We are living through the greatest paradox in the history of human creativity. Art has never been more visible. Images flood our screens every second—infinite, instantaneous, omnipresent. Yet art has never been more inaccessible. The experience of standing before a work, of inhabiting its space, of letting it transform your perception — this remains confined to the privileged few who can afford the flight to Basel, the admission to MoMA, the proximity to power.
Galleries erect walls of exclusivity. Museums hoard treasures behind marble façades. Collectors lock art in climate-controlled vaults. Shipping companies charge fortunes to move fragile objects across borders. Insurance companies profit from fear. The entire infrastructure of art circulation serves not culture, but capital.
Meanwhile, artists struggle. They create work that challenges perception, that opens new dimensions of seeing, that questions the very foundations of how we understand reality—and this work reaches, at best, a few thousand people in a single city for a few weeks. The rest of the world never experiences it. The work returns to storage. The artist waits for the next opportunity.
The current model was built for the 19th century. Physical objects, physical spaces, physical boundaries. Slow transport. Limited communication. Scarcity as a virtue. But we live in the 21st century, in an age where ideas can circulate globally in seconds, where communities form across continents, where the impossible becomes routine.
Yet art circulation remains trapped in a paradigm designed for a world that no longer exists.
