Paul Soto, a talented LA dealer, tried to sell me a great Mark Rodrigues work for $40,000.00, comprised of wooden shelving units housing hundreds of bootleg Grateful Dead audio cassettes acquired from eBay. In doing so, he assured me that Mark was in the collections of dealer David Kordansky and artist Mark Grotjahn. I’m not casting aspersion on the dealer, but I think we’ve entered a new universe where dealers and market-star artists are the conferrers of value rather than your traditional collectors, if they still exist.