The title of this essay isn’t mine. “The Last Days of the Art World” was the title my editor gave to another essay I wrote, last week, about the last day that I spent in New York art galleries before they shuttered for the foreseeable future. I thought it was too sensationalistic and untrue. I freaked out, scared, and asked him to change it. But less than seven days later, I am seeing his dark light and thinking there may be more to that bleak prediction than I wanted to believe at first.
Why didn’t I see it that way originally? In large part, I think, it’s because I’ve watched the art world go through episodes like this before — not pandemics, of course, but contractions and crises of various kinds, which each have shaped, not destroyed, the community I love. I thought, “Don’t be a disasterist; we’ll see what happens.” In particular, I’m a true believer from one particular former bygone world. I came of age during the last years of the smaller, nonprofessional, non-moneyed 1970s art world, where there were no such things as stable careers, sales, art fairs, big audiences, and auctions. This world ran on the desire and passion of semi-outlaws, vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, creeps, geniuses, hangers-on, exiles, gypsies, and aristocratic bohemians. It was a world before the one we know now that has grown so large, hyperactive, circuslike, top-heavy, and professional — all seasoned with obscene amounts of money, however concentrated it is in the hands of a lucky, mostly white 1,500 people.