Much good art got made while money ruled; I like a lot of it, and hardship and poverty aren't virtues. The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists - especially emerging ones - won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want.

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.

Don't talk. I can't hear myself see.

Those who love him love that he sells the most art; they take it as a point of faith that this proves Kinkade is the best. But his fans don't only rely on this supply-and-demand justification. They go back to values.