Let me begin by congratulating you on your survey of the art market (“Suspended Animation,” November 28, 2009).  It is a handy guide for a novice and a refreshing digest for an old hand.  Pithy and coherent, it eschews the razmataz that plagues the market, which brings together “great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion, and controversy,” as you put it so aptly, as well as mountains of obfuscation.  Estimated at some sixty-five-billion dollars at its peak in 2007, the market has slumped to about fifty-billion by now.  About ten-million wealthy people drive this market, and they are still looking for assets that will hold their value.  You thus expect it to bounce back.  Also, you expect it to benefit from globalization.  Great wealth and enormous egos can be found in Russia, India, Brazil, or China, and not only in America and Europe.  However, you say not a word about when the market will perk up again.  Judging from the nature of the current economic crisis, which came in the wake of the collapse of many a record asset bubble in history, it may take quite a while for the art market to return to its peak.  That was a mighty asset bubble, too.  Bouncing back might therefore take a couple of decades, over which period many of the market’s institutions would also undergo radical transformations.  I look forward to reading another survey of yours in so many years.