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From: sim Category: Art Date: 16 September 2008 Time: 03:09 PM Review: I can't understand. There must be some connection between the decade long purchasing of contemporary art by bankers and others and the current credit crisis. Surely if people don't have a surplus of money they can't buy. Unless we are talking about the super, super rich. Again maybe it's those who buy art at the lower level that will hold back. The kind of person who might buy something at a student show for example. How much of the "bread and butter" art world functions in that way. There was a posh woman on the television saying how wonderful and exciting it was that art was booming. The usual stuff: "art is sexy for investors" etc. But I've never seen evidence of this in the past. Where are the artists that are benefiting? Actually London is a fucking nightmare to be an artist in: studio costs, dangerous shitty areas that curators take taxis to, if they go at all. The art world is surely as "virtual" as the money market. Reputations, prices are all based on a kind of collusion about who is significant and who isn't. I think the fall might happen when the public stop caring. A show by Hirst generates utter apathy. Then the critics sensing the mood, pronounce Hirst dead and ready for pickling in a tank. Then the momentum builds, the "Damian Virus" spreads throughout the art world taking other artists and galleries with it.