I love the idea of Art Sales, where art galleries hold an auction of their own paintings. It seems like a natural idea for an art world that is constantly talking about its commercialization.

What’s best about it is that it would be fun. The art business is not known for its sense of humor, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy the satire. And who knows? Maybe it could work. Two hundred years from now, at a museum sale of the 21st century, some of those same paintings might be worth something.

: Work of Art is an art auction game. You are a museum curator, and you acquire work from contemporary artists to display in your museum. Your goal is to attract the most visitors and make the most money!

Each turn, players reveal an artwork card from the deck. If it’s one you want, you have three options: buy it at auction, place a bid in secret with other players, or pass. After all players have had the opportunity to place bids, you must then decide whether to buy the artwork at its listed price or pass again. You may also choose to raise your bid at any time during the auction process.

When you’re done buying artworks for the round, you also get a chance to sell them back for half price. But if no one buys anything from your museum that round, you’ll be forced to sell everything back for even less than half price!

The game continues until all but one museum closes its doors forever. The player with the most money wins!**

When I was an art student, we were told that museums collected art, but didn’t sell it. Then in 2006 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held a sale of some of its holdings. The publicity for the sale made it seem like the paintings were being sent to auction. But they weren’t being sold to a collector; they were being sold to other museums.

The sale made a lot of money — $842 million — and was widely hailed as a success. It seemed like a good idea, but also kind of crazy. Was MoMA’s collection really so much better than its competitors’ that it could get away with such a move?

It is often said that great business ideas are obvious in retrospect. So let me try to explain what wasn’t obvious about this one.

The British Museum is selling off some of its art collection. The proceeds will go to the national treasury, which needs the money.

I find the whole thing a bit depressing.

The British Museum is a great institution, and it has an enormous art collection. It was built on the basis of one genius’s collection: that of Sir Hans Sloane, who in his time was not only a famous doctor but also a great explorer and collector of things. And the collection has grown since then, as one might expect from such an institution; it was just impossible for so many years to build a museum with so much stuff in it.

It would be wonderful if the government were to give the museum more money, or if some rich person were to donate money for new acquisitions. But instead they are selling off what they have already bought. It doesn’t seem right that people should be able to buy masterpieces at bargain prices—and that they should get a tax break while they’re at it.

By the way, I don’t mean to disparage any of the works themselves. The Rembrandt alone makes it worth buying tickets for the first day to see the auction; and there are other masterpieces as well.

The paintings in the gallery were mostly watercolors, gouache, and oils. They dated from the 1920s to the 1960s and portrayed mostly landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. The artists were Russian or German or Italian or Chinese. Several paintings were signed by artists who had been famous in the 20th century but were now forgotten.

The fact that I had never heard of any of these artists did not surprise me. My ignorance was a consequence of my education in art history. As an art historian I had spent most of my time learning about a few old masters and a lot of stuff that nobody liked anymore. I knew something about many different periods, styles, and schools of art but very little about contemporary art. And I wasn’t alone: almost all art historians would be equally ignorant of such a sale at their local auction house.

The list price for the art was in the millions, but the museum was selling it at a loss.

The prices had been set by appraisers, who took a conservative position on what the art could be sold for. The appraisers were thinking about what might happen if the art failed to sell at all, or sold for less than its purchase price. They were not thinking about what would happen if it sold well.

The problem is that there are two basic kinds of people in the world: those who want to buy famous works of art, and those who don’t. Both kinds of people are willing to pay somewhat more than the appraised price. But only one kind of person can be counted on to actually do so. And since museums are in business to make money, they want to maximize their sales—they don’t want to just break even.

What’s more, museums have an incentive not to err on the side of caution when setting prices. If they do that, people will stop buying their art, because they’ll be able to get it more cheaply elsewhere. For similar reasons, if an artist does something new and interesting and then dies young, that work is likely to be worth more than similar work by an older artist who kept doing more of

It’s easy to make art. In fact, you already do it. Making art is the process of choosing what to pay attention to. When you walk into a room, you don’t register everything in it. You notice a few things. Maybe you see someone across the room you’ll want to say hello to, or maybe something on the wall catches your eye and catches your mood and becomes part of what this place and moment feel like.

Noticing is making art. If you go back through your day today and pay attention, I bet you can find at least ten moments when you were making art without realizing it. And if you look back through your life, I bet that the biggest artworks are not the ones where you decided ahead of time what kind of thing to create. The biggest works are probably the ones where something caught your eye and you followed it wherever it led for as long as it was interesting.