Courtesy Klosterfelde, Berlin, and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino

Lara Favaretto's installation "Your Money Here" (2008). In tough periods, collectors need to patronize galleries so that they can, in turn, help artists.

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It is no secret that all of us in the art world are dealing with a different market from a year ago. The mystery lies in understanding what precisely has changed. In the stock markets, analysts watch quantitative data with ferocious intensity, trying to parse massive data streams for clues about the future. In the art world it’s much simpler: We talk to each other constantly — trading anecdotes and impressions in our search to understand how the landscape has been transformed and what it means. Since the start of the financial crisis last fall, Annette Schönholzer and I have traveled all over the globe in our capacity as the directors of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Naturally, we have visited market-mainstay cities such as New York, London and Paris, but we have also hit points farther from art’s traditional main axes, including Delhi, Dubai, São Paulo and Tokyo.

Clearly, the pace of buying has slowed all over the globe. Just as clear is the evaporation of the financial speculation that once spurred rapid-fire sales — and, too often, rapid-fire resales. The impact varies widely: Depending on the region, the medium and the arc of an artist’s career, the market may have dropped a tad or totally stopped or even ticked upward (for midcareer artists suddenly "rediscovered" by collectors who are seeking a track record and institutional imprimaturs).

As always in the art market, perception plays a huge role in shaping reality. At a benefit event in New York this winter, for example, we spoke with a longtime collector who explained that while he still followed many gallery programs closely, he had significantly slowed his buying. It was not that he lacked sufficient funds; his industry is actually thriving right now, and his museum patronage is holding strong. Nor was he among those collectors waiting for prices to hit bottom before they come surging back into the market. His logic was emotional, not financial. "It just doesn’t feel right to be buying art from galleries now," he said.

That comment immediately brought to mind another, very different conversation that I had with a major American art adviser months earlier, on the floor at Art Basel Miami Beach. Some of her collectors had not come, but she considered visiting the show to be a form of civic duty. "If you believe in galleries, and in their artists, then this is the time when you have to be buying from them," she explained. "Because the art world needs those galleries to keep going." To her, galleries play an essential role in propelling culture forward.

We at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach could not agree more. Every year the gallery owners on our selection committee meet to choose the participants for the coming show, and the committees prize contribution to the broader art world more highly than raw commercial success. That contribution can lie in launching new careers, or reviving those of artists unjustly forgotten. It can take the form of contributing to scholarship by funding catalogues raisonnés and other publications. Or it can involve underwriting the production of ambitious works. Likewise, major galleries constantly contribute time, energy and money to help museums realize ambitious shows. The impact of such efforts can be widely global or intensely local. Such engagement requires unwavering dedication by gallerists.

Today — when the speculators and status-seekers are disappearing — it is more important than ever for serious collectors to continue buying from the best galleries. Why? Because it directly supports the artists, so they can continue developing their practices. And because for several hundred years, gallerists have been the ones who have most frequently taken the first and largest risks in promoting new artists, movements and mediums.

Granted, galleries are commercial entities. But in the good times, serious galleries don’t simply cash out; rather, they reinvest much of the profit from their successful artists in sustaining their entire programs. Even the largest galleries are small by most business standards. Most have the owner’s name on the door and bear the stamp of their founder’s personality. These galleries are not purveyors of luxury goods or brokerages peddling an "alternative asset class." No, serious galleries are a critical component in the art world ecosystem, providing resources to artists for both their short-term projects and their long-term legacies.