An Insider’s Indictment of an Isolated Art World

September 10, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Honoré Daumier, The Third-Class Carriage, 1864. Oil on canvas, 25 3/4 x 35 1/2 in. (65.4 x 90.2 cm). From the H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, Object Number: 29.100.129. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

For the better part of a century, the art world has insulated itself from the broader world. It carried an air of elitism, and the average person often felt excluded by it, or quietly looked down upon. That always struck me as strange. Art—its making and its appreciation—has never been the property of a class. It is part of the human condition. It predates the market, the museum, the fair and every credential we have invented to stand between a person and the thing they are looking at. A child draws before he writes. A grieving family builds something to mark a life. The impulse is older than any of us and belongs to all of us.

And yet the art world spent the last 100 years building a wall around it, and then crowned a handful of critics as kingmakers on the other side of that wall—as though anyone could truly tell you what is good art and bad art for your own self. There was a period when a single critic’s judgment could make or unmake a career, when a taste was handed down like a papal ruling and the rest of us were expected to receive it. Whole movements rose and fell on the strength of a paragraph. I understand how it happened. Markets need arbiters, and money is more comfortable when someone respectable has certified the object first. But we mistook a commercial convenience for a truth, and then we taught the public that their own eyes were not to be trusted. That is not connoisseurship. That is gatekeeping with a vocabulary.

I never entered this business to please the art world or to make a statement within it. I have always believed the very idea of an “art world” is wrong. Art belongs to the broader world; it is part of it. If a work speaks to people—if it reaches beyond the initiated—then it is consequential to the global cultural experience, and in my book that is what makes it important. Who wants to be revered in the esoteric circles of the art world and blind to everything outside them? That is not a career. That is a very well-appointed room with the door shut.

A few years ago I was called before Congress to speak about the business of art and about artists themselves. I was there in defense of an artist; whatever anyone thinks of that artist or that work is, to my mind, beside the point. What mattered is that art had seeped into the national narrative of the day, and once it does, it carries a real voice. I was asked at the time whether it felt like an aberration, an abuse of power, to be dragged to Washington to explain and defend an artist I represented. I never thought so. Art, artists and the people who champion them belong in the halls of power. They belong there to speak for the conscience of a nation and of our broader civilization.

I was told I was the first gallerist in American history to receive a congressional subpoena and testify. That statement shocked me more than the subpoena did. First? In two and a half centuries? Across every war, every depression, every civil rights struggle, every moment when this country was arguing with itself about who it was—not once had anyone thought to ask the people who spend their lives with the objects that record exactly that. My reaction, standing there, was not indignation at being summoned. It was: what are we in the art world doing in here when the world is out there?

Wars, tragedies and conflicts the world over, and it is the artist who can bring a particular voice, a unique perspective, that is so often lost on those in power. Policy is written in aggregates—casualty figures, growth rates, displacement numbers. Art is written in the singular. It restores the one face that the aggregate erases. That is not decoration. That is intelligence of a kind no briefing book contains. Anyone who truly believes in art’s power to change us as a culture has an obligation to carry it outward: to the politicians who so easily develop a myopic view of the world, and to the working person who may find solace in religion—but who should know that art is a place of rest too.

Lately the art world talks of little else but what is broken. Everyone feels that something is not right, that something has stopped working. The diagnoses are endless and mostly self-flattering. Here is mine.

In an age of infinite information—and now of artificial intelligence and technologies that were science fiction a decade ago—much of the work being celebrated no longer speaks to people, because it no longer reflects their daily reality. Knowledge has become cheap and plentiful. Fewer and fewer people take art criticism, or the machinery that props it up, seriously, and they are not wrong to have stopped. When anyone can see everything, the authority that came from having seen what others could not is gone. It does not come back. The world has become smaller, cultures more transparent to one another, populations more migratory. What worked in 1955 cannot possibly work now. And yet too many still speak about art as though nothing outside the halls of academia has changed.

The era of discussing art as the private reserve of the intelligentsia is ending, and the ending is overdue. What is broken is not the taste of the public and it is not the supply of talent. What is broken is that this field can no longer survive insulated and exclusionary toward the very people—the very humanity—it claims to reflect. You cannot hold yourself apart from a civilization and then present yourself as its mirror.

If any movement reflects the world we actually live in now, it may be Fusionism. Its premise is that a work should incorporate everything available and familiar to us—paint and sculpture and found material, sound, light, the discarded objects of ordinary life, the technology in our hands—so that the work reflects lived experience rather than rejecting the parts of that experience the tradition finds unbecoming. We do not live purified lives. We live surrounded by noise and screens and salvage and beauty all at once, and a work that admits only oil on linen is describing a world that no longer exists.

Shalom Neuman, the founder of Fusionism, saw this decades ago—long before the culture caught up to it, and at considerable cost to himself for having been early. He saw it because he believes in art without irony: that if a work is to truly reflect who we are, it has to do it with the objects and the methods that are actually ours. He was not predicting the future. He was describing a present that most of the field had agreed not to look at.

Meanwhile, galleries in New York close weekly. Rents that made sense in another market, a collector base that has thinned and aged, fairs that consume a year’s margin in four days, and a generation of buyers who were never given a reason to care. Some of those closures are simple economics and no one’s fault. But some of them are the bill coming due for a long habit of speaking only to ourselves. A business that spends 50 years telling the public it isn’t qualified to have an opinion should not be surprised when the public declines to spend its money.

I do not think the answer is nostalgia. It is a return to the first thing—to why any of this was built in the first place. Not to protect a market, not to certify taste, but to put a person in front of a work that might change how they understand their own life. That was the original proposition, and it is still the only one strong enough to sustain what we do.

The art world was always the wrong idea. There is only the world, and art’s place inside it. Our job is to close the distance.