Roger Scruton:

Pre-emptive kitsch is the first link in a chain. The artist pretends to take himself seriously, the critics pretend to judge his product and the modernist establishment pretends to promote it. At the end of all this pretense, someone who cannot perceive the difference between the real thing and the fake decides that he should buy it.

Christopher Glazek:

The collector class has traditionally come from the very top of the wealth spectrum and has included people looking to trade money for social prestige by participating in the art world's stately rituals. Over the last few years, though, a new class of speculators has emerged with crasser objectives: They are less interested in flying to Basel to attend a dinner than in riding the economic wave that has caused the market for emerging contemporary art to surge in the past decade.

Paul M. Barrett:

The Burford investment -- a form of speculation known as litigation finance -- was the wave of the future, he argued. Hedge funds were putting millions into major litigation in exchange for shares of recoveries.