I hate art auctions.

Galleries needn’t be exactly like White Columns purely because times are bad again. But the idea of this special space could – should – help shape what comes next.

The art world is molting – some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

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.

New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable – but certainly surmountable.

Chris Ofili’s suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

I don’t often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city’s magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn’t write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

It’s art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn’t about progress, and wants to – as Walt Whitman put it – ‘contain multitudes.’