from something.....

[Mark Kohut]

A funny thing may happen on the way to the recovery from the financial markets’ historic collapse. The art market, that alternate universe, may not change much at all—certainly not in any profound structural way—as economies around the world teeter, dangle their legs over the rim of a volcano and are forced into reinvention. Of course, the art market’s scale will contract as the larger economies contract. But not enough account is being taken of speed. This isn’t 1929 or the recession of 1974. This isn’t even the 1989 downturn in the art world, which wasn’t really a world then as it is now, with fairs and biennials in every port. The advances of the Web have sped the growth of art knowledge, and knowledge powers the expansion of older markets and the explosion of new markets; witness China and India, Russia and Brazil. How long the art market will stay down will be relative to the speed of communications and transactions. Even more
 significant, the fundamentals of the art market aren’t concealing some Katrina-size cataclysm. The essential model for the art business hasn’t changed in a century. Still, let’s put things in perspective: Iceland announced in October it was a heartbeat away from bankruptcy. Stock markets are rising and falling 1,000 points in a day. Thomas Pynchon couldn’t have written this. 

Sorry, he did...History is a step-function is one way he wrote it. In the story of silver and the gold standard in AtD is another...In the Dream casino scene is a third way.