Conventional wisdom says that art world power these days lies with the people who broker and buy art (dealers and collectors), rather than with those who create and analyze it (artists and critics). After all, in this hyperboom time, it is the market that makes most of the news. Even journeyman dealers command vast and glamorous spaces in Chelsea, Santa Monica and other stylish nabes. Young hedgies have been raking in such obscene bonuses over the past couple of years that they’ll buy almost anything they can hang on a town-house wall or plop on a new oak floor. Today, owning a passel of contemporary artworks is more like having a six-car garage filled with 7-series Beemers than it is like possessing the complete writings of Frantz Fanon.

This market-based power, however, lodged as it is firmly in the present, is pretty superficial compared with the power to shape the future. The real power lies below the commercial surface that currently glows so brightly. It resides in those who are shortly to change the art world: the artists.

Remember, it all begins with art: No art, no art world. Only artists have the power to start with practically nothing—tabula rasa, empty canvas, hunk of clay, roll of film, pile of junk, empty room, fresh laptop—and make something arresting and profound. In short, artists are creative; everybody else is reactive. It is only after painters, sculptors, photographers and the like do their thing that dealers and collectors (and, yes, critics and curators) can assume their roles as conduits, passing the creations along. To be sure, such people help artists survive, and savvy, sophisticated passers along do the job better than crass, vulgar ones. But most artists don’t need them to survive. Most—especially the ones prickly enough to change the art world—survive by their day jobs.

Behind the common perception that artists are less powerful than others in the art world is, ironically, the quick and flashy success so many of them have experienced. In the 1990s, collectors started to prowl the studios of mfa candidates, buying their thesis works even before the professors signed off on them. Consequently, an mfa in art became a hot career ticket. Programs ballooned, and pretty soon there were more “emerging artists”—inside and outside school—than you could shake a platinum AmEx card at. These wunderkinder made the whole scene what it is today: thick, buzzy, fast, gossipy, glitzy and undifferentiated.

But I have a hunch their day is coming to a close. Collectors aren’t as interested in cradle robbing as they used to be. Overpopulated mfa programs are spitting graduates into a cooling career field. Soon a lot of prospective mfa candidates—those more interested in being hotshots in hip culture than in being artists per se—will find someplace else to go (maybe into communications departments charged with turning out the next generation of reality-TV producers). Dealers’ ranks will also thin, similarly shedding those who want to be hotshots in hip culture more than they want to hang around art and nurture artists. Collectors’ numbers will dwindle as well, and those remaining will replace their “buy ’em now, cull ’em later” strategy with thoughtful penny-pinching. We’ve probably seen the peak of cheap money, too. The bill for the idiotic war we started in Iraq is in the mail. The current witticism, “Is that million dollars worth a work of art?” is beginning to sound tasteless.

I also sense a bit of fatigue with biennial-scale theme shows starring curator-impresarios. These Brobdingnagian exhibitions seem to be losing their stately international-relations aura. They’ve become less driven by artistic passion and more by national bureaus of tourism. The audience for art fairs, too, appears less neurotically compelled to attend for fear of falling hopelessly out of the loop. Yogi Berra’s wisely nonsensical line about a restaurant’s declining cachet is starting to apply to these events: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”