A small auction house in Pflugerville, Texas, made headlines in September when Gaston Sheehan sold Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1982 painting "Red Man One" for $22,002,790. The sale came after an intense bidding war with 456 rounds of bidding from 13 different bidders, all offering amounts in the multimillion-dollar range.

The final price represented a staggering 519 percent increase from May 2009, when Sotheby's sold the same painting for $3,554,500. It also marked a 139 percent jump from March 2013, when the Helly Nahmad gallery in Manhattan sold it for $9,191,040 to Jho Low, who was reportedly buying it as a gift for his friend Leonardo DiCaprio.

Basquiat, a prominent neo-expressionist artist who died of a heroin overdose at age 27 in 1988, has become a symbol of how the art world has transformed from treating fine art as a consumption good into viewing it as an investment opportunity. Historically, buying art was considered an expense rather than an investment, but Basquiat's market trajectory shows how dramatically this perception has changed.

In his new book "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon" published by Thames & Hudson, art consultant Doug Woodham reveals the deliberate and remarkably successful strategy used to transform Basquiat from a downtown New York scenester into a blue-chip, investment-grade asset class. Woodham's investigation pulls back the curtain on the high-profile advertising campaigns, bestselling children's books, and popular mythology surrounding the tortured genius narrative to expose the hidden mechanisms and the small group of powerful men who controlled them.

Woodham brings unique credentials to this analysis as a product of the modern financialized art market himself. As a former McKinsey partner and UBS banker, he spent four years serving as president of Christie's Americas before establishing his own consulting firm called Art Fiduciary Advisors. His insider perspective provides valuable insights into how the art market actually operates behind the scenes.

While Woodham's book doesn't read as a harsh denunciation or exposé of particularly nefarious activities, it serves as an important corrective for anyone naive enough to believe statements like the one made by Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer in 2006, who claimed that "the best art is the most expensive, because the market is so smart." Woodham's research demonstrates that this assumption is fundamentally flawed.

The art market is relatively small and highly susceptible to manipulation, as Woodham clearly illustrates through his examination of Basquiat's posthumous career management. The artist's market value was carefully orchestrated not only by his father, who served as the executor of his estate, but also by a tight-knit group of well-connected investor-collectors with significant financial resources and market influence.

The most prominent figures in this exclusive group include Jose Mugrabi, Peter Brant, and the late Enrico Navarra, along with a handful of others including Basquiat's former dealer Bruno Bischofberger. These influential collectors strategically intervened in the market whenever Basquiat's prices appeared to weaken, demonstrating their willingness and ability to purchase his works in bulk to maintain and increase market values. Their coordinated efforts have been instrumental in establishing Basquiat as one of the world's most valuable artists today.