Last Sunday morning, there was a collective groan in the art market when The New York Times told the stories of four artists who saw their auction sales pop in the post-pandemic art boom, only to see their prices dramatically plummet over the last year and a half. None of this is surprising considering the fact that the Times has always taken an ambivalent stance toward the art world. Its highly educated and liberal-ish readership cares about art and artists, but they are also easily put off by the idea that art is also a business. For some reason, the Times views the buying and selling of art with great suspicion and believes those who buy and sell art must be up to no good.  Much of the space in the Times profile is given over to the four artists complaining about what they considered unfair treatment, mostly by offstage speculators. (One of the artists, Amani Lewis, went so far as to attack one of her collectors, who sold a work for pretty much what he had paid for it.) The problem wasn’t so much that the collector sold the work but that, in trying to sell for significant profit, the collector had inadvertently revealed that there was little demand for Lewis’s work at the moment.