At some point, quietly and without notice, the gallery, once consecrated ground for artistic expression, a sanctuary of presence, shifted into an echo chamber of transaction.

The shift was subtle, a reorientation disguised as progress, moving from nurturing artists to extracting value. The commission stayed. Grew, in fact. Responsibility vanished. Galleries, once intended as the champions and stewards of artistic expression, now increasingly act like merchants trading in space, collecting rent, relevance and reward.

This current arrangement is fraying. It is a model that asks for more while doing less. Routinely now, artists are expected to bring their own collectors, their own networks, their own press, their own audiences. Their own pre-existing halo of cultural capital. And yet the commission, typically an unflinching 50 percent, remains unchanged. No marketing plan. No outreach. No stewardship. Just the expectation that the artist arrives with a ready-made crowd, body of work, and polite gratitude.

How and why have we arrived here?

Galleries once shared spirit with libraries, salons and ateliers, guided by the same impulse to cultivate culture, not consume it. Places of trust, of development, of enduring relationships. A gallery took on the care of an artist like a luthier shaping wood for sound not yet heard. A covenant with the artist’s unfolding.

But that ethos now feels far away. Relationships have thinned. Artists jump from one space to another like festival acts, seeking visibility while sacrificing depth. Galleries drift through cycles of novelty without anchoring vision, fishing the same market-vetted pool. Submissions are ghosted. Replies are boilerplate. "We appreciate your interest, unfortunately...". Dispassionate words in a domain built for feeling. This is not how reverence behaves.

The noble ideal of artistic patronage has been reduced to strategic alignment, trend dependency and edited intent. We are letting go of the virtues and ethics of care that once shaped true artistic support ~ nurturance, trust, custodial integrity, recognition of artistic perception and artistic sovereignty.

Iain McGilchrist, writing at the threshold of science, philosophy and the arts, names this clearly. We have handed over the stewardship of culture to the left hemisphere of the mind, the part obsessed with control, categorisation and utility, while letting the right hemisphere, that which intuits, envisions, knows meaning and reveals art, starve on the vine. The vine itself has been displaced by a lifeless scaffold.



Galleries can sense the structure buckling. The model is brittle. The frame can’t hold.

In this fracture, there is opportunity.

Artists must first re-author the landscape. That responsibility is theirs. Waiting for a broken system to anoint them has become a learnt helplessness, one that outsources legitimacy, and in doing so, erodes the artist’s sacred authority. That authority must be restored. Not through egoic dogma or inflated self-promotion (humility and a presenced openness are two of the great attributes of an attuned artist), but through spiritual clarity.

Artists are the vital organs of cultural and spiritual renewal. When they surrender that role to systems of approval, they abandon the very current that feeds their vision. The vision they carry belongs to something larger, something sacred.

When an artist touches real insight, when the work moves through them as an energetic experience, an intuitive embodiment or an image struck inward, they already know the truth of it. This intimacy is potent, luminous, alive. It carries its own provenance. No curator, prize, or accolade can add to it, and allowing a gatekeeper to reshape, diminish, or reduce the experience is not just a compromise, it is abdication.





Self-respect demands self-navigation.
I’ll repeat this.
Self-respect demands self-navigation.

The renewal begins within, not as an excuse for retreat, but with an understanding that the refinement required to do this work, the inner stillness, the calibration, the attunement, deserves protection. To be represented by someone who does not truly honour what you embody, or advocate for you, is to devalue your own radiance.

Boundaries are not barriers. They are tuning mechanisms. This does not mean severing connection, but refusing arrangements that diminish the sacred, and choosing those rare partners who amplify rather than extract. Relationships rooted in reverence, not transaction. And no, they may not be easy to find. But they are magnetised by integrity. When an artist stands faithfully and honestly in this part of their being, the field around them begins to shift and reorient. Declining to play the game isn’t defiance. It’s discernment. It’s devotion. It restores new terms of engagement, dignifying the work and restoring culture’s memory of honour.

About artists, further things need saying.

First, they answer to a higher order of listening. They already live beyond. They dream ahead of the present. They envision what culture has not yet learned to name. And they must not collapse that clarity back into a system that only validates what it recognises. That system is always late. The true artist is early. They are retrocausal. Reverent. And they must be revered in return.

History remembers the ones who arrived before the world was ready. Hilma af Klint, ignored in her time, is now seen as one of abstraction’s early prophets. Blake was dismissed as unhinged. Coltrane played from other dimensions. Ruth St. Denis turned dance into prayer. Vision arrives before consensus. Treat it accordingly.

Second, artists are refined instruments. Their gifted perception has been tuned through patience, discipline, and a kind of inward listening that modern life tries to drown out. Compression harms that instrument.

Third, strength of boundary is not a pose. It is moral clarity. When an artist stands inside humility, steady practice, and a living relationship with their inspiration, the work is enlivened by source. Insight gathers. The current strengthens. The opposite is also true. When the work is bent to satisfy gatekeepers who cannot see, this current thins. Concession is decay.

Fourth, responsibility does not end with protection. It extends to participation. Spiritual authority is not withdrawal. It is a form of service. Choose conditions that keep the work true, then carry it outward with generosity. Build communities of attention and amplify artistic peers. Share what you’ve learned with those still finding their way. Decline the cult of secrecy. Seed coherence downstream. 

From these points a new ethic of engagement can emerge.

Art is sacred. Each encounter with an artist should be treated as sacred. Artists deserve benefactors, not dealers. Stewards, not siphons. 



Middlemen are welcome when they open genuine paths. If someone is deeply helping you reach more people, selling your work in aligned ways, amplifying your impact, tending the long arc, serving the work, the field, the future, they deserve their share.

There are bright examples. Agents in music and literature often take 10-20% and work tirelessly to uplift the artist’s career. Could we see the rise of advocates who do the same for the arts. Allies who shape new opportunities beyond a narrowing market, one that built scarcity only to find itself starved. Meanwhile, vast audiences remain untouched. Pioneers of renewal could widen the sphere, drawing art into new circulations, new spaces, and new forms of accessibility for those who have long been excluded.

Public galleries, too, must re-embrace their original purpose. They must serve the public and the artist alike. Some are doing this beautifully, offering space and voice to emerging artists without institutional condescension. Others gesture at inclusion while still choosing the same pedigreed, networked names behind the scenes. 

A new field is possible. One where curators are genuinely curious, where galleries act in reverence, where commerce serves creation, and not the other way around.



To support the artist is to serve something greater than the artist. It is to honour what art makes possible. It is to build spaces where expression (not ego), is centre stage. Conceived and tended thoughtfully, the gallery should be a consecrated space. A place where artists and their offerings are trusted, affirmed, and magnified. Not harvested. Not used.

We must stop mistaking brokenness for tradition.

Galleries and artistic spaces of the future must be living guardians, entrusted to nurture the vision that brings their art to life. The artist, in turn, stands with integrity, aligned and clear, answering to the source of their inspiration.



That is how the sacred returns to culture, not as ornament, but as foundation