Anyone who still associates the ownership of art with the possession of virtue must have woken from their fanciful trance last week. Collectors have shown their true colours. On Thursday, the multibillionaire financier Steven Cohen was lambasted across America for his involvement in the notorious shorting of GameStop shares. Teaming up with a former protege, he fought the battle for hedge fund elites against ordinary investors - a dirty great Goliath trying to oppress all the Davids on Reddit.
Related: The GameStop affair is like tulip mania on steroids | Dan Davies
When Cohen went weeping to Twitter - "I'm not feeling the love on this site today" - fans of the New York Mets, which he owns, mocked his greed with a virtuoso range of sporting metaphors. If only the art world were so quick. Cohen's most famous purchases, before the Mets, were Jeff Koons's bunny, Damien Hirst's shark and an Andy Warhol Mao - essential football cards in any boy's Wall Street collection. Though of course Cohen told Fortune magazine that he personally knew just what he liked.
Earlier in the week, fellow billionaire Leon Black stepped down from Apollo Global Management, the private equity company he founded, following an inquiry into his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Black paid Epstein $158m over a five-year period; for what, exactly? it is asked.
Black's art collection includes a $120m pastel of The Scream, generously loaned to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for six months' grace (and burnished reputation). He also funded a new wing for the museum, of which he is chairman. Yet despite a lifetime's knowledge of money and art (two decades on the board of New York's Metropolitan Museum), it seems from the inquiry that Black needed Epstein's help for "the structuring of art entities". A new euphemism has surely been coined.
Being an important collector doesn't even seem to imply intelligence, never mind judgment. The Museum of the Bible, founded in Washington by Steve Green, was last week forced to return more than 5,000 disputed objects to Egypt. These include statues and funeral masks all gathered since the anti-Mubarak uprising in 2011. Baffling, is it not, how they came to be offered for sale in all that chaos?
Will ennui take flight?
Nobody comes, nobody goes and still I procrastinate. A broken handle on a vital drawer has been on my list since the start of the pandemic. The decorations, only just hung by Christmas Eve, are still waiting to be returned to the attic. I owe everybody I love a phone call, but when the day's work is done and home schooling ends, I am speechless, stymied and stalled. This paralysis is shameful, and I hope temporary, but still I can't even make myself go out and read the meters. Whereupon a scarlet balloon arrives by email from the utility supplier, awarded with congratulations on one year of total neglect. I like their wit and it might be motivational. But not yet.
School register heroes
By contrast, I cannot praise enough the teachers whose calm, clear, steady and often humorous voices issue from my teenagers' computers each day. Teachers - and all their colleagues, from the teaching assistants, heads and SEN staff to the caterers, administrators, cleaners, bus, train and tube drivers who risk their lives to educate our offspring - are heroic. Just to take the online register requires supernatural patience. I hear them read out the names into that Grand Canyon from which no answer returns, keep trying to inspire pupils who may be tired, depressed, anxious, self-conscious, distracted, burdened. And still they do it daily: teachers in all their morning glory.
. Laura Cumming is the Observer's art critic