A Reset

First, a word to those of you already here. Until now these letters have mostly introduced the work and the artists I believe in, one at a time. That doesn't stop. But I want to widen what this is, to step back from the single show and look at the system around it, the one coming apart in plain sight. Same hand, a longer view. This is where it starts.

For seventy-five years the art world ran on a machine almost nobody looked at directly. Dealers, fairs, auction houses, a handful of magazines deciding what counted — a system built to manage scarcity in a world where seeing art meant being in the room. That world is gone, and the machine built for it is failing in plain sight. What’s strange is how few people will say so without either mourning or spin.

This is an attempt to say so. Once a week, plainly, I want to take something that actually happened, an acquisition, a closure, a record at auction, a museum quietly legitimizing a medium the market already abandoned, and use it to explain what’s breaking underneath, and why it matters past the art world’s own walls.

I should tell you where I stand, because it shapes everything I’ll write. I ran a gallery and closed it. I work where art meets the machine, and I’m building something meant to replace part of the system I’m describing. So I’m not above the fray. I have a stake in the walls coming down, and you should read me knowing it. I’d rather declare that than pretend to a neutrality no participant actually holds.

What I can promise is the opposite of the two things on offer everywhere else. Not the wail that art is dying, it isn’t. Not the auction-house cheer that everything has never been healthier, it isn’t that either. Something is ending, and something is being decided in what it leaves behind, and the decision is more interesting than either side wants to admit.

That’s the whole project. One letter a week. The long view, in plain language, from someone close enough to the break to feel it move.

Michele