> Another revealing indicator: Soho Art Materials, a popular art-supplies company in New York that works with artists and galleries, traces the sector’s decline to the summer of 2022. The firm’s sales began falling gradually and then in June 2023 dropped 20 percent from the previous month, according to Jonathan Siegel, a co-owner. The company was stretching 700 to 1,000 canvases annually for three years, starting in 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said.

It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.

It's a stretch. Basically the speculators moved into NFTs, which scratched the gambling itch, and NFTs and other forms of crypto made money laundering much more straightforward.

The art part of the market - in the sense of original creativity that means something to someone - had become a footnote. And large parts of it were more about performance than craft.

So resale values collapsed, and now everyone is walking through the rubble and wondering if there's anything left to rebuild.

AI is both completely irrelevant to this and absolutely central, but for non-obvious reasons.