Critic Robert Hughes blasts the state of the art market in a speech in London: “I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying for an immature Rose Period Picasso $104m (£57m), close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states, something is very rotten: such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.”