With the stock market still in the doldrums and property prices starting to wobble, British investors have recently been pouring money into the art market. But with prices for Old Masters and Impressionist pictures at stratospheric levels, contemporary art is attracting ever-greater interest.
At the recent Frieze Art Fair in London, galleries from around the world, representing more than 2,000 artists, achieved sales in excess of £25 million (€35.8 million) over four days with many buyers aged under 40.
But what, exactly, is contemporary art?
The London market is still dominated by a group which came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, collectively known as the Young British Artists Movement. They are notorious for challenging traditional assumptions about what constitutes art and create highly controversial and provocative work.
Despite widespread public cynicism, they have achieved cult status among the cultural establishment and have attracted the attention of rich collectors - among them latter-day Medici Charles Saatchi.
In May this year he lost a number of works by Emin when fire destroyed an art storage warehouse. They included a beach hut called The Last Thing I Said To You, which he'd bought for £75,000, and her tent Everyone I Ever Slept With for £40,000.
The beach hut can easily be replaced - indeed wooden huts are one of her trademarks - but the tent may be more problematic. Although available from any camping equipment shop for about £50, it had been transformed into "art" by the very novel idea of Emin embroidering the canvas with the names of everyone she had ever slept with. She said it had taken her over six months to sew.
One of her best-known works, which was bought by the Tate Gallery, is Hate And Power Can Be A Terrible Thing. It is a blanket appliquéd with her thoughts on Margaret Thatcher. Her observations include "You cruel heartless bitch" and "I hate women like you"".
Saatchi's eponymous gallery on London's South Bank is the undisputed temple of contemporary art. His collection is reputed to contain some 7,000 works and the crème-de-la-crème is on show there.
The gallery's chief attraction is Emin's My Bed - unmade and surrounded by the detritus you'd expect in the boudoir of a lady with a hectic nightlife - which Saatchi bought for £150,000.
But Emin's fellow-artist, the media-styled "bad boy of Britart", Damien Hirst has displayed an even greater talent for creating "art" from the most unlikely sources and trumping his critics. He first achieved notoriety for pickling sheep and sharks in formaldehyde and displaying them in huge aquarium-like cases.
In 1998, as dotcom money sluiced through London nightlife, he co-launched a restaurant called Pharmacy in Notting Hill, which quickly became a "celebrity hotspot".
Pharmacy was theme-designed to resemble a bizarre chemist's shop featuring pill-shaped barstools and surgical cutlery. Hirst also supplied the "artwork", including fake medicine cabinets, which looked so authentic that passers-by sometimes popped in for a Lemsip - leading to complaints from the local authorities. These were overcome by juggling the neon letters on the sign into cheeky variations, including "army chap".
But the restaurant soon acquired a reputation for execrable food and the novelty of eating in what was effectively a jokey art gallery resulted in customers deserting in droves. The post-millennium market crash, which scuppered many restaurants, saw Pharmacy close in 2003. But not before Hirst shrewdly bought the fittings and fixtures which he had, of course, created himself.
These have now been auctioned by Sotheby's in a truly sensational sale which drew huge crowds to the New Bond Street salesroom and saw prices exceed all expectations.
The very first lot, a pair of martini glasses estimated at £50-£70, sold for £4,800, nearly 100 times the pre-sale estimate.
On it went, from matchbooks and specially labelled wines to ampoule-shaped salt and pepper shakers.
By the end, bidders had spent more than £11 million, leaving auctioneer Oliver Barker "shell-shocked" and a gleeful Hirst declaring "suddenly my restaurant venture seems to be a success".
The highest price was paid for a large medicine cabinet, entitled The Fragile Truth, which fetched £1,237,600, establishing a new auction record price for a work by Hirst.
A second cabinet, also filled with pharmaceutical packages and bottles and called, appropriately, The Sleep of Reason, sold for £1,069,600. Both had been estimated at £400,000-£600,000.
A neon "prescriptions" sign raised £66,000 (estimate: £3,000-£4,000). Even the architect's plans for the restaurant were sold for £36,000.
But it was investors' enthusiasm to acquire the humble and increasingly redundant ashtrays from the restaurant which really pushed the boundary of what qualifies as "art".
During the 1990s, stealing ashtrays from fashionable restaurants became almost de-rigueur in London. Large numbers of otherwise law-abiding people thought little of "nicking" these mementoes - any twinge of shame quickly dispelled by the prospect of a heart-stopping credit card statement.
Quaglino's, a glamorous, art deco establishment in St James's is believed to have lost so many ashtrays - at least 25,000 over a 10-year period - that the management eventually decided to put the item on the menu. Along with your venison carpaccio or seared tuna you can order the ubiquitous Q-shaped object to take away for a mere £10.
Diners who surreptitiously bagged an ashtray at Pharmacy may now be sitting on some pretty valuable stolen property. A set of six ashtrays, which are made from aluminium in the shapes and colours of tablets and intrinsically almost worthless were nonetheless estimated at £100-£150. They were sold for £2,160.
