There was a time in the distant past of 30 or 40 years ago when critics actually tried to distinguish significant contemporary art from passing sensations, but the art market shrugged such critics off a generation ago. It no longer matters what the Clement Greenbergs think. What counts is what the Steve Cohens buy.

"The great thing about collecting contemporary paintings," says an art-world friend of mine, "is that you don't have to know anything. You don't have to know dates; you don’t have to know historical context. There are no critics of consequence, and the only validation of your choices is the auction process."

The art world is finally absorbing the results of this spring's market frenzy. I remember in particular the escaping-earth's-orbit feel to the aftermath of Christie's postwar and contemporary art evening sale this May, which featured works such as Andy Warhol's Green Car Crash and Jasper Johns' Figure 4. Sales at the auction totaled more than $384.7 million, a 71 percent increase from the May 2006 sale. By now, even mainstream dealers and collectors say things have gotten out of hand. They're not, however, ready to go on the record with their opinions, since there may be more overhyped pictures to be sold to the latest social climbers to hit the circuit.

So we'll say it for them.
    
Here are my picks of the four most overrated artists and the most overrated school in today's overhyped market.

Damien Hirst
I was reluctant to put Damien Hirst at the top of the list. So obvious. However, Charles Saatchi's one-time pet bad boy has single-handedly reestablished Great Britain as a leading exporter … of rotting sharks in formaldehyde. What allowed him to push aside the competition like a yob with a Stanley knife was his latest: a platinum skull covered in pavé-set diamonds, yours for $100 million.

That check hasn't cleared yet, but let's compare two 84-by-84-inch paintings (at least the size is comparable) by Hirst at auctions: Beautiful Like a Rainbow Gone Wrong Painting, house paint on canvas, sold at Phillips de Pury in London on June 22 for $753,935, whereas in February 2004, another house-paint picture, Beautiful Four Cheese, Spicy Quarto, Staggioni, Florentine, Michelangelo, Venetian Glass, Pamplona Painting, changed hands at Christie’s in London for $358,333.

So his paintings more than doubled in value in three years. Of course, as a famous short-seller (of stock, not paintings) once said, "They go down a lot faster than they go up."

Dash Snow
American artists, in the meantime, are still trying to compete with Hirst in shamelessness. Take Dash Snow, a 26-year-old New York socialite pretending to be a Lower East Side punk. He takes Polaroids of himself and his friends playing junkies, whores, and petty criminals in what he pretends are mean streets. His work has been in the Royal Academy and the 2006 Whitney Biennial, but if he weren’t the great-grandson of art doyenne Dominique de Menil and the cousin of Uma Thurman, people would notice that it was all done 40 years ago by more attractive and more talented artists. Rent Andy Warhol and Joe Dallesandro's Trash and you’ll see what I mean.

However, for all his posturing and P.R., Snow is an amateur. He probably has a trust fund to fall back on, and if he doesn't, he's in trouble, because his dealer has said that “his prices haven't gone up much in the past couple of years”—astonishing, given the publicity he receives. The Whitney held an auction and reportedly sold one of his photographs for $3,000. His dealer in Germany offers individual Polaroids Snow has taken of street people for $1,500; collages go for $7,000.

Peter Doig
Peter Doig, on the other hand, won't need a trust fund. I feel comfortable calling him the fastest-rising contemporary artist, not because I have that much confidence in my aesthetic judgment, but because I can do arithmetic. The recent sale of his White Canoe at Sotheby's in London this February for $11.3 million—more than five times the presale estimate—means you need "plane money" to be a Doig collector. A leading French art buyer I know calls his work "very, very bourgeois. Petit bourgeois. But then that's what the buyers are, even with all their money. He paints very classically, very conservatively—the Dufy of the decade—and presents no risks for the collectors. To my mind, he is the most overvalued artist of the year."

White Canoe may have been an outlier, but even so, Doigs are still in the boost phase of the flight: Orange Sunshine, a 108-by-78.7-inch oil on canvas went for $3,581,027 at the June 21 Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale in London; Swamped, a 77.6-by-94.9-inch painting that also depicts a white canoe, sold for $455,508 at Sotheby's in February 2002.

As the hedgies say, the trend is your friend.

Doig's calm, nonthreatening pieces are part of the same current of demand that has bid up the mid-century minimalists. "Quite often you find collectors who are in very high-stress situations day after day are looking for minimalist works," says a German dealer. I thought the resurgence of interest in minimalism was an unconscious attempt to impose a Zen-like simplicity and order on an uncertain world. But one New York buyer thinks it's even simpler than that: "People's interior decorators like minimalism. So Richard Ryman, Agnes Martin, and Eva Hesse get bid up." Oh.

Lisa Yuskavage
Scientific research has determined that rich men really like pictures of naked women with big breasts. And because these men have lots of money, those pictures can be expensive.

What makes them art, though? Well, it helps if the pictures of naked girls with big breasts are painted by a woman who's, you know, smart and articulate—like Lisa Yuskavage. As my French friend says, "Yuskavage is for the frustrated banker who cannot screw his wife anymore."

Night, a 77-by-62-inch oil on canvas by Yuskavage, went for $1,384,000 at the already legendary Christie's contemporary sale in New York on May 17.

Little Northview, a 20-by-18-inch oil on linen, sold for $71,700 at Christie’s in New York in November 2002.

Even allowing for the smaller size—and size does count with nude women—that's an impressive commercial achievement.

The New Leipzig School
And no list of contemporary art would be complete without German representation. Most overrated? How about Neo Rauch’s followers in the so-called Leipzig school? If you are that nostalgic for East Germany, forget the Leipzig painters (with the arguable exception of Rauch himself) and buy up some used Stasi truncheons and reconditioned Trabant cars. They'll hold their value better.

Tal, a 1999 Rauch, 78.7-by-98.5 inches of oil on canvas, sold for $768,000 at the May 17 Christie's afternoon sale, after an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000.

Had you been into East German retro chic back in May 2002, you might have been able to outbid the buyer at the Phillips de Pury sale in New York who took Rausch’s Produktion, a grim (that's good in Leipzig) 78.7-by-98.4-inch oil on linen for $134,500.

Keep this in mind: According to Jiangping Mei and Michael Moses' February 2002 paper "Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces," there's strong statistical evidence that the most expensive works of art sold at auction will underperform the art market in the following years.

So don't kid yourself that you’re protected by buying the most expensive piece of junk on offer. No amount of polish will make a mirror of a brick.