Why does the art world seem to attract so many toxic people, and how can I protect myself professionally and emotionally from them? —A. Goodman, NY
Every industry has its share of toxic personalities, but the art world’s strain of toxicity is shaped by desperation. It is a field crowded with people who make and support art, yet the combined money from collectors, grants and philanthropy is not enough to sustain most of them. As a result, everyone ends up competing over the scraps.
Some people cope with scarcity better than others, but no one behaves at their best under those conditions. The pressure changes how people treat one another, and not for the better. In that environment, even decent people can become unpleasant.
When I was working as an art critic, people frequently asked me to write about the bad behavior of professionals they disliked. In many cases, the targets may well have deserved scrutiny, but the requests rarely felt right to me and usually were not real stories, just complaints. As I mentally catalogued the terrible things I had seen people do, I began to wonder whether what looked like toxicity was sometimes just ignorance.
