When it comes to locations I'm one of those crazy authors who has to see it touch it taste it before I trust myself to recreate it for my readers. Having said that visiting a locked-down pediatric psych ward was the most intimidating research I've ever done - and I've visited maximum security prisons shooting galleries bone collections etc.

The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world but as in whispering galleries they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity.

If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which for two months every other year new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes in galleries on the walls of auction houses and off the walls in museum storage.

The last time money left the art world intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries and a few of them have become the best in the world.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.

There's something pleasing about large well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot.

Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing museums are scaling back.