It’s a con. But they like being conned.

“The description of the work from Christie’s catalog hits all of Professor Galenson’s benchmarks.

It’s innovative: “Painted directly with the artist’s feet as he suspended himself above the canvas from a rope hanging from the ceiling, the painting represents a unity of the central tenets of postwar abstraction with performance art.”

And it’s from the most influential period of the artist’s work: “Painted in 1961, ‘BB56’ dates from a highly significant time for the artist,” the catalog description says, adding that 1962 “was the year in which Shiraga was given his first solo show outside Japan, at the Galerie Stadler in Paris, where this painting was exhibited.”

That it may look, to some, like a child’s finger painting is irrelevant. “A lot of contemporary art is aggressively ugly,” Professor Galenson said. “That doesn’t matter in terms of its value.”

Rich people buy art because they can.

I think Picasso is a trifle exhibitionist myself. It’s like he flaunted convention just to show he could.

Now Mini-Zilla, on the other hand…