I have been a dealer for nearly 50 years and have watched this argument arrive several times under different names. The art world keeps looking for someone to blame: first speculators, then fairs, before them the mega-galleries and the auction houses accused of turning art into a financial asset.

Let me say plainly what many people in this business think privately: much of what that system produced is decorative and commercial, and should never have been called art at all.

There is truth in these accusations, but the hunt leads nowhere. Blame asks who did this to us, a comfortable question because the answer is always someone else. The harder question is what kind of art world we intend to build now that the old one has run out of steam.

A correction is not a collapse, but an invitation to recalibrate. For decades the market’s energy went into velocity: how fast a name could rise, how many fairs a gallery could work, how quickly a work could be resold. That velocity produced excitement and opened doors for artists, but it crowded out something quieter and far more essential: the slow work of building a relationship between an artist, an idea, and the people who live with it.

A healthy market should optimize not for greed, vanity, or the next flip, but for the conversation a work makes possible with the person standing before it. Art is one of the few remaining spaces where a culture articulates itself to itself: what it values, what it fears, what it is still trying to understand. When the market drifts from that purpose, of course it corrects. The correction is not a punishment. It is the market remembering what it is for.