The Spirit of Gallery
The artist-entrepreneur's time has come.
The dependably informative and amusing Art Report Today linked to a Substack post by someone calling himself
, lamenting the closures of the galleries of Tim Blum and Adam Lindemann.These men were the archetypal dealer-patriarchs: suited, storied, and ready to drop a record-breaking sale between a bone-dry martini and a sly wink to the Whitney board. They didn’t just run spaces—they held court. They were the guys who could launch a career with a dinner party, who made taste look effortless and exclusion seem aspirational.
But their exits? They’re not gold watch retirements. They’re a controlled burn. A strategic ghosting of an art world they no longer recognize—one shaped now by online viewing rooms, meme aesthetics, Gen Z curators, and collectors who prefer their shopping carts digital. The power they once wielded through whisper networks and art fair real estate is cracking under the weight of decentralization. What was once empire-building is now a soft landing. A retreat from relevance, wrapped in legacy.
I couldn’t be farther from this world, logistically, politically, or spiritually. This morning, I saw a swallowtail butterfly admire her reflection in the windshield of the pickup truck. A dignified turkey walked through the yard. The broccoli in the garden is filling in. The Eastern Phoebe chick in the nest on the porch has flown. Mr. Daddy may as well be describing events taking place on the moon.
On the surface, the art market is still swaggering. The headlines stay glossy—$100 million Basquiats, buzzy Basel booths brimming with selfie-takers, and yet another “fresh wave” of ultra-high-net-worth collectors ready to bid on whatever’s trend-jacked and neon-lit. The spectacle is intact. The branding is tight. The party rages on.
But peer past the champagne haze, and the cracks are impossible to ignore.
Mid-tier galleries are vanishing in silence, the kind of spaces that once took chances on emerging artists before they became product lines. Advisors murmur about longtime collectors disappearing without a trace—ghosted like a bad Hinge date. Shipping costs are ballooning, insurance premiums are climbing, and even the best-laid dinner party placement no longer guarantees a sale. Instagram, once the great democratizer of taste, now feels more like a graveyard of algorithmically cursed content. Every post is a pitch. Every caption reeks of desperation. We’re not discovering—we’re doomscrolling.
You’re doomscrolling. I’m weeding.
I understand the need for the breathless editorial tone, that of a fashion tabloid columnist on a deadline and a cocaine bender.1 Most of the art to which this milieu is attached doesn’t speak for itself. Thus it’s necessary to discuss the commercial operation around it as if it were culturally significant. If it is, it’s in the manner of the veritable haiku that Rush sneaked into “The Spirit of Radio”:
Concert hall—
Echoes with the sounds
Of salesmen
The analogy is salient because Neil Peart, Rush’s magnificently gifted2 drummer and lyricist, was describing a scenario in which the artistic and the commercial had fused into an indistinguishable mass. Radio was the definitive engine of tastemaking for popular music when Rush committed “The Spirit of Radio” to vinyl in 1980. Rush gained traction thanks to a DJ in Detroit who was impressed enough with “Working Man” to forgive its 7:11 run time. Peart was a libertarian and had no quarrel with capitalism. But while he recognized that the radio business was enabling art and making it available to all who wanted it…
Invisible airwaves
Crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle
With the energy
Emotional feedback
On a timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price –
Almost free…
…it simultaneously shaped music into forms outside the musician’s control, and possibly not for the better.
One likes to believe
In the freedom of music
But glittering prizes
And endless compromises
Shatter the illusion
Of integrity
When Roger Taylor, the magnificently gifted3 drummer and one of the lyricists of Queen, sat down to write “Radio Ga Ga,” he intended an anti-radio song. But upon digging into his irritation, he discovered betrayed love.
We watch the shows, we watch the stars
On videos for hours and hours
We hardly need to use our ears
How music changes through the years
Let’s hope you never leave, old friend
Like all good things, on you, we depend
So stick around ‘cause we might miss you
When we grow tired of all this visual
Then the pre-chorus sang, “You had your time, you had the power / You've yet to have your finest hour.”4
In 2025, we call it by its retronym, “terrestrial radio.” It drives taste at the margins, if even there. It seems that “physical gallery” may not be far behind it. Radio as we used to understand it still exists. Likewise, it would be astonishing—and in my opinion, tragic—if galleries disappeared outright. Nevertheless, as the aforementioned columnist (I’m not typing his name again, it’s silly) put it:5
The role of the dealer is changing. The monolithic, male-dominated, vaguely mythic figure of the Art Daddy—half businessman, half priest of taste—is losing ground. In his place? A fragmented ecosystem: The influencer-dealer, fluent in memes, marketing, and moral positioning. The artist-entrepreneur, skipping galleries altogether and going straight to collector. The private advisor with a Substack and a WhatsApp list. The online platform masquerading as a movement.
And then there are the artists themselves, increasingly wary of gatekeepers, increasingly fluent in brand-building, and increasingly uninterested in playing nice with legacy systems that don’t pay them fairly or represent them honestly.
It’s not that the power has disappeared. It’s just diffused.
Would you, dear fellow artist, like some of that power to diffuse in your direction? Of course you would. And it might, if only we would listen to what Caroll Michels said in the first edition of How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist in 1983:
One of the more popular rationalizations is the perpetual search for the perfect agent. Once this person is found he or she will take your work to the marketplace. … I estimate that 75 percent of my clients have the notion in the back of their minds that I will fulfill this fantasy and provide the buffer zone they are seeking. Apart from my belief that within the visual-arts field this fairy godperson is practically nonexistent (or inaccessible to artists who have not yet been “discovered” and obtained a high market value), I strongly believe that artists are their own best representatives.
Those thoughts were hardly changed when the seventh edition came out in 2018, and she added to them:
If members of the public were self-confident about their preferences in art, the strength of the power structure would diminish. Art dealers would be acknowledged as sales personnel, a title that reflects their real occupation versus the messiah-like image currently awarded. Arts-related professions would be recognized as occupations that were created around artists, and not, as it often seems, the other way around! Or as the late Ted Potter, an arts advocate, pointed out: “Curators, administrators, directors, and art dealers are all really flight attendants for this thing called art. … Art and the creative artists are what it’s all about.”
And:
Most structural changes in the art world will come about only through artist pressure, artist initiative, and artist participation. While the prospect of radically changing the art world might seem overwhelming to any one artist, one of the most important contributions that any artist can make is to restructure and take control of his or her own career.
In the intervening 35 years, the passages of the book describing precisely how the artist might do so had exploded, including a description of best practices regarding the sale of art via the artist’s site. The artist-entrepreneur’s time has come.
Consider again “The Spirit of Radio.” When the concert halls echo with the sound of salesmen, what is the sound? When Geddy Lee, the magficiently gifted6 bassist and vocalist for Rush, sings those lines, it is the sound of Rush. Peart, I believe, recognized that he was complicit in the ironies of playing music professionally, which is not to say that he was doing anything but his absolute damndest as a musician. They are not contradictory. The song notes, “It’s really just a question / Of your honesty.” Honesty, one senses, is what appears to be missing when the above reporter peers through the champagne haze.
The obsolescence of the gallery, if that is indeed what’s happening, only clarifies the situation we were in all along: responsible for tending our gardens. Little else matters.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Credit where it’s due, “algorithmically cursed” is a brilliant turn of phrase.
Compare these sentiments from Rush and Queen to “Radio” by Rammstein, in which Till Lindemann recalls listening to Western radio stations as a child living under the boot of East Germany. “We were not allowed to belong / Not to see, speak or listen / But every night for an hour or two / I am gone from this world / Every night, a bit of happiness / My ear up close to the world receiver.” However much you hate socialism, you do not hate it enough.
Bullet list edited to paragraph form due to Substack formatting limitations.
"If members of the public were self-confident about their preferences in art, the strength of the power structure would diminish." No, it would become so weak as to be nearly impotent. Trouble is, apart from the exceptions that prove the rule, the public has always been too dependent on "experts."
Bravo Franklin, thanks for this!