Any historian will tell you that it's impossible to definitively judge people or events until you can look back at them in the fullness of time. Yesterday's measured strategy can easily become today's overreaction. Yesterday's misfortune can easily become tomorrow's blessing. Yesterday's antagonists can easily become today's heroes.

To some degree, I believe this is exactly what's happened with the legacy of Peggy Guggenheim. And examining the how and why of it leads to some potentially valuable perspective on navigating the present-day art world. 

Collecting fragments as the art market (finally) drops a few feet closer to Earth...

At noon ET yesterday, Shia LeBeouf once again turned the Internet into a den of howling werewolves by embarking on a durational performance piece. But whatever you may think of its creative merits, one of its executional details sets up an interesting possibility for monetizing artwork online. 

For readers who don't already know, this year I've been writing a weekly email newsletter in addition to my standalone blog posts. The newsletter––which you can sign up for here––recaps major business developments in the art market over the previous seven days, with one or two sentences of commentary on each story from yours truly. 

I haven't done a hall-of-fame job of publicizing the newsletter to date, and the discrepancy between the blog's page view numbers and The Gray Market Weekly's subscriber list reflects as much. So to try to muscle up both arms of the project, I've decided to start posting about half of each newsletter here on the blog every Monday morning. Newsletter subscribers, on the other hand, will still receive the full package every Sunday evening. So if you like the abbreviated version, sign up for the expanded one. 

If we've learned nothing else from the study of cults and communes, we've learned to be wary of the places an "all are welcome" mindset can lead in the wrong circumstances. David Koresh's Biblical egalitarianism eventually triggered the infamous Waco raid. Jim Jones's sermons of inclusion are the reason we all know the morbid meaning behind "drinking the Kool-Aid." And Charles Manson single-handedly ended the swinging '60s in Los Angeles by using free love to pry open the door to hell.  

What does this have to do with the art market, you ask?

Poll professionals in any industry, and you'll inevitably hear about a small set of practices that are almost universally reviled... and yet almost universally adopted, with no apparent course-changes in sight. 

Do the same in the contemporary gallery sector, and I guarantee that one of the first entries on the response list will be the exhibition press release: almost without fail, a page-long chunk of text as indecipherable to today's readers as a wall of hieroglyphics––and despite all the distaste, as sacred-seeming, too.

Midway through another week of watching various arts writers and industry figures fire potshots at the ruling class––an activity that's left gunpowder on my own hands at times––I feel like it's worthwhile to stop and consider the potential for ricochet. 

Over the last several years, "disruption" has become both a buzzword and a bogeyman in a whole range of industries. The fine art space has been no exception. And while outside analysts have tended to be the most enthusiastic about its imminent potential, some insiders have fallen under the spell, too. 

Today I want to try to correct some potential misunderstandings about just how much industry-changing chaos has actually taken place, hopefully before those misunderstandings start to distort anyone's expectations of where we are. And I'm going to use an insider opinion as my on-ramp.

Many, if not most, of art history's great inflection points have been covered in the rhetoric of rebellion against the status quo––specifically the monetization of fine art, or even capitalism as a whole. Yet in most cases, if you wheel a Caterpillar onto the mythology and start digging, you barely have to overturn the topsoil before uncovering the money quietly planted underneath––and I think fine art is unquestionably better for it.

Midway through another week of gathering business-in-art reporting for the Gray Market Newsletter, I stumbled onto the trail of the piece mentioned below––ironically, during a totally unrelated search: 

[T]he first of a two part series of articles in Fortune proclaimed art another of the most desirable international currencies. Both investments and investors were divided into three categories: "gilt-edged," "blue chip," and "venture capital"....