This disjunction between excellence and commerce was in evidence elsewhere too. While the salerooms' big success this year has been in 20th-century work the contemporary art world continues, like some latter-day South Sea Bubble, to swell and swell. To attend the opening of autumn's Frieze art fair — the omnium gatherum of artworks and artfolk — was to glimpse the sheer number of people who earn a living (or aspire to) from art as product. It is an ecosystem that seems unsupportable. 

If the financial health of art's private sector is bizarrely sound, that of the public sector took a severe turn for the worse with the government's spending review. The Arts Council, which funds 850 different organisations, will see its grant fall by 30 per cent over the next four years while the national museums and galleries get 15 per cent less. In light of the reductions of 25 per cent and more imposed elsewhere, these figures seem almost moderate. But coupled with the difficulty organisations face in accessing the £285 million in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reserve fund, the cuts will truly hurt. Arts Council England is not the spendthrift organisation many perceive it to be (despite the fact that it owns a 7,500-work collection of postwar British Art that is, scandalously, largely unseen) and our public galleries are positively lean. Years of real-term budget reductions and frozen acquisition grants have meant that they have learned to think creatively and if not parsimoniously then certainly with thrift in mind. Wages of curatorial staff at our premier institutions such as the National Gallery remain derisively low. 

While the new cuts will make the threat of staff losses and reduced opening hours a real one they will also encourage the re-addressing of some problem areas. The legal strictures preventing the deaccession of works in our public institutions' reserve collections, for example, will come under close scrutiny, as will the issue of free entry. This last, a government requirement, is laudable but there is no good reason why foreign visitors shouldn't be charged on a sliding scale, as is the case across the rest of Europe. Visitor numbers remain spectacular and tourists are used to paying for their gallery experiences. It is hard to see why philanthropists should be expected to close the funding gap when such an obvious and robust resource is wilfully ignored. 

There was one incident, however, where the confluence of art and money raised a real belly laugh. The news that a forger had netted £26,000 by selling 11 works purporting to be by Tracey Emin on eBay was funny enough. The fact that Emin herself described the items, without irony it seems, as "crude...corny and unimaginative and over-sentimental" should help dry the eyes of our public gallery directors and leave a smile hovering on their trembling lips.