“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in the opening of Anna Karenina. The line is so iconic that it gave rise to a principle: for success to occur in any complex endeavor, all key factors must be present and functioning properly, while failure requires only a single missing element. This year, as the art market faltered, many dealers learned that lesson the hard way.

It is possible that every such business, like every unhappy family, has its own reasons for calling it quits, and in fact there are varying explanations for the raft of gallery closures this year. But when the numbers overall tell indisputably of a shrinking market, it’s hard to believe that many don’t come down to the same thing: too much money going out the door on implacable overheads, not enough coming in from buyers. 

Sure, some have questioned whether the doom-and-gloom reporting is excessive. ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger re...