The founder of what many consider to be one of the leading experimental galleries in Manhattan, Sawon describes the current situation as "completely puppeteered from the top" and says it has "tremendous consequences for everyone else." As for the effects of all the investment-grade cash permeating the art world, she is disarmingly direct about what many in the industry are too timid—or conflicted—to say: "It kills radicality for artists, dealers, and everyone else. I think the word collecting doesn't even apply to that kind of activity. It's about buying to sell, really, it's gambling, and has nothing to do with any of the issues that are central to the creation and appreciation of art in our time."....... .....Take the October auction of Gerhard Richter's Abstract Painting (809–4) . A work widely thought to be—like most of the German painter's abstractions—inferior to his far more influential photo-based paintings, it fet...