In her account of Grayson Perry's Reith lecture about the workings of the art world, Deborah Orr (21 September) describes how the art market operates as a "formidable cartel", and advises us to recognise it as a "gargantuan practical refutation" of the idea that only free markets create economic growth. She's probably right. But by bringing money into it, as usual, she is once again pointing a finger at the wrong bad guys.

The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake – they've always been there – but the pirates who've taken over the ship. I am thinking of course of that awful art world species: the curator. When I started writing about art, there were no curators. Now they are everywhere. They go to the same biennales; speak the same meaningless art language; and control the art world from within by privileging their creativity ahead of the artist's. For 5,000 years art survived perfectly well without curators. Now they are its gate keepers.

What we need is a revolution, akin to the impressionist revolution in 19th-century France. Just as the impressionists overthrew the salon and put artists back at the centre of the art world, so someone out there needs to overthrow the Tate empire. Come on Hackney. Rise up.

Waldemar Januszczak

London

• In addition to the advantages libraries bestow (What libraries do for us, 23 Sept), you can add the findings published in the journal Research Stratification and Mobility (2010), which found that having books around the house, even unread, correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. Living with 500 or more books was as great an advantage of having university-educated parents. Given children are more likely now to have sight of e-readers than books and parents who can't afford to go to university, where else but libraries can they be immersed in books?

Anne Strachan

Manchester