Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.

My first car I got it in an auction at my temple. It was an '86 Volvo that I got for 500 bucks and then wound up throwing $10 000 into the stereo system and put TVs in the foot rests. It was the most ridiculous Volvo you'd ever seen but I had never had money before and I was out of my mind.

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.

Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes in galleries on the walls of auction houses and off the walls in museum storage.

I hate art auctions.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.