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In short, it is a buyer's market in which only a small minority of successful artists have any power over the destiny or price of their work. If there are to be any royalty assurances, then, they can only work if they are written into U.S. law. The prospect of such a bill ever getting to Congress is, naturally, viewed askance by many dealers and most collectors, who contend that it would diminish or even wreck the art market, depress prices, and discourage new collectors. These critics raise other objections: Why should an artist be entitled to a piece of the profit every time his work is resold when an architect, say, must settle for a single flat fee for designing a building that may be resold a dozen times? What if a collector resells a painting at a loss? And, given the informal nature of many transactions in the art world, how could any body possibly keep track of all the buying and selling?
Nonetheless, one may well ask whether it is really worth having a system of "patronage" that would collapse if collectors, who have been known to realize profits as high as 10,000%, were compelled to give artists 15% of the wind fall. The arguments against artists' royalties have the bristling, reactionary tone of oldtime corporate protests against antitrust laws. If some of the investment hysteria evaporated from the art world, it would be a spiritual gain — and probably it would not damage the well-being of living art ists. But since the speculation does go on, it would be nice if at least some of the cash were turned back to the men and women whose work is so suavely ripped off under the present art system. Robert Hughes