When we think about the art market, we tend to think of the sellers, the galleries and

auction houses, and the buyers, the art collectors, museums, maybe even some speculators.

That's what we looked at last week in the first episode of a three-part series we're calling

the hidden side of the art market.

Those buyers, and really even the sellers, they represent the demand side of the equation.

Today, let's talk about the supply side.

In other words, the artists.

What does the art market look like from their perspective?

Well, I would say it's the world's largest unregulated commodities market, except I was

corrected by a friend that art is not a commodity.

A commodity is like orange juice or copper, so you can't really compare apples and oranges,

but it is extremely unregulated and subject to all kinds of monkey business.

That's Tom Sachs.

I'm an artist, 55 years old, living in New York City.

I'm a sculptor, and my priority is making sculptures that really expose the transparency

in which they're made.

Sachs may sound low-key, but he's a pretty big deal.

His work is in the collections of top museums in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco,

Paris, Milan, you get the idea.

When we spoke with him, he was in Hamburg, Germany, setting up the fourth installment of a virtual

space mission he's been working on for 13 years.

We're going to the asteroid known as Vesta on a mining mission because we've run out of

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