It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero Andy Warhol who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.