Hickey's well-honed rhetoric is used to bolster the notion that 'democracy' is embodied in market mechanisms, so that the laws of supply and demand set the hierarchy of prices which really does reflect what people want from art. This view is loosely associated with the standard line of liberal thinking that says that you cannot have democracy without the market. It is another matter, though, to say that the market can act as a subsitute for democracy. If that is a very doubtful claim even when applied to free markets, when applied to the art market—which, as we have seen, is highly archaic, controlled, and restricted—its foolishness is crystal clear.
(pg.169)