I wrote this piece for the New York Times because I felt too many people weren't taking seriously enough the unprecedentedly perilous position of galleries: Despite two decades of global artworld expansion and enormous new wealth worldwide, the art market itself had largely stagnated. The way forward, I suggested, lay in being more open to new buyers, discouraging speculation and returning to the slower IRL work of cultivating artists and collectors close to home. Of the hundreds of pieces on this website, this is by far the one that has produced the most controversy, and not just because of the size of the NYT platform. Some thought I was saying a thing that was widely felt but desperately needed to be voiced. Others thought I was too focused on the galleries rather than artists - or, more commonly, that even if I was right, it wasn't my place to put forward those concerns. Judge that for yourself, but this is certain: The piece set out to ignite an intense and very real conversation about the situation of galleries, and it certainly achieved that.
