This is our life. The first is a sinister and status-obsessed view, with museums at the center of a conspiracy to exclude the unmoneyed and uneducated from a zone of privilege. The perpetrators of this connivance are dealers, collectors, and others, who fashion a mystique around art so as to justify exorbitant prices. Quality doesn't count, or even exist, according to this view. Validation is bought on the cheap from struggling critics, who receive kickbacks in the form of work by the young genius.
Public approval is nurtured through exhibitions of increasing stature.
The ultimate goal of the conspiracy is appearance in a museum, whose trustees already own work by the young star or are actively courting future donations from collectors who own it. A different scenario, often taught in college courses, sees art works as suffused with a unique value, the search for which is undertaken in the ongoing conversation among painters and sculptors that is art history. In this fantasy, art schools inculcate students into the art conversation. The critics' job is to show how artists fit into the historical record and to illuminate the connective tissue of ideas. Collectors and dealers are there, but mainly to participate in the dialogue.