I was attracted to art as a vocation and a love because it was an exquisite, otherworldly refuge where the highest values of the spirit (and sometimes the lowest) were explored and reexamined, a place where one could be both grounded and humbled, consoled and challenged, shocked and awed. Even when artists were being brutal cultural critics, they could provide comforting insight and a new way of understanding our world and where we are. Art offered me a way to both escape reality and understand myself better.

Power, as it is usually exercised, had no power here. The wealthiest people did not necessarily end up getting the best artworks. Taste could not be fully learned or replicated or bought. One could somehow possess without owning, and one could buy without ever fully possessing.

In the 1950s, there were fewer than 50 “modern” artists in New York. There were a few dealers and critics, and fewer collectors and curators. But ever since, the value of art has skyrocketed, along with the appreciation of it. Virtually every university in this country legitimizes the professional pursuit of art, as it does that of medicine or accounting. More and more people want to be collectors, and artists can now be as rich as their patrons. We have witnessed the popularization, the corporatization and ultimately the hedge funding of art. We in the field have done our jobs too well.

I know what it is for art to have power—the power to inspire and to transcend. But I don’t see much of that today. I know what it is for curators and critics to have the power to open eyes to new art, to new ways of thinking and seeing; but nowadays no matter how thoughtful or original, they have been reduced to serving as hair and makeup people to some collective consensus about value. I understand the power of an art dealer like Leo Castelli to make a difference simply by making a commitment to represent an artist, no matter how commercially viable, or not.

These days when we talk about power in art, chances are we are talking about money. The market has seized control. And by reducing artistic value to financial value, all this focus on product is taking the artist out of the art, the connoisseur out of collecting.

The hunger for new product, a love of the hunt, has resulted in an art world pedophilia, with collectors raiding art-school student shows for the next new, hot, promising things and a secondary market that once required decades to define blue-chip now chasing artists who had no presence just a few years ago.

One hopes that this next generation has developed a greater resilience, a capacity to evolve and mature, to remain psychically on the edge while being celebrated by the middle. When I look back at the art world and market of the past 30 years, I see an endless parade of victims of freshman success. Early stardom eliminated the possibility for Keith Haring to develop; it killed Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are countless hot young things whose names are no longer even uttered, no longer worthy of an arcade sale.

When it comes to art and power, we should be less preoccupied with who has power than with who does not. We have spent billions of dollars amassing great holdings of art and building elaborate palaces to house them, but while we have focused on inventory and physical plant, we have left the intellectual infrastructure to crumble. Our museums are suffering without enough strong curators or viable directors and without the financial freedom to collect independently of their patron collectors. And we have few critical voices of consequence.

It is time for dealers with power and for those of us who have influence on collectors and institutions to nurture the core values of collecting. That means not confusing it with investing, not being seduced simply by fat wallets and rising prices. Biggest isn’t usually best.

Power is not just about owning great things and having the money to buy them. It is not simply about influencing taste and patterns of collecting and pricing. When it comes to art, if everyone has power, no one does. It is time to return power to where this all begins, to the art itself, with its ability to affect perception, provide cultural insight, to touch, to move, to witness, to change the way one sees the world.