EVERYONE LOOKS GUILTY 

Lately, I have had the feeling that the art world is looking for someone to blame. The director. The collector. The fairs. The galleries. The advisors. Instagram. AI. Young artists. The market. Every crisis produces the same reaction: we look for personal responsibility because it is harder to accept that the operating system itself may be changing. 

When I arrive in a city, I always look at the cranes on construction sites. They tell you where money, confidence, and the idea of the future are moving before the newspapers do. I am never completely sure whether they announce progress or speculation, but they rarely appear by accident. 

The art world often does the opposite. It keeps looking at the buildings while the ground beneath them has already changed. 

TOO MUCH TO SEE

The art system we have inherited was built around scarcity. Images were difficult to produce, see, and distribute. Visible artists were scarce. Information was scarce. Access was scarce. Museums, galleries, critics, magazines, and curators were the filters through which that scarcity passed.

Today, images are infinite and almost free. We are surrounded by more photographs, films, artworks, advertisements, and generated images than we could ever absorb. What we lack is not something to look at but the time required to look at it. And yet, much of the art system continues to behave as if its main task is to place yet more images in front of us, with each new one entering a stream that is already full.

THE REVOLUTION LOST ITS ADDRESS

People often say that nothing is happening in art anymore. I think the opposite may be true. Too much is happening. There are more artists, exhibitions, fairs, images, texts, and parallel narratives than any one person can follow. What has disappeared is not change, but the center that once organized it.

In the 20th century, a small number of exhibitions, critics, and magazines could create the impression of a shared direction. One movement appeared to replace another. Art seemed to be going somewhere. Today, thousands of directions exist at once. The revolution did not end. It lost its address.

When everything can appear new at the same time, ‘new’ becomes less convincing as a value. It is easy to produce and even easier to consume.

Perhaps the more useful question is no longer, ‘Is it new?’ but ‘Was it necessary?’

A REASON TO STOP

The art system is still extremely good at administering objects. It knows how to store, transport, insure, authenticate, preserve, exhibit, and price them. Meanwhile, much of what gives a work its life happens through encounters, stories, arguments, reproductions, and circulation. The object has not disappeared. But it no longer travels alone.

Cities may have understood something similar before museums did. For decades, they took space away from pedestrians to help cars move faster. Now they are slowly doing the reverse:Sidewalks are widened, streets are closed, and places are created where people can stop. A person who walks, pauses, looks around, meets someone, or changes direction has become more valuable than a vehicle that simply passes through. Perhaps art faces a similar dilemma: not how to produce more traffic, but how to create a reason to stop.

That pause does not have to be peaceful. It can be uncomfortable, funny, embarrassing, violent, or confusing. It only has to break, for a moment, the automatic movement from one image to the next. A system built to select, distribute, and protect art may still be defending a form of scarcity that no longer exists in the same way. Images and symbols now come from everywhere: cinema, fashion, video games, memes, platforms, and AI.

Art will probably lose if it tries to compete by becoming faster, louder, or more productive. It can still do something else: create doubt, delay judgment, make the familiar unstable, and leave behind something the next image cannot immediately replace.

Perhaps the problem is not how to attract more attention, but what we do with it once we have it.