Honey, does this go with our couch??

The market for contemporary art is exploding. Here are the living painters whose work has sold for the most $$. Get out your checkbooks people!

1. Jasper Johns $80 million last year for "False Start", painted in 1959



2. Cy Twombly $20 million in 2002 for "Lepanto" painted in 2001



3. Robert Rauschenberg $12 million in 1999 for "Factum II" painted in 1957


These first three are all Americans.

4. Peter Doig $11.3 million for "White Canoe"

5. Lucian Freud $8.2 million for "Red Haired Man on a Chair"

6. Damien Hirst $7.4 million for "Lullaby Winter"

7. Gerhart Richter $6.2 million for "Abstraktes Bild"

8. Jeff Koons $5 million for "Michael Jackson and Bubbles"


My advice? Concentrate on Twombly, Richter and Koons. To my mind, Rauschenberg, Doig and Hirst are kind of hacks (of course I think Renoir and Rembrandt are hacks too) and Johns is just too darned expensive.