Talk about investment hubris getting pumped to the max! Listen to what one market veteran, Amanda Sharp, told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal recently: 'If we were to get a crash or correction, there would be a nice cleaning out,' she says. Would that we all shared Ms. Sharp's brash confidence as we await the inevitable day when the stock market begins, finally, to discount an incipient plunge into recession and the widespread deflation that has gripped the real estate sector. Neither prospect has had much of an impact on shares, at least not yet, but we can bet Ms. Sharp and her ilk have been sharpening their knives, waiting to feast on road kill. The woman was not talking about stocks, by the way, but about art. She is the organizer of a highly successful London event called the Frieze Art Fair and presumably an ardent collector herself. You may have read that the art market is so superheated these days as to make the current surge in stocks and even ultra high-end real estate look as subdued as a 4-H bake sale. How does $19.1 million sound for a stainless-steel cabinet containing 6,136 handcrafted pills? That's what Damien Hirst's one-of-a-kind tchochka fetched at auction recently ' the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. As for works by famous dead artists, even some of the heavies ranked near the bottom of the Forbes 400 list might not qualify as serious bidders. How about $72 million for Warhol's 'Green Car Crash'? Warhol Our Pick While we have little doubt that Warhol's iconic paintings will more than hold their own at auctions a hundred or even a thousand years from now, how many more greater fools can there be to sustain their current, vertical
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