Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has a piece on why art prices—like the $120 million paid at auction for The Scream last week, an event embedded in a whole season of moneypot auctions this spring—have become so outrageous.

He cites a study completed two years ago by researchers at Yale and Tilburg University that looked at two centuries of incomes and art sales (abstract here).

It showed, he says, that the single factor most involved in the into-orbit leap in art prices in the period between 1908 and 2005 was the increase in income inequality.

I haven't read the study, so I don't know whether he's playing at all fast and loose with the researchers' own interpretation of their data. But on the other hand, the conclusion seems obvious: The prices of "priceless" things are predicated on nothing but the ability of the extremely rich to pay them. Unless I am missing something, Knight's point that the art world is only a freak show to the extent that the world of the wealthy is a freak show is redundant: They are the same world. What I appreciate about his post is that he's connecting them, or calling out the typically obscured connection.

The fact that he's doing it in order to one-up New York critic Jerry Saltz, whom he refuses to refer to by name and instead only calls an "art expert" who appeared on a morning talk show, is kind of silly. They're on the same side. As someone pointed out to me the other day, if Charlie Rose and Gayle King treated their CEO interviewees as critically as they treated Saltz—"Why, Jerry, why?"—or if Saltz were allowed to ask them just how much they made or spent on their most prized commodities, well, we'd be living in a different world.