The Last Days of the Art World … and Perhaps the First Days of a New One Life after the coronavirus will be very different.
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.
