Sotheby’s and Christie’s are in the news. They are making zillions selling art to the super rich. As they compete with each other, they are enriching the auctioneers, as well. Sotheby’s just had a stunning auction of impressionist and modern art in New York, where they totaled more than four-hundred and twenty-million dollars. This is the record in the company’s history of no less than two-hundred and seventy years. At the auction, Giacometti’s “Chariot” collected more than a hundred-million dollars. Wow! As is typical lately, the buyer remains completely unknown. Thorstein Veblen comes to mind at once. He understood the rich of his time quite well, but they have moved on ever since the onset of the current depression. A billion dollars is peanuts nowadays. And Sotheby’s and Christie’s offer a splendid window on the behavior of the super rich. Even though many of them are not known to the general public, at least not in any great detail, they know each other more than well. Conspicuous consumption gets a new twist, for it is conspicuous only to the chosen few. Now we have conspicuously inconspicuous consumption, to coin a phrase.