When people are scared, they tend to lash out. Working folk in fear of losing their jobs have led the chorus cheering for the collapse of aig and various Wall Street firms. And contemporary-art holdouts — those who rather too cheerfully say they just don’t get it — are surely enjoying the sight of this market sinking.

But am I the only one surprised to hear faint peals of delight over the plight of the art market coming from card-carrying members of the art world? For the past six months, several critics and curators and the occasional artist have been celebrating the fall of the art market as though it were something separate from the art world, stuck on a painting like a bogus price tag.

In "The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!" New York Times critic Holland Cotter praised the hungry and "improvisatory" period of East Village art making in the 1970s, among other bohemian flowerings — and the idea of artists getting day jobs. New York critic Jerry Saltz, a fount of free-market anxiety now on staff at one of the most promarket magazines in the history of journalism, has recently written that his "Schadenfreude side wishes a pox on the auction houses." Former museum director David Ross has declaimed, perhaps less gleefully, that "difficult times bring out the best in the best artists."

They all feed an argument gaining currency: Lean times could be good for the art world, like day jobs could be good for artists. Without pressure from the market to perfect a recognizable style, artists will have more room to experiment. And without so much art-fair schlock and so many collector-speculators poisoning the market, quality can triumph over quantity as in the good old days.

There are countless flaws with this line of thinking, but I will just point out a few of the most dangerous.

FALLACY ONE: It wouldn’t hurt for artists to get day jobs. While the merits of "day jobs" are themselves highly debatable, the fallacy here rests in the very idea of day jobs (or night shifts even) being gettable. Did you hear about the Ohio junior high school that received more than 800 résumés for a $15/hour janitorial opening?

FALLACY TWO: A fast-shrinking art market will through some magic of natural selection get rid of the junk and keep the good stuff. Anyone who has read Darwins Origin of Species knows that natural selection benefits the hardiest and toughest of species — almost to the point of predicting that cockroaches will one day rule the earth.

What would this mean for artists? Those with family money to fall back on, or no children to support, or past market successes to cushion them, will be in better shape to continue making art. Art market darlings like Hirst and Koons will have no problems, while lesser-known midcareer artists might have to start thinking about law school.

FALLACY THREE: Everyone will be better off when the hedge-fund schmucks go home. Here the market bashers seem to have a point. The art world of late has seemed rife with people drawn to art parties more than art, and with crowds who can walk past a paper stack by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (I’m thinking of a recent Art Basel Miami Beach) and ask the price, without realizing that by the very premise of his work they could take a sheet home with them for free.

But even ignorance can be a good thing. When your community grows, it will inevitably include people you don’t want to break bread with, people who don’t share your values. They might be speculators. Or they might just be jerks. But I cannot imagine any circumstance (unless you are a teenager and your favorite underground band has just been discovered) under which this is inherently a bad thing. It just means there are more people for the rest of us — curators, dealers, writers and artists alike — to reach or move or possibly even educate. It means we probably need to spend more time with them, not less.

If you still bemoan the recent expansion of the art world, consider the alternatives. Consider the modern-poetry community, which may be too small to even call a "world." I wrote poetry in college, I studied poetry in graduate school, I know the 10 or 20 people who have some sway in the field. Some would say it’s a small circle because post-Mallarmé poetry is deliberately difficult, dissonant, opaque. But then again so is a great deal of post-Duchamp art.

So why is the poetry community so tiny? Yes, it’s because reading feels demanding, while images have become the frictionless lingua franca of the world. But it’s also because there is no money in poetry and no glossy social scene that feeds it. Nobody’s figured out a way to package it, trade it, commodify it, visit it, live with it, celebrate it. Likewise, those of us in the press have not managed to make a compelling news story out of it.

As a result, the art form is languishing. College students who write poetry — like my former classmate and current Artforum editor Tim Griffin — would be smart to become art critics instead. And anyone with a knack for words — hello, Lawrence Weiner — would be wise to figure out a way to frame his experiments with language as gallery projects.

We’ve been lucky to live in a time when the market supports our efforts to make art, write about art or just spend a lot of time looking at things. And the art market is hardly a price tag stuck awkwardly on top of paintings: The market is, if you look back at the Renaissance, the very reason paintings exist in their current, portable form. If it weren’t for collector demand, paintings would have never left the shrine and landed on the easel in the first place — an innovation that even the most market-phobic critic would likely applaud.

Jori Finkel is Art+Auctions contributing editor in Los Angeles.

"Whose Side Are You On?" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.