In October, each of the four nominees opens an exhibition in a grand room at Tate Britain. Eight weeks later, usually on the first Monday in December, the jury reconvenes and chooses a winner.

“You hear two auto mechanics and you have no idea what they are talking about,” he explained. “There is a kind of poetry in their impenetrable phrases. Why shouldn’t art criticism have that?”

Heller manages the art collections of six Wall Street money managers, several of whom are billionaires.

Art Basel claims to host la crème de la crème, but the all-determining six-dealer admission committee is not without its biases and idiosyncrasies.

The art world may be decentered and global, but Manhattan is still the print media capital that supports more art critics than any other city.

social group. Their diverse, generally figurative artistic output shared an ability to trigger media “scandals.”

Gladstone herself has jet-black hair and is dressed entirely in black Prada.

The Parisian dealer Emmanuel Perrotin was thrown out of the fair because he gave exhibitors’ passes to art consultant Philippe Ségalot and Christie’s owner François Pinault. As a compensatory gesture toward Perrotin’s loss of face and income, Ségalot admitted to paying him $300,000.

Steve Cohen,