When I read your response to Sandy Starr, who responded to Andrew Brighton’s response to my piece about Tracey Emin, I was taken aback a bit: “Me, a gossip artist?” Andrew’s callous accusation of abuse rang hollow, as many such accusations nowadays ring, but yours rang true. And so I spent a few days wondering about gossip. Only today I feel ready to respond to you. To start with, what is gossip? Besides, what is it good for, if anything? In the end, I came out well, as you might have suspected from the outset. Gossip is an indicator of the extent to which information is scarce or dangerous, or perhaps both. It fills the information gap between the demand for and supply of information. Is there a better example of a world in which this condition still prevails than the art world? Now that the Soviet Union is gone, I doubt it. Without gossip we would know even less than we now know. True, some bits of gossip are either useless or even wrong, but that is simply a part of the cost of information in a poorly informed world. Mind you, the scarcity of information benefits those in power in the art world. Even gossip can shed some light on what is going on and how things are done. Even gossip can potentially hurt those in power. In short, let us gossip! Let us not fall for social norms that benefit those who run the game. Let us not leave gossip to those who are least competent—say, the gossip columnists of the art world.