Micki Meng is a gallerist based in San Francisco, New York, and Paris.

I had a long conversation with Jeff Poe right before he quit the art world last May. A true bleed-it-out art purist, he frayed like the best of us. (If it was ever more obvious that we are a wheel in a fucked-up machine…) I can no longer gaze into a black hole. Instead, I am staring at another art collection on @larryslist that looks just like the last, a tacit yet overt pitch, and I am about to vomit. I’m moving too fast. My mind is confused. Is the screen convex or concave? Am I the avatar? Leave my ID alone!

In the past few years, art has turned into a real industry with a capital I, and it appears as if we—the artists, gallerists, curators, patron-collectors, and, sadly, the last of the art critics—are the only ones who don’t believe it. I arrived on the scene in 2008, wide-eyed and in awe of the artist, at the time of the über curator. The biennale curator held all the power simply because it was their job to know the most about artists and what they were thinking and making around the globe. Art was an idea. Art was just art. Art was free. Rightly or wrongly, many people behaved badly. But then again, since when was art a party of saints?

Sohrab Mohebbi told me that everything since Covid has been the same, but weirder. Fucking hell. I started my gallery three months before the pandemic. In this time we saw the rise of Asia’s participation in the primary and secondary markets, which inevitably led to art becoming engaged in a wild form of accelerationism. At the same time, Big Tech was trying to commodify art in digital form. Art in its physical form was becoming a real-life NFT. WTF was happening? I started to miss the interior decorator.

Who the fuck is in charge here? The art fairs? There are too many and we are cannibalizing ourselves. Art pollution. We have all become Roombas. The auction houses are dangerously short-sighted. And they are also having shows directly with artists? Perrotin sold his business to… a private equity firm?! The megas have turned into franchises of the Sharper Image, gallery XXX has adopted a multiplier model of churn and burn, and… Barbara Gladstone is no… longer… here. Mom has left the room.

I have been hearing a lot of blame placed on the gambling-minded, short-term Asian buyer with saccharin and infantilized taste. But really, many people across the globe were involved in the short-term trading of art. One cannot blame the young Chinese market. They were not properly trained or protected. I speak with many Chinese collectors in our native tongue (I am from Shanghai and Taiwan), people who feel 或 受伤 or “broken-heartedly wounded” by merchants in a perceived El Dorado.

We did not take time to teach the budding Asian market to understand the intrinsic value of art. At the same time, the line between church and state was disappearing. In 2021, the largest global museum in the Far East, M+, opened its brilliantly robust program in Hong Kong in a brutalist building designed by starchitects Herzog and de Meuron. Conveniently, across the street is the massive Asia headquarters of Phillips auction house, designed by the same architect with the exact same facade. Um. Is this… okay?

All this is coupled with a generational shift. What is the art of our time in relation to the greatest issues of our time? Please, no more irresponsible click-baity articles abusing art and artists who have been thrashed around. It is cringe, and it is not productive, and it is also grossly inaccurate. It makes artists needlessly nervous.

Art and the market are okay. Everything is fine for those who were prudent enough not to raise prices too much and not to get on the treadmill of doing too many overpriced art fairs. Galleries who run programs with a heartbeat will never fail (unless they want to), and the artists will be okay. If I were to give artists any advice, it would be to show with a gallery like that. It is what we aspire to be. For gallerists, our margins are lower than ever before. Make smart choices.

In our gallery’s fifth year, we are sitting more comfortably in who we are, and where we want to be. I like the shadows. I love my artists. We will alway focus on long careers and partner with those who love art for the right reasons. And yes, if you bring our artists’ work to auction bloodlessly, whose life’s work you see as pure cash, you are dead to me.

I have told all of my artists this year: We are releasing less work. And only the best work. Spend more time in the studio. Let’s talk about art. Go further. Dodie Bellamy wrote this great text for Sam Parker and me when we did a fun group show in New York last year, and I will carry it with me for the rest of my life:

“According to the sexy Jungian therapist, this story is about soul-making. Of course she says this. Every Jungian story is about soul-making. But I see it as about the making of an artist. When she first meets the wounded old woman, the girl says the reason she lost her legacy necklace is that she believed a great untruth and that she was untrue to what she truly believed. To find one’s purpose as an artist, one must refuse the untruths we are all fed and instead insist on being true to what one truly believes.”

Our titans of industry are shifting. It is a changing of the guard. I think we are all wondering: What is this all going to look like? A new generation across the field is arriving. The radical curators of my time have all become museum directors. Forty percent of my carefully cultivated clients are in their twenties or thirties. We grow with our generation and this has long been an industry where we all mate for life.

How is the previous generation going to carefully pass the torch onwards? How do we honor the legacy of those who actually care about the future of art? How can we guide this in an interesting direction and create a place that we all want to be a part of? Because that is really how we all thrive—and really why people want to participate in art. To the outgoing generation: What is your legacy? And to my generation: What is ours?

For those who care, know that the avant-garde is still alive. There are breadcrumbs to bliss points behind magical doors. It is not scratching your eyes out for attention. It is a wonderful place that is left to be discovered. And it’s… right in front of your face. Hiding in plain sight. Just look at the art and take the time to understand what the artist is showing you. We are the truffle pigs, after all. Sniffing out the best of what this world has to offer.