Galleries are not the engine of the art world. Artists and their art are. Culture only trickles up, and money never trickles down.  A comment by Lari Pittman from Los Angeles in an NYT letter to the editor.

Here are a few easily forgotten facts of life in a capitalist, transactional society.  Capital, which is simply money one can access and use, is immune to gravity.  The second fact is only those with money can afford the devices necessary to collect the gravity exempt wealth on its way up and out of reach.  Finally trickle down economics is a ruse and distraction for money once it becomes wealth,  unlike water, and never trickles down.  We can be as angry as we want, but in the end, even those collecting more money on its way up and out of reach of the common citizen relies on a stable society below wealth to keep the circulation system moving and healthy. A few members of our government right now are rich and complacent with their new capacities of funneling money on its way up and into their private collection devices.  Our own President has made full use of the new, unregulated form of amoral wealth called crypto to strip investors and gather their meager investments into private ballooning pockets.

Rely on an artist to identify the anti-gravity nature of wealth. To the new millionaires and billionaires this writer warns you that unless you intentionally, assign packets of gravity to wealth to serve the common person working for means in America, the economic system that circulates all money and keeps it healthy will heat up and implode.  Your brand new million dollar bill will be worthless. You will fall to earth like Icarus.

Modest Proposal for Good

Money is indeed amoral.  Wealth can be used as a weapon for war or a garden spade for the community.  It is the decisions connected to good intention that attaches packets of assigned gravity to elements of wealth.  Even wealthy individuals are still individual human beings deserving the rights of human kind, but their super wealth is a cancer in the economic system. The flashy symbols of wealth, like private jets, watches that could buy a semester in college, and weddings that could have fed thousands of impoverished are no different than that hard fleshy growth you refuse to take to the doctor.  Economic theory is just an abstraction about human values and the intentional assignment of gravity to portions of wealth. To borrow a metaphor from Jonathan Haidt, the human community is the elephant and the economic theory is that wee little trainer on the elephants back. The elephant can be helpful but God help you if you irritate the elephant to anger. A good decision can draw wealth back to the people. A good economy is one that that brings wealth and capital back to earth where it came from to justly and morally sustain the fields of humanity. An intentionally good economy would be good.  Shall we?