Recently, the fine art auction industry has experienced an unexpected boom right on the heels of an unexpected bust just a few years ago. Now, with a surge of wealthy Chinese driving up prices, some financial experts fear the onset of another bubble—one ready to burst. To help make sense of it all, let us turn to Oscar Wilde, the great playwright, novelist and purveyor of witty commentary, who provided a myriad of quotes on the subjective and unpredictable medium of art.

There are always worthy art pieces up for sale. Auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s constantly unveil new works by old masters—and continuously find interested buyers. When an industry depends on the sale of beautiful objects created by famous people in limited supply, it can expect lucrative returns. But how does one quantify the value of a subjectively beautiful object?

The problem with purchasing art is that its value can suddenly shift based on how much money people are willing to pay for it. And that creates a very precarious situation. In a recent auction, several re-appraisals and aggressive Chinese buyers drove the price of a vase initially valued at $800 to its final selling point of $86 million—a 100,000% increase!

This kind of unpredictability has been seen before and often indicates an underlying problem in financial markets. In late 2006, a series of Sotheby’s auctions saw record returns. A Jackson Pollack sold for $140 million, the most ever paid for a painting. A Willem de Kooning went for $137 million. A Gustav Klimt for $130 million. All these purchases occurred right before the credit bubble started to burst.

Vikram Mansharamani, author of Boombustology, argues that periods of record bidding are “scarily accurate bubble predictors.” He explains that Sotheby’s stock, mostly stable over the last 20 or so years, has undergone four sharp peaks. In the late 1980s, Japan was the center of the international art market, but its economy soon imploded and Sotheby’s stock plummeted.

Ten years later, Silicon Valley caused another auction boom during the Internet bubble, which soon burst. A decade after that, the credit bubble happened, with the art market raking in a record $11.3 billion in 2007, only to see that number plunge to $4.8 billion in 2009. Now, all signs point to an impending Chinese bubble. Pay high prices at your own peril…

In this case, the excess is coming from Chinese buyers and they are paying record-high monetary values, especially for individual pieces. China’s spending has quadrupled over the last five years and last year reached $10.9 billion dollars, reports The Atlantic, wresting the top position from the U.S. as the largest auction market for art.

Chinese purchases have ranged from the aforementioned vases, to paintings by the Old Masters, and even to wine, when three bottles of 1869 Lafite Rothschild sold for over $200,000 each last year. A Chinese buyer is believed to have set the record for a Picasso, paying $106 million last year. Chinese buyers have also demonstrated a preference for sizable works, as in 6-foot tall paintings, seemingly craving volume in their prizes. Pieces are getting bigger and prices are getting bigger. But can this price escalation last?

Just because the Chinese are paying high prices now does not mean their financial situation will remain rosy. Mansharamani views art spending as a “symptom of overconfidence and hubris” indicative of a “newly rich society spending its easy money with exponential flamboyance.” Derek Thompson, in The Atlantic, sees signs of “fake wealth” in China, including housing investment reaching the “inauspicious mark of 6% of GDP, the same level the U.S. touched in 2006 before our bubble burst” and lavish spending on “ghost towns” built for millions and only inhabited by a few thousand.

Another indicator is the Chinese stock market. Although headlines advertise “booming economic growth,” the Shanghai Composite Index has not made any net progress during the last six months. “Chinese stocks are diverging noticeably from Sotheby’s—a stock the index has tracked very closely for most of the last two decades,” writes Eric Fry in The Daily Reckoning. “While Sotheby’s stock is busy challenging its all-time high, the Shanghai Composite remains 50% below its all-time high of October 2007.”

The art market is fickle, as are tastes. Today’s treasure might be tomorrow’s trinket. The Wall Street Journal reports that “collectors feel wiser” since the last crash and that “those who lost fortunes…are treading carefully now.”

Even so, the newly aggressive Chinese buyers have skewed the art market, sky-rocketing the prices of items they deem valuable. Chinese collectors might think they have the fine art market figured out, but is the next bubble ready to burst? As Wilde concluded in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, “All art is quite useless.” But in this case, the art market might be useful in portending a financial hit to the Chinese economy as well as to any collector thinking of bidding against the Chinese.