Nice profile about the rise of the David Zwirner Gallery and a excellent fly on the wall view into the obtuse workings of the art world by the folks over at The New Yorker.

“One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot of people in the art world who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance. It distracts from the work, they say. It distorts curatorial instincts, critical appraisals, and young artists’ careers. It scares away civilians, who begin to lump art in with other symptoms of excess and dismiss it as another garish plaything of the rich. Of course, many of those who complain—dealers, artists, curators—are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money—mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base”

via The New Yorker article:

Dealer’s Hand

by Nick Paumgarten

via: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/02/131202fa_fact_paumgarten