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+Auction’s 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.