“Money and aesthetic value are absolutely linked in the eyes of the public. Try to find one of the many popularising articles about Damien Hirst, for instance, which does not mention money. Is a work of art worth £100,000 because of its indefinable aura, or is the aura a product of the £100,000? Art objects are near-perfect commodities: lacking the complications of usefulness, they are pure tokens of exchange, their value based on opinion alone. Yet the power of their exchange value is taken for an aesthetic charge: with ordinary commodities an apparent relations between things, mediated by price, masks an actual relation between people; with works of art this same autonomy of the object stands alone, yet the monetary value on which it is founded is concealed by an ideal relation involving people — the artist and the viewer.” by Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, pg 80