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Having studiously avoided the media for years, Charles Saatchi was stirred enough to write an article for the Guardian last December that opened: ‘Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is sport of the Eurotrashy, hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs.’

He has a point. A new type of collector is taking a close interest in contemporary art and elbowing old hands such as Saatchi out of the way. These new collectors are not interested in watching artists build a career through museum shows over a period of years. They’re not out to spot new movements as Saatchi tried to do with young British art. Instead they want to find out who is the latest overnight sensation and indulge in a flurry of speculative buying and selling.

Nothing exemplifies this cultural shift more potently than the story of the sudden and meteoric rise of a young American artist, Jacob Kassay, who went from modestly priced newcomer to auction-house phenomenon in the blink of an eye.

Born in 1984, Jacob Kassay graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the State University of New York in 2005. That same year he had a small solo show in a non-commercial project space in Buffalo. Then, like most young artists, he participated in a series of group shows in project spaces. His first one-man exhibition in a commercial gallery came in February 2009 at Eleven Rivington, New York. Here he unveiled a new technique, which involved evenly covering the surface of the canvas with acrylic paint before carefully silver-plating the surface thinly, deliberately burning edges of the areas of paint while keeping the brush-strokes visible. The exhibition did well and the 15 paintings sold quickly. Enough of a buzz had been created and when a few more of Kassay’s silver paintings turned up in two group shows and at an art fair later that year they also sold for the going rate of about $8,000.