Surrealist art is having a moment for many reasons—not least because, as a specialist friend once posited, the surreal is often preferable to reality, and offers occasions to laugh in profoundly unfunny times. As Gagosian’s Freja Harrell, who works with two surrealist artists, put it to me, “Surrealist imagery is resonating now because it’s the visual language of excess and estrangement.” No wonder, then, that the genre is booming relative to the rest of the somewhat lackluster art market—just look at the results of the recent auction of surrealist works from the Pauline Karpidas collection, which doubled its presale estimate.