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The reading represents avant-garde versus traditional as being equivalent to taste with financial power versus financial power lacking taste. Surely this is not always the case but is a very interesting evaluation/judgment. The well lit, spare, bare floor minimalist style of contemporary galleries (at least in the front room), or "white cube" “white cube” is a direct contrast to the dimly lit, furnished, and carpeted traditional galleries. Price is not displayed and money is not spoken of in the front room of the contemporary gallery while in the traditional gallery prices are often displayed and the overall experience is much more similar to other forms of retail. While it is impossible to separate art and commerce, contemporary galleries attempt to define a separation whether or not this is only symbolic.
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Although dealers, galleries, and artists may deny it, art is definitely a business. It is a business that is carried out in a manner perhaps unlike any other in the way that it combines influences, relationships, and other factors specific to it in order to shape the monetary, cultural, and symbolic values of art. There is much emphasis on buying art for the right reasons and sales being "good matches" “good matches” between a work of art and a patron, but the purchase of art for whatever reason affects the current and future value and history of the work and all parties involved are acutely aware of this. Art and money are inextricably linked whether visibly or not.