The notion that AI and other digital technologies will “democratize the art market” is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

For most of us, time still passes linearly in our personal lives but cultural time seem increasingly to have no boundaries, no fixed points that demarcate then from now, and no obvious pathway back to the wide-open spaces of the 1960s and 1970s. There is just so much stuff now that it is harder to make sense of it, to winnow the great from the good from the pet rocks of their moment.