I’ve responded at length to Simon Linke’s thoughtful comment, which, I think, surfaces many of the assumptions we carry about artistic development in the contemporary context. Even the fact that we find ourselves having to articulate these distinctions feels telling.
What you exemplify so clearly is just how nuanced this terrain actually is. Artists occupy vastly different positions for vastly different reasons, yet the ecosystem tends to flatten those differences into convenient narratives. There are artists with strong reputations who appear visible from a distance, yet lack meaningful representation or sustained institutional support. Because they are assumed to be “established,” they can find themselves in a peculiar limbo, respected, cited, occasionally referenced, yet structurally sidelined. They have much to contribute, but the infrastructure does not quite know how to hold them.
Very few galleries consistently do the work you describe: visiting studios, building relationships, developing conversations over time. And the situation can be even more acute within public institutions. Under immense funding pressures, they often default to populist programming, exhibitions that are safe, digestible, and marketable. Such work may entertain, but it rarely presses into the deeper, more difficult questions that art is uniquely capable of asking.
I find myself increasingly weary of this narrowing. We are fed a steady diet of work that is whimsical, flashy, or rhetorically fashionable - art tailored to magazine culture and rapid consumption. Meanwhile, artists are sometimes elevated as spokespeople for the field in ways that inadvertently reduce the scope of what art can do, confining it to simplified narratives that travel well but say little.
And yet, perhaps there is another way to think about this. Maybe the most vital work has always happened slightly out of view — sustained within communities where knowledge is exchanged generously and where the wisdom earned through long practice can circulate without distortion. If so, the question becomes: how do we protect that freedom while still ensuring artists have a meaningful voice in the broader cultural conversation?
What I would like to see more of are genuinely maverick actors within the system - museum directors willing to risk unpopularity in favour of depth, galleries committed to building serious, long-term dialogues around artists’ practices. Less complacency. More responsibility toward the work artists have devoted their lives to, often at considerable personal cost.
The issue, for me, is not visibility for its own sake. It is whether our institutions are prepared to meet the seriousness that already exists within the field, and to recognise it before it is simplified beyond recognition.
I teach at an intensive summer program here in the states that draws undergrad and grad students each year. What I often see is young artists full of promise that go on to make a mark in the artworld as emerging artists. After a few years their momentum slows and sometimes disappears. I remember this well from my own emerging days, long, long ago. My fellow classmates began to disappear from the gallery walls, one by one. More than likely due to the life constraints you mention and hardship was no longer possible or romantic.
Your essays make me recognize another downfall of the system not recognizing the middle. When the middle is not recognized the emerging have no where to evolve into. I remember the crash when my work began to evolve and mature. I was suddenly no longer accepted into exhibitions and galleries weren't sure if they wanted to take me on. It was tough to continue in a system that didn't seem interested in you. If the middle was the center, as you suggest, the emerging would have a place to land when they evolve. They would have permission to evolve. It would be a system that nurtures art rather than exploits it.
I am an artist who is very much in the middle and I live and see the struggles you describe. Thankfully, I have a gallery that I work well with and that treats me with respect. I recognize how rare this is and I am grateful to have it. Many artists struggle with dismissive behavior that, quite simply, can only be tolerated for so long.
Thanks for acknowledging what it takes to keep going in an artworld that isn't always interested. Afterall, how do the established become canonized without the middle?
If I can extend the question further, there is also the countervailing observation that seismic breaks in culture are disproportionately made by the young. That is not a romantic cliché; it is a structural phenomenon. Youth often has the advantage of operating with fewer internalised constraints. With less accumulated allegiance to existing hierarchies, fewer sunk costs in established languages, and less investment in reputational maintenance, younger artists can act with a kind of formal ruthlessness. They are sometimes able to cut through inherited complexity and propose a new coherence precisely because they have not yet metabolised the full weight of the tradition they are interrupting.
This introduces a tension in the way we talk about the “middle” and about seriousness more generally. Complexity, experience and skill are undeniably virtues. But they also introduce density. The more an artist knows—historically, technically, theoretically—the more vectors of influence and self-awareness enter the work. What begins as depth can tip into over-determination. The desire to acknowledge lineage, to avoid naïveté, to demonstrate sophistication, can produce internal conflict inside the work itself. It can fracture coherence.
There is a risk that sophistication becomes conflated with value. The work accrues references, gestures, qualifications. It signals intelligence rather than embodying necessity. At the extreme, this can border on a kind of connoisseurial self-consciousness—art made in anticipation of the informed gaze, rather than in pursuit of a clear internal logic. In that situation, seriousness mutates into a performance of seriousness.
Which raises a further complication for your argument: if the middle is where practices deepen, it is also where they can become entangled in their own reflexivity. The young artist may produce a break that feels seismic because it is coherent—brutally so. The more mature artist may struggle precisely because their understanding of complexity makes simple coherence feel intellectually dishonest.
So what, then, is the status of coherence within an exchange economy that rewards both novelty and prestige? Coherence is legible. It travels. It is easy to convert into narrative. A seismic break often reads as coherent because it simplifies the field—it reduces noise. But a complex, internally conflicted practice can appear inconsistent or difficult to summarise, and therefore economically inconvenient.
This returns us to the drives at work within the system. Young artists are often propelled by the drive to differentiate—to mark territory decisively. Mid-career artists may be propelled by a different drive: to reconcile competing truths, to hold contradiction without collapsing it. Yet the market may misrecognise that struggle as lack of clarity rather than as a higher-order problem.
So the question sharpens again: do we overvalue coherence because it is market-efficient, and undervalue complexity because it resists easy exchange? Or conversely, do we sometimes overvalue sophistication—mistaking density for depth—because it flatters the educated ecosystem that surrounds the work?
If seriousness is to be defended, it may require distinguishing between complexity that clarifies and complexity that obscures; between coherence that is hard-won and coherence that is simply reductive. The young artist’s seismic break and the mature artist’s layered practice are not opposites. But the exchange economy tends to process them through the same filters of legibility, speed and story.
Perhaps the most difficult form of seriousness, then, is the capacity to maintain coherence without simplification, and complexity without self-indulgence. That balance is rare. And it may be precisely what the “wise middle” struggles to articulate—because it neither detonates the field nor embalms it, but quietly reorganises it from within.
That’s an interesting observation, Simon, and one I probably would have agreed with a few years ago. But I’m no longer convinced the evidence supports the idea that seismic cultural breaks are primarily the achievement of youth.
First, it’s important to clarify that I referred to the “wise middle,” not the “knowledgeable middle.” Wisdom, as I understand it, is not the accumulation of information or institutional sophistication. It is the fusion of experience and knowledge - knowledge tested through time, failure, revision and persistence. The stultifying effects of artists overdetermined by academia or theory are real enough, but that condition describes knowledge without wisdom.
Innovation rarely emerges from ignorance of tradition. More often it appears when an artist reaches the limits of what they already know, when inherited languages have been fully grasped and begin to fail. One cannot meaningfully abandon or transcend a structure that has never first been understood. What looks like radical novelty without that grounding is often energising, even necessary, but it tends to remain surface-level: a rupture without sufficient pressure behind it to sustain discourse.
Historically, the figure of the “young genius” is less common than we like to imagine. Early work is typically exploratory, derivative, or performative, and rightly so. Artists are learning how to think through materials, situating themselves within traditions, testing positions against existing cultural conversations. Originality is never context-free; it always emerges in relation to something prior. Without that relation, novelty risks becoming merely stylistic differentiation. This is not to dismiss the energy younger artists bring. Their urgency and willingness to cut through convention are vital to any living culture. But energy and wisdom are not the same quality, and our present moment arguably suffers more from a deficit of the latter than the former.
Where I struggle with the idea that the “wise middle” is paralysed by reflexivity is that it does not correspond to the artistic communities I know firsthand. Many mid-career artists are not entangled in self-conscious sophistication; they are engaged in the far harder task of refining coherence without simplification, integrating experience, contradiction and technical understanding into forms that are less immediately legible but often more structurally durable.
My concern is almost the opposite of the one you describe. The problem is not that such practices fail to exist, but that they remain underrepresented within both commercial and institutional galleries. I am only able to recognise their significance because I encounter these artists directly as colleagues and friends. Their relative absence from visible platforms suggests less a failure of coherence than a failure of the systems that determine visibility. If there is a tension here, it may be this: cultural economies tend to reward clarity that can be quickly narrated, whether in the form of youthful rupture or easily recognisable sophistication. Work that develops slowly, reorganising the field from within rather than detonating it, is harder to circulate, harder to summarise, and therefore easier to overlook.
The challenge, then, is not to choose between youthful coherence and mature complexity, but to recognise that seriousness may lie precisely in sustaining both: coherence without reduction, and complexity without self-indulgence.
I appreciate the care in your response, particularly the way you resist turning the middle into a sentimental category. Your emphasis on coherence as something earned rather than assumed feels important, and I agree that youth is not inherently radical, nor maturity inherently compromised. The field is more contingent than that.
Where I’m still circling, though, is less the biographical question and more the structural one. When I mentioned seismic breaks, I didn’t mean to romanticise youth so much as to note that certain kinds of coherence—especially those that reset a language—often emerge from positions that are not yet densely entangled in the existing order. That doesn’t make them better; it makes them structurally lighter. They can move faster because they are carrying less.
Your point about coherence being a discipline rather than a simplification resonates. But I wonder whether the exchange economy we’re both describing tends to reward a particular kind of coherence: the kind that is immediately legible. That may be very different from the slower, more metabolised coherence that emerges from prolonged wrestling with complexity. The former reads as clarity; the latter can look, at least temporarily, like inconsistency.
This is where I think the economic layer matters. Sophistication can certainly tip into connoisseurship, into signalling. But it can also be the byproduct of an artist genuinely trying to reconcile accumulated knowledge, experience, and contradiction. The difficulty is that a market structured around speed and narrative compression may not distinguish between density that clarifies and density that obscures. Both simply register as “harder to place.”
So perhaps the question is not whether coherence or complexity is more valuable, but how value itself is formed and recognised. If seriousness is tied to duration, to sustained inquiry, then its economic visibility will almost always lag behind its cultural significance. That lag creates pressure—on artists, on galleries, on collectors—to either simplify prematurely or to overperform sophistication in order to justify price and position.
I don’t think this is a moral failure on anyone’s part. It feels more like a systemic feedback loop. The young artist who produces a decisive, coherent break is rewarded because the signal is strong. The mature artist who refines, complicates, rethinks may appear less decisive precisely because they are thinking more. In that sense, the “wise middle” might not be a stylistic category at all, but a temporal one: a commitment to allowing work to resolve on its own terms rather than on the market’s timetable.
Your insistence on looking closely—on describing what the work is actually doing—strikes me as a partial answer. It’s a way of slowing down value formation. But it still leaves open the larger question: can a system calibrated for exchange genuinely sustain practices whose primary currency is seriousness, when seriousness often manifests as delay, revision, and internal conflict?
I suspect we agree more than we disagree. I’m just trying to locate where the structural incentives intersect with the psychic drives of the individuals moving through them—and whether the recalibration we both seem to want requires more than better attention.
I’m very grateful for this exchange. One thing I want to add, though, is a slightly different picture of what the wise middle looks like when you encounter it in the world, rather than in theory.
There’s a recurring implication in how we talk about mid-career seriousness that experience equals some kind of weight - that the artist becomes tied down by their own knowledge, slowed by reflexivity, pulled into long-winded internal argument, and that this is partly why the market struggles to hold them. I understand the structure you’re both describing - the economy wants legibility, speed, story - but I’m not sure encumbrance is the lived quality of the best work in this middle.
When I look at an artist like Sarah Pickstone (who Matthew originally mentioned), what strikes me is not heaviness. Each body of work feels fresh in the most unshowy way. Not fresh as in “new trick” but fresh as in the decisions are right. The medium and the message are in a kind of harmony - sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes discordant, sometimes absurd, sometimes slightly perverse - but it coheres. Even when it shudders, it still makes sense. And that coherence doesn’t feel reductive or market-friendly. It feels earned. It feels like someone who knows what they’re doing and therefore can move cleanly, with just enough risk, without needing to announce the risk as risk.
Which makes me wonder if we slightly misdescribe the middle when we frame it as the place where complexity accumulates and therefore value becomes harder to circulate. Sometimes experience doesn’t thicken the work - it distils it. It produces an agility that can look effortless from the outside precisely because the wrestling has already happened. Or happens intuitively.
And then there are practices where the “layers” are real - not connoisseurial signalling, but genuine artistic endeavour that only time makes possible. I’ve been looking recently at a series by Chris Hawtin: in one register the paintings feel almost traditional, in another they’re teasing pulp fiction and fantasy. Each work also sits on top of a short story he has written, while the series has an album behind it that you can listen to on Spotify. That kind of multi-register thinking isn’t youthful urgency - it’s accumulated craft, narrative intelligence, and a willingness to build a whole world rather than strike a pose.
So perhaps the tension isn’t that the wise middle is inherently dense or slow, and therefore economically inconvenient. Perhaps the tension is that this kind of appropriateness - this earned coherence, this distilled agility - is oddly hard to describe in the compressed language of the market. It’s not “new” enough to be a clean headline, and not canonised enough to be safely prestigious. It lives in that awkward zone where the work can feel quietly groundbreaking without providing the system with an easy handle.
Which brings me back to what I was trying to get at in the original newsletter: the problem might not be that these practices are difficult to grasp - it might be that they’re difficult to package without shrinking them. The work is often clearer than the narratives available to it.
And I should say - I don’t mean any of this as a pious scolding of galleries. Being a gallerist is hard. The job is a daily negotiation between conviction and cashflow, between getting serious work in front of people and keeping the lights on long enough to do it again next month. I also suspect there’s a lived gap here: a lot of gallerists haven’t spent years inside the slow time of a studio, so some of the nuance - the revision, the visceral experience of making - can be difficult to understand from the outside. That isn’t a failing, it’s just the shape of the role. But it does make me want other kinds of space.
A very interesting discussion between Matthew Burrows MBE and Simon Linke. Ultimately young vs old is best is a very loaded question! I love the YBA's as disrupters. One thing not mentioned is that all artists go through peaks and troughs at any stage of life - when things visually come together and when they don't. (bit like life really). I did a quick chat GPT search and it covers the same areas mentioned in the discussion.
'But it does make me want other kinds of space' (Blackbird Rook)
I spent a year on a mentoring course at Newlyn School of Art. (2023-4) Partly to bring myself up to date with contemporary art. One of the consistent points raised by professionals visiting artists is a disquiet with the gallery system. It causes a mild frown rather than hate, but certainly not a whoop of joy iether! Artists are now finding lots of other ways to showcase their work. Collectively, politically or individually.
I suppose we will have the term 'mega-gallery' soon!....
Hi Simon, thank you again for such a thoughtful and generous exchange. I think we agree on far more than we disagree, particularly around the structural pressures shaping the field.
Where I remain unconvinced is the assumption that seismic shifts are primarily driven by youth. Historically, that narrative is less stable than it appears. If we look at the major ruptures of modern art, the average age of breakthrough tends to cluster in the thirties and forties. Early Cubism and Surrealism emerged largely from artists in their thirties; Abstract Expressionism is even more telling, with key breakthroughs occurring in artists’ mid to late forties. Even movements associated with radicality were often metabolised through a decade or more of prior struggle. The myth of the precocious detonator is compelling, but statistically it’s not the dominant pattern.
Naivety can absolutely be compelling. It carries energy, elasticity, a willingness to move without over-calculation. But innovation in the deeper sense, innovation that restructures a language rather than simply jolts it, usually follows the acquisition and exhaustion of knowledge. Only once something has been grasped can it be meaningfully released. Otherwise the gesture risks becoming posture: a stance against a weight one has not yet carried.
That said, I fully accept your point about burden. The “wise middle” can easily become the encumbered middle. Knowledge accumulates mass; reflexivity can thicken into hesitation. Which is precisely why sustained conversation matters, so that unnecessary baggage can be shed and what remains is distilled rather than dense. Wisdom, ideally, produces lightness of a different kind: not the bounce of youth, but the agility that comes from having wrestled with complexity and survived it.
I value the elasticity of younger artists enormously. When I was younger, I benefited from older artists who recognised and encouraged that energy. I would never want to diminish it. The field depends on that vitality. But the agility of the wise middle is of another order, it is the risk of relinquishing what has been earned, of letting go of mastery in order to move again. That is a far more existential gamble.
Risk without stakes can be exhilarating, but it rarely carries the same transformative force. When there is little to lose, the leap can remain stylistic. When there is accumulated investment, technical, reputational, and intellectual, the leap reorganises the ground beneath it.
To be clear, I want to see strong work at every stage: emerging practices, historical reassessments, posthumous recognition. What feels underrepresented to me are artists whose inquiry is both mature and ongoing, whose conversations are alive, deep, and unresolved. That is where I often sense the greatest seriousness, and also the greatest difficulty of placement.
I suspect this is where structure re-enters the picture. Markets struggle with weight and duration; museums are constrained by funding, expertise, and risk aversion. Neither is inherently malicious, but both are calibrated toward legibility. Greg’s suggestions seem to me not utopian but manageable: slower looking, deeper relationships, less compression.
Perhaps what we are circling is not youth versus maturity at all, but how a system built for exchange might better accommodate work whose primary currency is sustained inquiry.
As a “discovered the need to create” later in life artist so much of what you have written resonates. The feeling of occupying an unwatched space and quietly developing and exploring. There is something of the quiet to be cherished but it’s a balance between having the silence you need to follow your path and feeling ignored because you don’t fit in. (And have no desire to.) Beautifully written and I’m following with interest. Thank you.
Interesting insight into the thoughts of art collecting which is way above my pay scale! However having worked alongside sales teams for 25 years (i'm not a salesperson myself but enjoyed their company nevertheless). The middle ground is as you point out where the still waters run deep so to speak and in pure business terms probably those middle tier artists are probably doing consistent work for the right reasons; and hence where you pick up the best bargins! Art is a business and the no 1 goal of any business is to make money! The more the marketing/reach/hype/collectability the more you inflate the price...it's not rocket science to any business.
Certain car brands prices are priced way above the average, not because the car manufacturing costs and luxury of the vehicle are better but because in brutal terms the customer is happy to pay for the esteem of ownership. Obviously sales teams would'nt express it like this!
Thank you, Greg, for the mention.
I’ve responded at length to Simon Linke’s thoughtful comment, which, I think, surfaces many of the assumptions we carry about artistic development in the contemporary context. Even the fact that we find ourselves having to articulate these distinctions feels telling.
What you exemplify so clearly is just how nuanced this terrain actually is. Artists occupy vastly different positions for vastly different reasons, yet the ecosystem tends to flatten those differences into convenient narratives. There are artists with strong reputations who appear visible from a distance, yet lack meaningful representation or sustained institutional support. Because they are assumed to be “established,” they can find themselves in a peculiar limbo, respected, cited, occasionally referenced, yet structurally sidelined. They have much to contribute, but the infrastructure does not quite know how to hold them.
Very few galleries consistently do the work you describe: visiting studios, building relationships, developing conversations over time. And the situation can be even more acute within public institutions. Under immense funding pressures, they often default to populist programming, exhibitions that are safe, digestible, and marketable. Such work may entertain, but it rarely presses into the deeper, more difficult questions that art is uniquely capable of asking.
I find myself increasingly weary of this narrowing. We are fed a steady diet of work that is whimsical, flashy, or rhetorically fashionable - art tailored to magazine culture and rapid consumption. Meanwhile, artists are sometimes elevated as spokespeople for the field in ways that inadvertently reduce the scope of what art can do, confining it to simplified narratives that travel well but say little.
And yet, perhaps there is another way to think about this. Maybe the most vital work has always happened slightly out of view — sustained within communities where knowledge is exchanged generously and where the wisdom earned through long practice can circulate without distortion. If so, the question becomes: how do we protect that freedom while still ensuring artists have a meaningful voice in the broader cultural conversation?
What I would like to see more of are genuinely maverick actors within the system - museum directors willing to risk unpopularity in favour of depth, galleries committed to building serious, long-term dialogues around artists’ practices. Less complacency. More responsibility toward the work artists have devoted their lives to, often at considerable personal cost.
The issue, for me, is not visibility for its own sake. It is whether our institutions are prepared to meet the seriousness that already exists within the field, and to recognise it before it is simplified beyond recognition.
I teach at an intensive summer program here in the states that draws undergrad and grad students each year. What I often see is young artists full of promise that go on to make a mark in the artworld as emerging artists. After a few years their momentum slows and sometimes disappears. I remember this well from my own emerging days, long, long ago. My fellow classmates began to disappear from the gallery walls, one by one. More than likely due to the life constraints you mention and hardship was no longer possible or romantic.
Your essays make me recognize another downfall of the system not recognizing the middle. When the middle is not recognized the emerging have no where to evolve into. I remember the crash when my work began to evolve and mature. I was suddenly no longer accepted into exhibitions and galleries weren't sure if they wanted to take me on. It was tough to continue in a system that didn't seem interested in you. If the middle was the center, as you suggest, the emerging would have a place to land when they evolve. They would have permission to evolve. It would be a system that nurtures art rather than exploits it.
I am an artist who is very much in the middle and I live and see the struggles you describe. Thankfully, I have a gallery that I work well with and that treats me with respect. I recognize how rare this is and I am grateful to have it. Many artists struggle with dismissive behavior that, quite simply, can only be tolerated for so long.
Thanks for acknowledging what it takes to keep going in an artworld that isn't always interested. Afterall, how do the established become canonized without the middle?
A really important insight and beautifully articulated. Thank you for writing.
If I can extend the question further, there is also the countervailing observation that seismic breaks in culture are disproportionately made by the young. That is not a romantic cliché; it is a structural phenomenon. Youth often has the advantage of operating with fewer internalised constraints. With less accumulated allegiance to existing hierarchies, fewer sunk costs in established languages, and less investment in reputational maintenance, younger artists can act with a kind of formal ruthlessness. They are sometimes able to cut through inherited complexity and propose a new coherence precisely because they have not yet metabolised the full weight of the tradition they are interrupting.
This introduces a tension in the way we talk about the “middle” and about seriousness more generally. Complexity, experience and skill are undeniably virtues. But they also introduce density. The more an artist knows—historically, technically, theoretically—the more vectors of influence and self-awareness enter the work. What begins as depth can tip into over-determination. The desire to acknowledge lineage, to avoid naïveté, to demonstrate sophistication, can produce internal conflict inside the work itself. It can fracture coherence.
There is a risk that sophistication becomes conflated with value. The work accrues references, gestures, qualifications. It signals intelligence rather than embodying necessity. At the extreme, this can border on a kind of connoisseurial self-consciousness—art made in anticipation of the informed gaze, rather than in pursuit of a clear internal logic. In that situation, seriousness mutates into a performance of seriousness.
Which raises a further complication for your argument: if the middle is where practices deepen, it is also where they can become entangled in their own reflexivity. The young artist may produce a break that feels seismic because it is coherent—brutally so. The more mature artist may struggle precisely because their understanding of complexity makes simple coherence feel intellectually dishonest.
So what, then, is the status of coherence within an exchange economy that rewards both novelty and prestige? Coherence is legible. It travels. It is easy to convert into narrative. A seismic break often reads as coherent because it simplifies the field—it reduces noise. But a complex, internally conflicted practice can appear inconsistent or difficult to summarise, and therefore economically inconvenient.
This returns us to the drives at work within the system. Young artists are often propelled by the drive to differentiate—to mark territory decisively. Mid-career artists may be propelled by a different drive: to reconcile competing truths, to hold contradiction without collapsing it. Yet the market may misrecognise that struggle as lack of clarity rather than as a higher-order problem.
So the question sharpens again: do we overvalue coherence because it is market-efficient, and undervalue complexity because it resists easy exchange? Or conversely, do we sometimes overvalue sophistication—mistaking density for depth—because it flatters the educated ecosystem that surrounds the work?
If seriousness is to be defended, it may require distinguishing between complexity that clarifies and complexity that obscures; between coherence that is hard-won and coherence that is simply reductive. The young artist’s seismic break and the mature artist’s layered practice are not opposites. But the exchange economy tends to process them through the same filters of legibility, speed and story.
Perhaps the most difficult form of seriousness, then, is the capacity to maintain coherence without simplification, and complexity without self-indulgence. That balance is rare. And it may be precisely what the “wise middle” struggles to articulate—because it neither detonates the field nor embalms it, but quietly reorganises it from within.
That’s an interesting observation, Simon, and one I probably would have agreed with a few years ago. But I’m no longer convinced the evidence supports the idea that seismic cultural breaks are primarily the achievement of youth.
First, it’s important to clarify that I referred to the “wise middle,” not the “knowledgeable middle.” Wisdom, as I understand it, is not the accumulation of information or institutional sophistication. It is the fusion of experience and knowledge - knowledge tested through time, failure, revision and persistence. The stultifying effects of artists overdetermined by academia or theory are real enough, but that condition describes knowledge without wisdom.
Innovation rarely emerges from ignorance of tradition. More often it appears when an artist reaches the limits of what they already know, when inherited languages have been fully grasped and begin to fail. One cannot meaningfully abandon or transcend a structure that has never first been understood. What looks like radical novelty without that grounding is often energising, even necessary, but it tends to remain surface-level: a rupture without sufficient pressure behind it to sustain discourse.
Historically, the figure of the “young genius” is less common than we like to imagine. Early work is typically exploratory, derivative, or performative, and rightly so. Artists are learning how to think through materials, situating themselves within traditions, testing positions against existing cultural conversations. Originality is never context-free; it always emerges in relation to something prior. Without that relation, novelty risks becoming merely stylistic differentiation. This is not to dismiss the energy younger artists bring. Their urgency and willingness to cut through convention are vital to any living culture. But energy and wisdom are not the same quality, and our present moment arguably suffers more from a deficit of the latter than the former.
Where I struggle with the idea that the “wise middle” is paralysed by reflexivity is that it does not correspond to the artistic communities I know firsthand. Many mid-career artists are not entangled in self-conscious sophistication; they are engaged in the far harder task of refining coherence without simplification, integrating experience, contradiction and technical understanding into forms that are less immediately legible but often more structurally durable.
My concern is almost the opposite of the one you describe. The problem is not that such practices fail to exist, but that they remain underrepresented within both commercial and institutional galleries. I am only able to recognise their significance because I encounter these artists directly as colleagues and friends. Their relative absence from visible platforms suggests less a failure of coherence than a failure of the systems that determine visibility. If there is a tension here, it may be this: cultural economies tend to reward clarity that can be quickly narrated, whether in the form of youthful rupture or easily recognisable sophistication. Work that develops slowly, reorganising the field from within rather than detonating it, is harder to circulate, harder to summarise, and therefore easier to overlook.
The challenge, then, is not to choose between youthful coherence and mature complexity, but to recognise that seriousness may lie precisely in sustaining both: coherence without reduction, and complexity without self-indulgence.
I appreciate the care in your response, particularly the way you resist turning the middle into a sentimental category. Your emphasis on coherence as something earned rather than assumed feels important, and I agree that youth is not inherently radical, nor maturity inherently compromised. The field is more contingent than that.
Where I’m still circling, though, is less the biographical question and more the structural one. When I mentioned seismic breaks, I didn’t mean to romanticise youth so much as to note that certain kinds of coherence—especially those that reset a language—often emerge from positions that are not yet densely entangled in the existing order. That doesn’t make them better; it makes them structurally lighter. They can move faster because they are carrying less.
Your point about coherence being a discipline rather than a simplification resonates. But I wonder whether the exchange economy we’re both describing tends to reward a particular kind of coherence: the kind that is immediately legible. That may be very different from the slower, more metabolised coherence that emerges from prolonged wrestling with complexity. The former reads as clarity; the latter can look, at least temporarily, like inconsistency.
This is where I think the economic layer matters. Sophistication can certainly tip into connoisseurship, into signalling. But it can also be the byproduct of an artist genuinely trying to reconcile accumulated knowledge, experience, and contradiction. The difficulty is that a market structured around speed and narrative compression may not distinguish between density that clarifies and density that obscures. Both simply register as “harder to place.”
So perhaps the question is not whether coherence or complexity is more valuable, but how value itself is formed and recognised. If seriousness is tied to duration, to sustained inquiry, then its economic visibility will almost always lag behind its cultural significance. That lag creates pressure—on artists, on galleries, on collectors—to either simplify prematurely or to overperform sophistication in order to justify price and position.
I don’t think this is a moral failure on anyone’s part. It feels more like a systemic feedback loop. The young artist who produces a decisive, coherent break is rewarded because the signal is strong. The mature artist who refines, complicates, rethinks may appear less decisive precisely because they are thinking more. In that sense, the “wise middle” might not be a stylistic category at all, but a temporal one: a commitment to allowing work to resolve on its own terms rather than on the market’s timetable.
Your insistence on looking closely—on describing what the work is actually doing—strikes me as a partial answer. It’s a way of slowing down value formation. But it still leaves open the larger question: can a system calibrated for exchange genuinely sustain practices whose primary currency is seriousness, when seriousness often manifests as delay, revision, and internal conflict?
I suspect we agree more than we disagree. I’m just trying to locate where the structural incentives intersect with the psychic drives of the individuals moving through them—and whether the recalibration we both seem to want requires more than better attention.
I’m very grateful for this exchange. One thing I want to add, though, is a slightly different picture of what the wise middle looks like when you encounter it in the world, rather than in theory.
There’s a recurring implication in how we talk about mid-career seriousness that experience equals some kind of weight - that the artist becomes tied down by their own knowledge, slowed by reflexivity, pulled into long-winded internal argument, and that this is partly why the market struggles to hold them. I understand the structure you’re both describing - the economy wants legibility, speed, story - but I’m not sure encumbrance is the lived quality of the best work in this middle.
When I look at an artist like Sarah Pickstone (who Matthew originally mentioned), what strikes me is not heaviness. Each body of work feels fresh in the most unshowy way. Not fresh as in “new trick” but fresh as in the decisions are right. The medium and the message are in a kind of harmony - sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes discordant, sometimes absurd, sometimes slightly perverse - but it coheres. Even when it shudders, it still makes sense. And that coherence doesn’t feel reductive or market-friendly. It feels earned. It feels like someone who knows what they’re doing and therefore can move cleanly, with just enough risk, without needing to announce the risk as risk.
Which makes me wonder if we slightly misdescribe the middle when we frame it as the place where complexity accumulates and therefore value becomes harder to circulate. Sometimes experience doesn’t thicken the work - it distils it. It produces an agility that can look effortless from the outside precisely because the wrestling has already happened. Or happens intuitively.
And then there are practices where the “layers” are real - not connoisseurial signalling, but genuine artistic endeavour that only time makes possible. I’ve been looking recently at a series by Chris Hawtin: in one register the paintings feel almost traditional, in another they’re teasing pulp fiction and fantasy. Each work also sits on top of a short story he has written, while the series has an album behind it that you can listen to on Spotify. That kind of multi-register thinking isn’t youthful urgency - it’s accumulated craft, narrative intelligence, and a willingness to build a whole world rather than strike a pose.
So perhaps the tension isn’t that the wise middle is inherently dense or slow, and therefore economically inconvenient. Perhaps the tension is that this kind of appropriateness - this earned coherence, this distilled agility - is oddly hard to describe in the compressed language of the market. It’s not “new” enough to be a clean headline, and not canonised enough to be safely prestigious. It lives in that awkward zone where the work can feel quietly groundbreaking without providing the system with an easy handle.
Which brings me back to what I was trying to get at in the original newsletter: the problem might not be that these practices are difficult to grasp - it might be that they’re difficult to package without shrinking them. The work is often clearer than the narratives available to it.
And I should say - I don’t mean any of this as a pious scolding of galleries. Being a gallerist is hard. The job is a daily negotiation between conviction and cashflow, between getting serious work in front of people and keeping the lights on long enough to do it again next month. I also suspect there’s a lived gap here: a lot of gallerists haven’t spent years inside the slow time of a studio, so some of the nuance - the revision, the visceral experience of making - can be difficult to understand from the outside. That isn’t a failing, it’s just the shape of the role. But it does make me want other kinds of space.
A very interesting discussion between Matthew Burrows MBE and Simon Linke. Ultimately young vs old is best is a very loaded question! I love the YBA's as disrupters. One thing not mentioned is that all artists go through peaks and troughs at any stage of life - when things visually come together and when they don't. (bit like life really). I did a quick chat GPT search and it covers the same areas mentioned in the discussion.
'But it does make me want other kinds of space' (Blackbird Rook)
I spent a year on a mentoring course at Newlyn School of Art. (2023-4) Partly to bring myself up to date with contemporary art. One of the consistent points raised by professionals visiting artists is a disquiet with the gallery system. It causes a mild frown rather than hate, but certainly not a whoop of joy iether! Artists are now finding lots of other ways to showcase their work. Collectively, politically or individually.
I suppose we will have the term 'mega-gallery' soon!....
Hi Simon, thank you again for such a thoughtful and generous exchange. I think we agree on far more than we disagree, particularly around the structural pressures shaping the field.
Where I remain unconvinced is the assumption that seismic shifts are primarily driven by youth. Historically, that narrative is less stable than it appears. If we look at the major ruptures of modern art, the average age of breakthrough tends to cluster in the thirties and forties. Early Cubism and Surrealism emerged largely from artists in their thirties; Abstract Expressionism is even more telling, with key breakthroughs occurring in artists’ mid to late forties. Even movements associated with radicality were often metabolised through a decade or more of prior struggle. The myth of the precocious detonator is compelling, but statistically it’s not the dominant pattern.
Naivety can absolutely be compelling. It carries energy, elasticity, a willingness to move without over-calculation. But innovation in the deeper sense, innovation that restructures a language rather than simply jolts it, usually follows the acquisition and exhaustion of knowledge. Only once something has been grasped can it be meaningfully released. Otherwise the gesture risks becoming posture: a stance against a weight one has not yet carried.
That said, I fully accept your point about burden. The “wise middle” can easily become the encumbered middle. Knowledge accumulates mass; reflexivity can thicken into hesitation. Which is precisely why sustained conversation matters, so that unnecessary baggage can be shed and what remains is distilled rather than dense. Wisdom, ideally, produces lightness of a different kind: not the bounce of youth, but the agility that comes from having wrestled with complexity and survived it.
I value the elasticity of younger artists enormously. When I was younger, I benefited from older artists who recognised and encouraged that energy. I would never want to diminish it. The field depends on that vitality. But the agility of the wise middle is of another order, it is the risk of relinquishing what has been earned, of letting go of mastery in order to move again. That is a far more existential gamble.
Risk without stakes can be exhilarating, but it rarely carries the same transformative force. When there is little to lose, the leap can remain stylistic. When there is accumulated investment, technical, reputational, and intellectual, the leap reorganises the ground beneath it.
To be clear, I want to see strong work at every stage: emerging practices, historical reassessments, posthumous recognition. What feels underrepresented to me are artists whose inquiry is both mature and ongoing, whose conversations are alive, deep, and unresolved. That is where I often sense the greatest seriousness, and also the greatest difficulty of placement.
I suspect this is where structure re-enters the picture. Markets struggle with weight and duration; museums are constrained by funding, expertise, and risk aversion. Neither is inherently malicious, but both are calibrated toward legibility. Greg’s suggestions seem to me not utopian but manageable: slower looking, deeper relationships, less compression.
Perhaps what we are circling is not youth versus maturity at all, but how a system built for exchange might better accommodate work whose primary currency is sustained inquiry.
As a “discovered the need to create” later in life artist so much of what you have written resonates. The feeling of occupying an unwatched space and quietly developing and exploring. There is something of the quiet to be cherished but it’s a balance between having the silence you need to follow your path and feeling ignored because you don’t fit in. (And have no desire to.) Beautifully written and I’m following with interest. Thank you.
Interesting insight into the thoughts of art collecting which is way above my pay scale! However having worked alongside sales teams for 25 years (i'm not a salesperson myself but enjoyed their company nevertheless). The middle ground is as you point out where the still waters run deep so to speak and in pure business terms probably those middle tier artists are probably doing consistent work for the right reasons; and hence where you pick up the best bargins! Art is a business and the no 1 goal of any business is to make money! The more the marketing/reach/hype/collectability the more you inflate the price...it's not rocket science to any business.
Certain car brands prices are priced way above the average, not because the car manufacturing costs and luxury of the vehicle are better but because in brutal terms the customer is happy to pay for the esteem of ownership. Obviously sales teams would'nt express it like this!
Really well said. Thanks 🙏