The art world is at times hermetic and self-referential. Museums, artist-endowed foundations, commercial galleries and art fairs can resemble a never-ending carousel of party-going collectors, curators and dealers. Behind the glamorous facade of the art world are newly urgent challenges. Decades-long resentments about the privileged classes dominating the creative sector have boiled over. And today there is no hiding the fact that the art market – the largest unregulated legal market in the global economy – is a preserve of wealth, speculative investment and vanity.