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s.