In the rarefied air of White Cube, you will find nothing as horrid as a price list

Commercial galleries seem to be suffering from something like an identity crisis at the moment. White Cube, possibly the grandest of London's contemporary art galleries, has just held an opening for Antony Gormley. The exhibition is expected to be so popular that the gallery was busy erecting canopies in Hoxton Square to cope with the crowds. There was a press conference for the charming artist, in which he spoke in his typically mesmerising combination of street talk ("Well, it's free, innit") and academic jargon ("This work is a continuum in which your passage through space is reconfigured. It is indeed a reworking of Einstein's first theory").

Gormley - OBE, Turner Prize winner and the Henry Moore de nos jours - is certainly worthy of such an exhibition. Yet for all the public service, it is also a commercial venture. Apart from the showpiece, a five-kilometre piece of aluminium wound into the ground-floor gallery, there are five life-size figures sculpted from balls or cubes of metal. There is also a smaller aluminium tangle and quite a few drawings upstairs, which no doubt come in several editions and are clearly there for minor collectors.

There are no price tags, nor a price list at the door, nor prices in the press pack. I can't imagine anything so horrid in the rarefied air of White Cube, where exquisitely dressed staff sashay downstairs and Jay Jopling, the wizard behind it all, sits upstairs in a sanctum breached only by the rich and famous. The whole thing only works if there is a regular assembly of collectors willing to pay the premiums, and that is a moot point in Britain. Collecting is not one of our national characteristics, and old money is rarely spotted around Hoxton Square.

Presumably White Cube and its rivals think they must maintain their appearance of exclusivity, for fear of alienating that small group of wealthy collectors who do the rounds of contemporary galleries.

The route of greater accessibility, as encouraged by the government, can have some pleasantly surprising results. After breakfast with Gormley, I had a very jolly lunch with Will Ramsay. Ramsay dared to establish an inclusive London art "shop" - Will's Art Warehouse - and a twice-yearly event - the Affordable Art Fair - where 135 galleries display their work with conspicuous price tags and nothing costs more than £2,500.

Five years on, the fair now takes £3.4m at each outing. "Half the customers are existing buyers, half are new buyers whose eyes have been opened by the art world and who want to buy into it," says Ramsay. "We just remove the fear factor." His fans applaud such spirit. "I astonished other galleries by showing at the fair," says the West End gallery director Rebecca Hossack. "But I hate elitism in any form. And it didn't put off my regular clients such as Dennis Stevenson and Marjorie Scardino. They came along, and bought work. They got great bargains!"

Far from being defrocked for such shocking behaviour, Ramsay has gone global. He has established fairs in Sydney, Melbourne and New York, where the art world is even more snooty than in London.

"I couldn't call it the Affordable Art Fair in Manhattan," he says. "New Yorkers didn't react well to the word "affordable". I had to call it the AAF."

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