The new galleries will offer surprises, anointing some artists who are barely known today or whose work is quite inexpensive. Luc Tuymans, a Belgian-born painter virtually unknown in the U.S., is “an artist we’re making a deep commitment to,” says James Cuno, director of the Art Institute. The museum is also focusing attention on a group of local ’60s artists, the so-called Chicago Imagists, whose ranks included Ed Paschke—known for his acidic take on pop art—and Jim Nutt. By and large, these artists have not participated in the run-up in art prices: A Paschke painting sold at auction last year for $31,200.

As for superstars, three galleries will be devoted to conceptual artist Bruce Nauman, including a six-camera installation of his Clown Torture video. Pioneer sculptor Eva Hesse, whose works rarely crack seven figures at auction, gets her own room, as does Jenny Holzer; Francis Bacon, however, whose works have brought in excess of $50 million, doesn’t. Ellsworth Kelly is given prominence, as is Robert Gober. Gerhard Richter is deemed more important than his countryman and contemporary Sigmar Polke. (The Art Institute owns 20 works by Richter.) What’s missing? Any Latin American contemporary art, which effectively means that the museum considers it, at least for now, ancillary to art history.

Think studying museum exhibitions with an eye toward the market malignantly blurs the line between art and commerce? Michael Mezzatesta, who held top jobs at the Kimbell Art Museum and the Duke University Museum of Art before becoming director of the Palm Beach Fair, says it’s only natural that dealers and collectors pay attention to museum exhibitions; the institutions spark a “rethinking of common assumptions” about the value of art artistically—and financially.   

The Art Institute of Chicago’s opening is more than a year away, but it’s already having an impact on prices—in the sense that the Art Institute is paying higher ones. Sculptor Charles Ray hit an auction record of $2.2 million in 2000; the Art Institute recently paid far more—Artnet.com estimates $5 million—for Ray’s colossal Hinoki, a 38-foot-long sculpture of a felled oak tree, meticulously carved to Ray’s specifications from hundreds of wooden blocks by a team of Japanese craftsmen.     

What does that mean for Ray’s market? Well, back in 2004, when news got out that MOMA had commissioned a Peter Doig painting for its reopening, the artist’s prices climbed to $650,000 at an auction shortly after the event. A year earlier, no work of his had sold for more than $100,000.