Dear Reader,

The art world as we know it today is an industry. Like it or not, it is a conglomerate not unlike the film or music industry. It is a hierarchical system to be sure, but towards the top, the question of who rules is a little blurry. Is it the art museums with their phenomenally wealthy patrons? Is it the commercial art galleries with their powerful dealers? Is it the auction houses, with their prosperous collectors? Or is it the artist who creates all this work for the collectors, the museums, the galleries and the walls in our homes?

Sometimes the collectors don’t have enough room in their palatial homes to hang all their investments, er, I mean art. So they open a museum in their own honor and share their impeccable and expensive tastes with us, the hoi polloi.

Those museums have names that are recognizable in the philanthropic and corporate worlds of this city: Geffen, Broad, Marciano, Lucas. One, in particular, has been the scuttlebutt of a recent art world scandal: the Marciano Art Foundation, which closed its doors to us.

This particular maneuver provides a closer look into just how these museums operate, when push comes to shove, as transparent tax shelters for the sole benefit of the owners. The Marciano brothers turned out not to be quite as altruistic as the public might have naively imagined. Our legal columnist, Stephen Goldberg, digs a little deeper into the Marcianos’ exploitation of their museum staff and their abuse of our governmental tax system, and what other museums are doing about fair wages for their employees.

But back to the artist, the cornerstone of it all. Are artists mere pawns in this big art-world game, and if so, should they even care?

Along with Goldberg’s piece on the political side of the art world, in this issue, we also feature an artist, Sylvia Fein, who is 100 years old and still hard at work. LA painter Tom Knechtel writes about her amazing retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum. Her paintings are soulful, full of sadness and intrigue. They take you to another place, a place far away from the commercial art world. When art does what it’s supposed to do—communicate ideas, transport us, offer glimpses of the sublime—we momentarily forget about the questionable machinations of a ruthless art world that can break one’s heart.

It’s not all politics and commerce. There is still some beauty for us to behold. We just need to hang on to that in this big scary world we face today.