It’s tempting, when writing about modern art, to devote more attention than is useful to the kinds of market forces that bestow, say, Jeff Koons ’s totalitarian visions or Damien Hirst’s intellectual posturing with the imprimatur of respectability. After all, so much modern art has become uniformly perverse, which is to say boring, that it leaves little of interest to be discussed except the prices the pieces command at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Recently, price again became the focal point of the art world with the sale of Gauguin’s 1892 painting Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) to (rumor has it) representatives of the Qatari royal family. The cost came to $300 million, making the sale one of the dearest in history. This is not the primary reason to visit the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., between now and January 10^th, but if it is sufficiently attractive to pull you into the Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland exhibit, give way to materialism just this once!