This
morning, doing my regular morning round of favorite websites, Arts & Letters Daily enticed me with
this: “As the last big
unregulated industry, the art world attracts pirates, rogues,
eccentrics, bullies, and snobs. Ruling it all is the dealer-king...” and the
link went on to a piece, written by Nick Paumgarten in the New
Yorker, about the art dealer David Zwirner.
Of course I had to google Zwirner. Turns out he is an interesting and
quite powerful man in his field, and if you’re interested in the field it’s an
interesting article. But what really struck me, and prompted this first
paragraph, was not the subject of the piece but its own first paragraph, ‘buried’
in an article that would be read by very few:
“Very important people line up differently from you and
me. They don’t want to stand behind anyone else, or to acknowledge wanting
something that can’t immediately be had. If there’s a door they’re eager to
pass through, and hundreds of equally or even more important people are there,
too, they get as close to the door as they can, claim a patch of available
space as though it had been reserved for them, and maintain enough distance to
pretend that they are not in a line.”
Did this writer know how elegant a statement that is? It
is appropriate for those in the very top echelons of our world, the cream of
the elite no matter their sphere of influence, on down to the every-day rank
and file members like you and me. It prompted me to think “how true!” and to
bring this food for thought to the attention of my own very few.
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