How to Solve the Art World’s Courage Problem

June 26, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Yellow) in “Pop Forever Tom Wesselmann &” at Fondation Louis Vuittonin 2024. Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP

It’s not always those among us who survive and thrive in brutal environments who are the best of us. If anything, they almost never are. In such a world, it is almost always those with the courage to feel—those who open their hearts—who are punished for it and perish. A lesson for anyone who ever dares to do the same. And so we harden. We go cold. We fear saying anything the crowd might object to. We fear them, we fear our neighbors, we fear everywhere. How can a world function when everyone in it is constantly afraid? It can’t. And while some among us—the courageous ones—die as Hilde Lynn Helphenstein did, overnight, tragically, instantly, the rest of us do so quietly, cowardly and slowly.

I’ve seen too much of this in the art world to stay silent. Courage deserves to be named. Few women ever break through in this world—and when they do, they are treated barbarically. No wonder most prefer to fade into the wallpaper rather than be seen. Women, the industry quietly says, are not enough on their own—they feel compelled to succumb to surgery, to stay young, to remain beautiful. Men don’t feel the same pressures. Hilda was even attacked, I read in passing, by an artist who accused her of betraying the working class. The working class. As if the art world as it exists today has any relationship to the working-class towns of Kentucky and Pennsylvania or the backwoods of Maine and Texas.

Since when has the art world been for the working class? I have yet to see a working-class man or woman walk into a SoHo or Chelsea gallery and truly feel welcome. Art is one of the few things capable of helping ordinary people endure extraordinary difficulty. That it doesn’t is a choice made daily by an industry that talks about accessibility while building higher walls.

The art world presents itself as progressive, liberal, enlightened. It is none of those things—and nothing reveals that more plainly than who holds the pen. At the New York Times, both staff visual art critics are white men. This is the power seat. This is where artists are legitimized or buried, where galleries rise or disappear, where careers are made with a single review. And in 2026, at the paper that lectures this nation daily on race and equity, not one of those seats belongs to a woman or a person of color.

I am not someone who deals in racial politics. I believe in the best person for the role, nothing more. But in a country of 330 million people—a nation of extraordinary racial, cultural and gender diversity—to arrive repeatedly at the same demographic in the same chair as during the era of segregation is not an accident. The odds against it are staggering. Which means it is not chance. It is preference. Quietly maintained, institutionally protected and made grotesque by the fact that the institution doing it is the loudest voice in the room on the subject of equity. That is not progressivism. That is performance.

Many in the art world—artists especially—imagine an art world that simply doesn’t exist. I never cared about the art world. I cared about the actual world. Art belongs to only one world, and that is the same one we all wake up in. It was never meant to be elitist, exclusionary or as harsh and judgmental as it has become.

Art is about conveying across time, culture and language the human experience that unites us all. That simple nod of understanding between seemingly different human beings—reminding us of our common humanity. I wish it were more for the working class. For the millions who wake up every day and go to work, who don’t have the luxury to pontificate on life’s big questions, but who can be moved in ways they never expected, if only they were allowed to experience it. Sometimes it is nothing more than standing before a work of art before heading to work, only to realize years later that it was precisely that moment that gave them the courage to continue.

If evil exists in this world, it killed humanity’s soul by seducing the art world with capital. The circle grew smaller, more exclusionary. We began to fetishize certain artists and certain names and forgot what art even is, robbing humanity of one of the last tools we had to remember that despite everything, the commercializing, the materialism, the decadence, something still remained within us that we once treasured. A soul.

Perhaps it is time to stop and reckon with how far we have strayed—and how thoroughly we have become lost. We hear constantly about galleries closing, retrenchment, the art world model broken beyond repair—everyone desperate to discover the secret of survival. Maybe the secret is, and has always been, the one thing we had and lost. The model that has seemed so elusive begins with galleries once again rooted in the owner’s heart. Because when you have forgotten you even had one, you will spend the rest of your days trying to understand with your mind how to fix something that only the heart can.

Georges Bergès is the founder and owner of Georges Bergès Gallery. He still believes art is not a luxury but a necessity in life. Art for life’s journey.