POP*

After Francis Bacon's Study From the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light barely made its low estimate at Christie's London on Sunday — and this was the top lot of the auction house's contemporary sales during Frieze Week, according to a press release — and considering Damien's bubble seems to have burst, it looks like an almost certainty that the market is headed for some kind of correction (if not an implosion). The threat level, then, is raised to: ORANGE.

*If you ask an art market savant what's driving the current boom in the market, he'll probably answer you with one or more of the following:

1. It's the hedge fund guys. They're using their millions and billions to fill their Greenwich McMansions with Hirst's conceptual turns and Warhol's candy-colored silk-screens.

2. It's new global wealth. As the economies of countries like Russia and China thrive, their nouveau riche want trophies for their walls.

3. It's the weak (weak) dollar. Apart from the international circuit of fairs, most of the action is happening in New York, and when your cash money is in, say, euros, not dollars, a Christie's catalogue looks like a bargain bin.

Our theory is that if one of these markets takes a hit, we may see the art market fall from its lofty pedestal. It's a hypothesis grounded historically: The general consensus is that the last rich and heady times for the market were driven by Japanese businessmen and that they came to an end when the Japanese real estate market crashed in 1990.

As the November auctions approach, we'll be regularly updating a feature we call "Pop." Aggregating hedge fund activity, the health of global markets, and fluctuations in the exchange rate, we'll assign the market a low risk of tanking (BLUE), a medium risk (YELLOW), a high risk (ORANGE), or an almost certain risk (RED).