This not-quite-serious question is prompted by a quick look at the exhibitors list for the recent Auckland Art Fair. By my count, of the 41 exhibitors, about thirty have named their enterprises after themselves.

And fair enough, you might object: when you run the shop, you're allowed to call it what you want. But this overlooks the grander possibilities. Public galleries are stuck with their mostly dead-boring names. When you're an owner-operator, however, surely the only limit is the size of your thesaurus.

With this in mind, I hereby inaugurate the (itself very badly named) Dealer Gallery Name of the Year Award, and immediately hand it to one of the youngest galleries in the fair – Melbourne's Utopian Slumps. The phrase has always sounded to me like the name of a wonderfully downbeat suburb, just over the hill from Utopian Heights. In fact, it's the title of a work by painter Ed Ruscha, whose gifts as a namer I've recently praised. But to say that the gallery 'took' it from Ruscha would be wrong. Ruscha always finds his language in the wider world, and I'm certain he's happy for other people to find theirs in his work too.

As poet Bill Manhire once said (or maybe he was quoting someone else), the nice thing about words is that they've been in so many other people's mouths.

Dave Hickey showed how it's done back in 1967 when he called his Austin, Texas dealer gallery 'A clean, well-lighted place' (from a Hemingway story title, and surely a candidate for Best Gallery Name Ever). Even my local hairdresser manages to throw a 'z' into 'Cutz' to lend it some snap. Is it too much to hope for a little more adventure in the realms of naming from our dealers?