When I started covering the art world for The New York Times in 1991, the market was reeling from a worldwide recession. Gone were the Japanese who had been snapping up Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings at a frenzied pace, spending huge sums for what one dealer described as “pretty pictures across a crowded room.” After the Japanese disappeared, sales at the auction giants Sotheby’s and Christie’s plummeted to about half of what they had been.

Now, as I write my last Inside Art column for The Times, not only is the market many times stronger but the overall canvas is also considerably larger, with higher prices, bigger galleries, more acquisitive museums.

Not that the art world has changed beyond recognition: Back then, one of the most talked-about shows was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s re-creation of “Degenerate Art,” the exhibition organized in 1937 by the Nazis in Munich; a few months ago, the Neue Galerie in New York held a hugely popular exhibition that explored the same theme. In 1991, one of the most buzzed-about gallery shows featured Jeff Koons’s series “Made in Heaven.” Lines formed in front of the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, with curious art lovers wanting to glimpse works of Mr. Koons engaged in sex acts with Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star who was then his wife, and to ogle the perfectly made wooden sculptures of panting puppies and sexually suggestive flowers. Although more panned than praised, it was a “must see” — just as Mr. Koons’s museum-wide retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art was a few months ago. The recent show, attended by 320,000 people, was its last hurrah in the landmark Marcel Breuer building; its new digs in Manhattan’s meatpacking district open May 1.