Touring New York, London, Hong Kong, Geneva and Doha is the world’s largest balloon, created by an in-the-know cartel of Americans, French, Italians, Swiss, Koreans, Taiwanese, Chinese, Iranians and Arabs. Its immensity once buoyed prices for artworks across the board; today its achievements are blandly dependent on the hammer prices of lone prestige pieces. For instance, Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (1895), sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2012 for USD 120 million, was outperformed just a year later at Christie’s New York when Acquavella Galleries, bidding on behalf of an anonymous buyer, bagged a “rare” Francis Bacon triptych of his friend, the painter Lucian Freud, for USD 142 million. For auctioneers and moguls, ten-million-dollar increments are the new norm. To “ordinary” collectors and dealers—and particularly to artists, for…