Join us for the almost final episode of this season where we welcome back our incredible team of editorial advisors who guide, suggest—and even challenge—what we’ve discussed in this series.
Joining us are Deana Haggag (program officer at the Mellon Foundation), Mia Locks (curator and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward), Jay Sanders (curator, writer, and director of Artists Space), and of course Allan Schwartzman. Together with host Charlotte Burns, they reflect on the wonderful and wide-ranging conversations with our guests this season, talking about creativity, the nature of change, the future of museums, the balance between wealth and art, and new thinking in philanthropy.
What if we focus on what’s urgent? What if we treat art like it’s essential? All this and MUCH more…
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to the almost final episode of this season of The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests]
We welcome back our incredible team of editorial advisors who guide, suggest, and even challenge what we’ve discussed throughout this series.
Joining us are Deana Haggag, program officer at the Mellon Foundation; Mia Locks, the curator and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward; Jay Sanders the curator, writer, and director of Artists Space; and Allan Schwartzman, of Schwartzman&.
With their expertise, we reflect on the wonderful and wide-ranging conversations with our guests this season. We talk about creativity, the nature of change, the future of museums, the balance between wealth and art, and new thinking in philanthropy.
What if we focus on what’s urgent? What if we treat art like it’s essential?
Let’s get going.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns: Deana, Jay, Mia, Allan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all of your work and all of your insights. We're at the end of another podcast season. What are your thoughts on the way out? Shall we start with you, Jay?
Jay Sanders: I thought this season was fantastic.
I was struck by this kind of massive work in progress that was mapped across all these episodes and then the bravery expressed by a lot of our guests—for sure the ‘Transforming Museums’ episode—coupled with an unflinching belief in art comes across this. There's a sense in the conversations really about a path and a journey and an unfolding. Bryan Stevenson speaks about that in his work and also in the experience of the Legacy Sites but, also you hear it across really different conversations like Jarl [Mohn]'s how he entered into art and then became a philanthropist, in Mia and Laura [Raicovich]'s conversations about institutions after being within them in moments of crisis, and then coming back and finding fruitful and really fundamental avenues of advancement. And then Kemi [Ilesanmi] in this really different reflective state of very active, attentive, unknowing. Maybe a feeling of process that I thought the season conveyed across a lot of different times and spaces.
Charlotte Burns: Thanks so much for sharing that. I think that's really true. And I think the point about the bravery, it struck me that there was a real vulnerability to a lot of the guests and I appreciated how open they all were with us, how willing they were to share with us that sense of uncertainty.
Allan Schwartzman: That vulnerability comes out of trust, so each speaker felt comfortable with the context.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, Allan. I think trust is really important. It's a different thing to do a podcast in 2024 than any other year. People really want to communicate. People really have things that they're trying to process and trying to share.
I've really noticed that, from where I sit, that there's much more urgency around the need to connect and much more trepidation around whether things will connect.
Which is why the idea for the ‘Transforming Museums’ show came about, through the experience of building this series, and the sense that, actually, that kind of crisis that people are fearing has been in the industry for a while.
Deana?
Deana Haggag: For me, and this definitely came across in the museums’ episode, the timing of this season, I could really feel. There is actually something about the first season of What If…?! that felt like we had not yet landed post-crisis. Like, even though things were starting to calcify back to whatever back was before Covid, before 2020, before 2019.
There's something about this season where people are really standing firm in the possibility that some of the systems we thought may shift after 2020, may not. And maybe there was some kind of vulnerability I got off of that. Or maybe I'm also speaking a little bit about myself, too. Like, there is no great hope coming.
And I felt like some of our guests, especially Koyo [Kouoh], to some degree Karen [Patterson], a little bit Salome [Asega], like they themselves are not a solution to the thing that's happening to us, that people have to meet them at the world we may want to make together if we can actually organize as a collective that's interested in the things our field has said it's been interested in for many years.
And I think there was a shift for me this season, really looking at these people is just because I'm in this role or in this place at this time is not in and of itself the solution.
Charlotte Burns: I think that's really interesting. Something I have on my notes is “systems plus success,” and I was thinking about this in preparing one of our first guests this season, Alice Smith said that her only real trauma was escaping the apparent success of making it, and she said that breaking free of her record label contract, her creativity wasn't valued by the industry that was supposed to shepherd it.
[Audio of Alice Smith]
Alice Smith: Because what you're doing when somebody else decides all the things that you're creating, coming up out of your soul, and then they are saying to you, “Nope, that's not it.” Their suggestions for what is gonna make it right, they’re fuckin’ made up. There are no real true rules to how to make music or art of any kind, right? You can't be like, “There's a formula.” Maybe there's a formula for a particular thing, but I never was after that particular thing.
When I left there, it took me a long time to try to heal that up. And then retrain my brain again just to kind of trust what came out.
Charlotte Burns: I was thinking the thing that kept emerging through the season that the systems were sort of broken. It keeps coming up in all of the guests in lots of different ways whether it's collecting, philanthropy, whether it's over and again, you have people saying, “I don't want to run a museum,” or “That role isn't working.” So it's a thread through the season that the systems are in question, at the very least.
Do you think our guests are answering those questions? Do you think they're creating new systems? Do you think that they can?
Allan?
Allan Schwartzman: I think each of them is very acutely immersed in what it is that they are doing. While the nature of the systems is a kind of cloud hanging over it all, I think most people are simply trying to do good work and then step back and assess it within a broader context through these moments of interview. Part of what I picked up is the power of so much work is in being very specific about what the goals and needs of a situation are and then working outward from there.
Koyo spoke about that very much of her work being in the place that she is and not being for every community, but how that sense of building within a community builds community in a larger way.
Charlotte Burns: Mia, as someone who's been a guest and an advisor this season, you've talked about transforming the system. You're someone who very much is focused on that change. So you have hope—you are one of our very hopeful guests this season. To what extent do you think the systems can be changed?
Mia Locks: The systems have to change. I don't even think about it as like they can or they can't. They have to. And I know some people would probably say the systems are actually working perfectly well. They're working exactly as they were designed. But in 2024 in our sector, even those that know that they're benefiting from those systems, I think everyone's acutely aware that they have to change. I think it's a question of how exactly, and really the question for me is always how long. It's also like the style, it's like the nature of the change, and I feel like part of what Deana was saying about feeling this moment or feeling 2024 is
it's super scary for folks. We're in an election year in a very divided moment on so many levels. The system has to start to embrace some of those conversations and the only way that happens is, to Jay's point about the bravery and courage of people that are willing to do that, but to be able to do that from a place of like grace and mutual respect and not in the fever pitch of crisis, if you will.
Charlotte Burns: I always wonder about that. I remember a museum director saying to me once when we did the female artist data study in 2019, “We have to be patient. These things take time. We're getting there.” And I was like, “With respect, we have known about women for a while now. How many more millennia do you think it's going to take?” And also the numbers showed the progress peaked in 2009. Like this isn't even change. This is actually going backwards. And actually, when you really study it, change is cyclical. So we might need to address our understanding of change because it isn't some linear thing. What does it take to make change? That's something that one of our guests addressed this season. Hoor Al Qasimi said, “I always say that if you want to make change, then you have to be part of that change.”
[Audio of Hoor Al Qasimi]
Hoor Al Qasimi: You can't sit and wait for things. So for the world to change, you have to make an effort because nobody is going to know what you need if you don't try, if you don't open your mouth, if you don't say, “Actually, this is the kind of thing that we are interested in doing.”
I think putting yourself in that position is very important. We all have the same ambition that as artists, we want to create space for other artists, and we want to do that at home, and I feel it more and more seeing artists creating their spaces.
Charlotte Burns: I really liked that, and I liked her story of her just deciding that she was going to run the [Sharjah] Biennale—that really stood out for me.
I really like the way, obviously, that Bryan Stevenson made change. He's a hero of mine.
Who, for you guys, stood out? Thinking about change, what it takes to make change, did anything hit a nerve for you this season?
Mia?
Mia Locks: I really liked what Koyo said about doing what is necessary and how that has been the driving force in all of her decisions. She says that you’d never imagined she'd be a museum director, that she didn't necessarily want that job, but the realization that there was a necessity and an opportunity, being really inspiring.
And I heard a kind of echo of that in some of what Karen shared about intuition and instinct and how that is something that she's really respected and been tuned into. But this sense that in these moments when things need to change, there is a degree of just stepping into that because there's always going to be somebody in the room that's, “Hold on, we need a process. We need three years of exploration.”
Institutions like to really take their time and part of me really understands that—I'm very sympathetic to the need for taking our time. But we're at this moment where we can't just wait until the process gets sorted out and maybe in some cases we could just move at the level of instinct and trust people to try a different thing.
Deana Haggag: Just to pick up where Mia's leaving off, I can't stop thinking about Koyo saying that she decided to move back to the continent to move to Senegal to raise her son, and specifically, I can't stop thinking about the part where she says that everything that she really values about herself, she sees as having come from being raised in Cameroon and that she didn't feel like her son would get the tools he needed in Europe or the weapons and like the throwaway or the weapons at the end of that really hit me.
Koyo Kouoh: I didn't want to raise a Black boy in Western Europe in the late 20th century because of all the odds that he will be confronted with as a young Black boy and I always thought that my strength comes from my upbringing on the continent. My upbringing in Cameroon, that is where culturally I am. I was grounded and I was formed in ways that gives me the strength to be the Black woman in the world that I am.
Deana Haggag: When she said she didn't think her son could get the tools or the weapons he needed to survive in Europe, I think the art worlds we make are something that give us tools and weapons. The things we consume from this kind of global arts community is one really palpable form of knowledge for me. And so I think the folks who are really shifting it in lifetime to better prepare us for the world we're actually living in and for the world that's ahead of us. There were so many folks this season that I think we're doing that either inside the institution or outside of it. But the way Koyo talked about doing what is necessary and then knowing exactly what has to change to better orient you really blew my mind.
But the other person I feel like has really done the work and formed real change in our field is Kemi. The way that Kemi can make a container for exactly what is needed, the way that she will let the world lead and build around it, I think is really admirable.
The other thing about Kemi that I think really came through for me in her episode is like not being attached to something because we must. Everything is on the table, everything. And if the institution needs to change, if the location needs to change, if the way we work needs to change, she really felt to me like someone who has made change integral to her practice, and I think we've also seen that in the containers she's built and the things she's left behind. She will move at the speed of the society that she is in, and she will shift alongside of it. She will not wait. She will not make a relic of our present, and like something about that really, really stood out for me this season.
Charlotte Burns: I agree. I love talking to Kemi. You're right, she so embodies that change. She's an idea maker and a community builder in the truest possible sense. She really sees it and builds it. And it's really amazing to watch her create it with words and then actions.
I was just looking at her ‘what if,’ she talked about creating a beautiful, joyful, sustainable cultural infrastructure for brown and Black people across the globe.
[Audio of Kemi Ilesanmi]
Kemi Ilesanmi: I'm similarly interested in what does it look like to build infrastructure that works, a net that works on the African continent so that our culture can be preserved. It can also experiment and build new things connected to or not connected to what came before. All those ideas being able to bubble up, but how do we create it? They need different kinds of supports to make that happen and different kinds of infrastructure.
What if that were possible, and what if I could help with that? And who else could help with that?
Deana Haggag: The way Kemi worded her ‘what if’ really demonstrated for me why she has had the single most successful succession plan in the field. When she left Laundromat Project, that organization is only stronger. As someone who talks to thousands of grantees across this country every day, and everyone is stuck in like what it means to succeed someone, what it means to hand an infrastructure to another person, Kemi is by far and large is the single most successful example I've seen of that, that many of us, I think in we have seen of that. And I think her ‘what if’ question, like the way she layered that, “Who else could help with that? How could I help?” It's just, it's really beautiful.
Charlotte Burns: Is that why it's successful, you think? Because it's that idea of layering help?
Deana Haggag: I think that she really sees people. And I think that she is not afraid herself to evolve. She can move on from an idea, she can move on from an infrastructure, she does not need to be buried in the work she's doing. She can move on. That is something I don't see modeled very much in the field all the time. I feel like something about her ‘what if,’ like she wants to create the space, who else could help? And it almost always works out because she can really let go and she can really move on. And I think some of the reasons our field is stuck where it is people don't know how to move on from ideas, from models, from their jobs, and so we're stuck.
Mia Locks: I agree with you. But part of what I read between those lines is so much about a kind of antidote to the culture of individualism like it's not about accruing power or the museum director's legacy or this person's particular mark on the field for Kemi. It's like that question of, “Yeah, how can I help? Who else can help?” It's actually about the work.
So much of what we've seen in the past is it's hard to walk away from a position of power. It's hard to get off the pyramid or to share the podium with somebody else. So maybe part of her success as a leader, as a colleague, as a builder has to do with that collectivism at the center of all of the thinking. That is part of what is really inspiring to me, at least.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Allan, you said something when we were talking about the pre-prep for this, something that stood out to you this season was that many of the guests were coming to grips with aspects of identity, what defines each of us and where we meet this idea of reckonings. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what you meant by that?
Allan Schwartzman: Oh, lots of things.
When you're dealing with large scale institutions and with large systems, big change requires big rethinking, and ultimately it's about sharing power, giving up power. Whether that's economic or political, we are not yet coming to grips with necessary reckonings that are the result of horrible historical collisions that have built the system and that have brought the system to a kind of breakdown point that we're in now. Especially when it comes to institutions, the capacity to embrace change tends to reside more with the small C than a capital C. The big change is ultimately going to be at the cost of power and how it has been exercised for hundreds of years, if not through most of civilization.
And, I think that's the part where each of the people interviewed this year is making truly profound impact in their individual initiatives. But the larger issue of white male power, for example, that's not giving up. And so how far change can go is, it's very reassuring and affirming to see it happening on a specific individual case-by-case basis. One hopes, as Kemi and many others allude to, that as those cases become a kind of norm or become interwoven into daily lives, maybe the needs for much larger systemic changes become less necessary because there's place for different realities to exist in parallel that play out what they seek to play out.
I think that's part of the challenge of today is that it's like we're waking up all of a sudden to see all these problems that we've built all along over hundreds of years and that most of us or many of us have been victim to or governed by in our own various ways. And the world of culture has been almost simple-minded in how it's looked at growth and therefore has been stunned. It's like things had to be really off for there to be demands for change. I see this in a much larger kind of epochal shift, but where this ends up going, I'm very curious to see what impact can ultimately happen on larger systems and institutions.
Charlotte Burns: Where do you think is different than when we first started? A shift I could see from this season is that we've never had so many people saying they don't want to be museum directors or that the job of a museum director doesn't work. Something that people were saying quietly a few years ago now seems to be being said on the record, much more publicly.
Allan Schwartzman: I'm not sure how much that our world has shifted as our focus in who's being interviewed has shifted and that certain people doing work independently of existing institutions have evolved to a certain place within their work and that's reached a point where we can see these points of change.
Our dialogue and our consciousness has shifted dramatically since the beginning of a global view toward art began in the early ‘90s. Now we are truly aware that anything meaningful can happen anywhere. It depends upon the conditions, the people, and the convening. And that's what's exciting about Hoor, for example, is she just made it happen, built it step by step. This was somebody who was trained as a traditional art historian and realized that “History doesn't include me,” or “It includes me in one very specific way.”
I loved when Koyo spoke about seeing postcolonial as beginning in Ireland. That was such a mental shift. Somehow the geographies of the world and the people within it have developed more complexity or nuance or fluidity then in the past.
Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting.
Jay, did you want to say something here?
Jay Sanders: Picking up on a different thread of what Allan said, this kind of idea, just this transforming through deep sea and LaToya Ruby Frazier had been on my mind, especially Charlotte, the way you conducted that interview. She so clearly details a kind of model or proposition for the role of an artist in society and also the role of an artist to interrogate the real concrete social material specificities of their own medium and then deconstruct and transfigure those kind of from within. There's so many things about that practice and the conversation that I found both instructive and really inspiring.
[Audio of LaToya Ruby Frazier]
LaToya Ruby Frazier: I really am unpacking the power of photography not only as something to raise awareness or tell a story but literally as the platform to advocate for social justice and literally as the resource itself that would bring about the monetary difference so that the people in the work can enact the change that they need. And it also underscores that they actually are the change they need. It’s the creative solution to the situation at hand that the work is revealing to the viewer.
Jay Sanders: Through really studying conceptual photography and documentary photography, you can create a different dynamic that refoots the power intrinsic in the images toward the subject, and not toward the entity commissioning it or the photographer. And that's done both aesthetically in the work but also structurally through a redistribution of resources, equity, including actual money.
That fundamental shift within practice, I think, is really profound in LaToya's work. And then how image making becomes collective memory, becomes public discourse, how her work calls the bluff of advertising, and what it articulates as a potential for an artist to be, I think.
Allan Schwartzman: I love how LaToya speaks about her work as a calling. She found true power in society through art that is quite brilliant and magical and it sees connections that the rest of us may have seen as not really feasible. Every decision she's made has been intentional. It's been with a thought toward where she's going and what this means in her life and her impact on others' lives and within communities that parallel her own. Hers is a very beautiful interweaving of personal and cultural stories and commitments.
Charlotte Burns: I loved interviewing her. Like Jay says, it's this idea that art is the means. She took the photographs, then the sale of the photographs bought the water for the people in Flint, Michigan. It's so amazing. She did something with her art that no government did, no private organization did. She did that with the art that she created and the community that she created the art with. It was a collaborative thing. And, that's, I guess for me, that's one of the big through lines. That's one of the truly joyful, hopeful things that each of the guests has had this season, which is this fundamental clarity around what art is for them.
From Mia talking about art being the baggiest thing; It can hold all of these questions, you said. It's this space that's given you so much to think about all of these things. To Bryan Stevenson, when I said, why did you move from arguing in front of the Supreme Court into opening sites of cultural memory in Montgomery, Alabama? And he said that around 13 years ago, he thought that Brown versus the Board of Education was going to be overturned during Obama's administration and so he knew that he wanted to move into the space of cultural narrative.
[Audio of Bryan Stevenson]
Bryan Stevenson: I began to worry that our courts today wouldn't do something to protect the rights of disfavored people, marginalized people without power, and that made me realize that we were going to have to get outside the courts and engage in this narrative struggle that we had largely just been watching. And when we chose to do that, it became clear to me that race was the most critical narrative issue still looming in America—our unwillingness to confront this history. That's what motivated this idea of creating these Sites. My hope is that we can change the relationship to the history. We don't want people to just learn about it. We want them to think about it differently, feel it differently, understand it differently, and then be motivated to act differently.
Charlotte Burns: Or Alvaro [Barrington] and how much he understands that art just has to be much, much more in people's lives. It has to figure that out, from the generosity of his practice.
Or, Alice Smith talking about the importance of creativity for her and that feeling. Or, Barbara talking about the importance of art. Koyo, the urgency of culture.
In a period in the broader art world where there is a lot of confusion generally, the guests on our show, each of them I think knows what they're doing and why, what art has meant for them, what it can be.
Do you agree with that?
Allan Schwartzman: Absolutely. The value system by which we've all lived here, not we individually, but this world in which we function, is rooted in and defined by a market and what it values financially. And that's become very thin. It's led to safety, art that doesn't challenge to a hyper obsession with painting because that's more practical to place value in.
And I think that this is what the wider system is beginning to reveal, the schism between art, its potential, and what many individuals are doing versus how the market had overpowered what stories got told and how they got told, and how everything became valued.
And so I feel like there's space now opening up out of necessity, through a line that was empowered by money but has become rather thin in its ideas and it's thoughts. It's a little bit like we're in a moment where painting reflects the kind of, the perfumery of the Rococo rather than the power and vision of other periods of time.
Mia Locks: Yeah, that's interesting. What you're describing has a lot to do with the clarity of mission and purpose. I say that as somebody who's only ever worked in the nonprofit world. And I think a lot of what you're talking about, Charlotte, a lot of these folks are similarly minded where it's just values alignment. And then it's just this is our mission and we just move toward that thing. I think things do get really confusing just due to the concentration of money and power and just, obviously, the fact that art is a global asset class is almost separate from this thing that Emily Rales said in the last season about art is essential, and actually a lot of the different people on this season talked in a really personal way about that.
I really appreciated hearing people's individual sort of journeys into this. Jessica Morgan talked about class and about her experience of feeling outside of stuff growing up in the UK, or Koyo talks about it a little bit too. Our way into this thing from wherever it started genuinely follows some kind of belief in the fact that art is essential.
I talked about it in terms of bagginess, but just I was a young person who I think probably like many people was interested in lots of stuff and curious about lots of things. And art really was the thing, the one space where you could actually be interested in all those things and ask a lot of questions and like fumble your way through and like maybe get it wrong, but just to keep thinking like that was the space that valued that type of process and thinking.
Jay’s points in the beginning about process and how people are talking through that, that's the real value of art, you know, that these other sectors and industries and worldviews don't allow. For those of us on the hopeful side, it still is, and that's like what keeps us here. Keeps me here, I'll say personally.
Jay Sanders: Yeah, Mia, in your conversation, your definition of art helping us find out how to be in the world. In reading through the transcripts, I actually highlighted different people's definitions of art and Koyo says, art is the spiritual social science and then says that, expresses that bringing back artistic practice into a solid, independent, valid social science should be the goal.
And Jarl says I think it's a shortcut to the soul. Barbara says—even about collectors—that it's people feeling a bit incomplete and we're searchers. That they wanted to find something that gave them answers and they found it in art. And I think, I have to imagine that in this era, maybe when there's probably more divergent opinions about what art is than ever, and more participants, and more definitions—and that, of course, is challenging to attend to on all levels—but yeah, that maybe there's a, there is a band of kind of philosophical hopefulness that we see in these conversations, for sure.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: I want to ask you all about the pressures on some of that philosophical hopefulness, a lot of which is the financial strain. And money came up a lot in this season as well. One of the first guests was Jessica Morgan, whose ‘what if’ pointed to a different funding system in the US.
[Audio of Jessica Morgan]
Jessica Morgan: I feel that everybody in America has always rolled their eyebrows whenever I talk about real funding support in the US coming from the government, and that it's impossible and it's so wound up in politics—although sadly we've seen the same thing happen in the UK in recent years as well—but I still think that there's something to be said for the feeling that the people who are visiting your institution have helped pay for it. And actually I think what's hilarious is that I think most people do think that. I think most people here actually do think that tax dollars go to support museums when they don't. I think there's appetite for that as well. It would be wonderful if somebody would actually take that on.
Charlotte Burns: And we ended the season with Laura Raicovich outlining an idea for a system in the US where we could bring in money from governmental infrastructure bills.
Laura Raicovich: Which I think could be an interesting way of doing it but I'm not talking about trying to impose a European public funding model on culture, for culture in the United States. That would not work. That's just not historical. It's, it just would not work. So this is rather a rebalancing so that the public sphere actually has a stake in what happens inside these cultural spaces. And also that we have the opportunity to have a public conversation as a nation about what is culture and how is it mobilized in our daily lives.
Charlotte Burns: But in that same episode we also included an excerpt from Glenn Lowry, MoMA's [Museum of Modern Art] director, talking about the real possibility of political attacks on the tax system that currently undergirds many US cultural organizations. He was speaking on a panel organized by Talking Galleries, in collaboration with Schwarzman&, and Deana was on the same panel.
So Deana, I'm going to go to you here. Which of those ends of the thing is because there's hope there, the idea that we began the season talking about a possible solution to more governmental support. We ended the season going, “Okay, maybe there is a way.” But then we also ended the season saying, “And maybe things could also get worse.”
Where do you sit on that scale? Do you think there are viable funding solutions other than the one that we have? Just an easy question for you.
Deana Haggag: No. I don't. Not in our lifetime. And I actually, maybe I'm going through this sort of evolution and in real time. So it's with like deep regret and shame that I think things are going to get a lot worse, not better. And so what does that mean for how we make and participate in art together? And so I don't feel hopeful about any kind of government intervention. I'm actually arriving at a place where I don't know that we want that even if it was possible because when we say that there is government intervention, we talk about it like it's objective and it's not. And I think we're watching that all over the country right now. And so, no. I think this is the system we have. I am thinking a lot more about what I'm willing to give up to divest from the system.
I think all organizations and all artists and all institutions might just want to shrink for good reason, not because their arm was forced, but because it's not just the money flowing in, it's also the money flowing out that's not sustainable. We're doing too much on too little resources and it's burning a lot of people out. I do think, over time, that we really will dislodge New York and LA and a small subset of European cities as the centers of the art world if just by force. People can't afford to be there anymore.
I don't think that there is anything to work towards. I think we are making art in an increasingly fraught and dangerous context. And rather than try to cooperate with them, rather than beg—and that's what it's increasingly feeling, that we are begging for this kind of resource and attention—I think we have to build away from it.
I also want to be clear, because I sound so dreadful right now, I don't think that's all going to get gobbled up in even the next couple of decades. I am really thinking about the art world my child will live in, and that will have even less government intervention, even less public support, even more censorship, even more rules. Things in this country and increasingly globally are moving at a 50 to 100-year timeline. And a lot of the stuff that came up in Bryan Stevenson's episode, a lot of the folks that have organized, the folks that have helped us hold up against the system, they've known this is coming for a long time. So I think it's going to get a lot worse and I don't think we're going to run back from it.
I'm curious more actually about the way that Koyo built up RAW [Material Company].
Charlotte Burns: In what way are you curious about that?
Deana Haggag: I guess I'm curious when the math is done, what was more helpful? Was it RAW or was it Zeitz MOCAA? And why? And I don't have an answer for that, but I am curious about the difference between a slow, small-moving residency in Dakar versus a massive, multimillion global infrastructure like Zeitz MOCAA. Which thing will Koyo say felt better and which was more meaningful? And I don't know, but I think when we talk about the infrastructures of support, those are two very different models. And I'm curious about the difference between what it takes to make something like the Laundromat Project and what it takes to make something like MoMA. I wonder if over the next 50 to a hundred years, there will be significantly less of these massive global infrastructures that take so much to do in a world where there's just less and less resources to do them, and in the very least, the RAWs and the Laundromat Projects of the world, they're adaptable.
The thing that's making me hopeful is I think there will be a return to the small and to the low and to the steady in the face of an organizational infrastructure that I don't know how it sustains itself. And it's definitely not the government. I really think we just need to put that thing away and not put so many brilliant minds into trying to convince the government to see us. I don't think they ever will.
Mia Locks: I have a question, though.
Charlotte Burns: Oh yeah, Mia, you go.
Mia Locks: I was reflecting on that point that Glenn makes about the tax system and how that feels under threat if those on the right do really scrutinize the tax status of higher ed, that the same one applies to museums. But the question I have is, again, as somebody who works in the nonprofit sector, has tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3), I understand how the taxes work, but for the wealthy people that support museums, and I really ask this very genuinely, is it really just the tax benefit? Is that really the reason? Is that driving 100 percent of those people's support of museums? I don't think so. I think that's a pretty cynical view. If that status changed tomorrow, would those people really just stop giving to museums?
Allan Schwartzman: I think they would give in different ways. In 1987, I believe, when there was a change in the tax code that eliminated for a period of time, the tax deductibility of donations to museums, the number of donations of artworks to museums plummeted.
Mia Locks: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: I remember doing a study that a museum like the National Gallery [of Art], I think the numbers dropped to far less than 10 percent of what they had been in years before. Now, that could have been…
Mia Locks: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: …very specifically because people were waiting for another change to come but I think you will always have people who believe in things like culture and their value to society, whether or not they are able to write it off because ultimately it's still money. It may be less money, but of people who have extreme wealth, it's not really making a difference in their balance.
Mia Locks: That's the question. Yeah.
Allan Schwartzman: And I can think of a couple of people I know of great wealth who have great commitment to culture and to its potential impact on people's lives and on society in general and they're giving away most of their money. I think this gets more into a question about, do we need substantial change to distribution of wealth? Did the Reagan era in deregulating everything start this tumble where you have such excessive wealth that it actually becomes obscene and animalistic when you see it played out in many instances?
Deana Haggag: Yeah. I think maybe, Allan, you're hitting on something. We cannot solve this as a field in isolation from the conditions of the global economy. We just can't do that. This idea that government, first of all, the very infrastructure that has made most of this mess, is going to be the one that saves us is ridiculous. I think we can't separate how an art market is made, an art world, be it the market or the nonprofit, whatever it is, as separate from how value is created monetarily in this country—they're like completely intertwined.
I think a lot about restaurateur friends in the Bay, specifically in San Francisco, whose restaurants close because they can't afford to hire anyone because no one lives anywhere near them. The hardest thing to find is a waiter and a busboy, but you can find an executive chef. We've built a world where the wealth has gotten so inequitable that our country is buckling under it, and I think so is the infrastructure for the art world.
But Mia, also, just to go back to that, no, it's not the only reason, people choose to donate to museums. And also, I would say that what happened in ‘87 would happen today, bar none. That if those things got deregulated or overly regulated, we would lose a substantial swath of the things that support the museum-making field. They are tied.
Mia Locks: This connects to what you're saying though about constricting and doing less.
Deana Haggag: Yes.
Mia Locks: And simplifying, and clarifying.
Deana Haggag: Yeah.
Mia Locks: Nobody wants to be forced to do that because of the tax code any more than they want to be forced to do that by law.
Deana Haggag: Yeah.
And I also want to be really clear. What I mean when I say that because it's painful. We will show less art. We will employ less people. As a sector, there will be less to do in this world. It's not like that, it's also some tidy arrival point. It will also suck. But if the question is, how does this field sustain itself writ large? This thing we're doing is not sustainable.
And today I talked to more EDs that are curious about capping their work. And I'm really interested in that. What does it mean to say our staff will never grow more than X? Our people will not make more than X. We will not do more than X number of shows. And it does cut off possibility in a lot of dimensions, but it makes it so that they've found something that works for them.
Allan Schwartzman: This was the rub in institutions, or museums in particular, growing in the same way in which businesses grew. It meant that growth was always the goal. That if you didn't continue to grow, you shrank or you died. How many “robber baron” mansions remain on Fifth Avenue? A tiny percentage of what used to be there. The nature of wealth and how it gets concentrated and how it gets passed on, it changes over time, usually based on necessity or practicalities. So many of these very large scale behemoth museums grew independently in parallel. But at a certain point, they can't all survive. It's not practical. It's not practical for what the art requires to be responsible to the art.
There are institutions that will be challenged sooner than others. And ultimately, I think it will take collaboration for the essentialness of institutions to be defined, enforced, and made practical for survival or else you'll have a very random kind of collapse.
Mia Locks: Deana, you said something about the field not being able to sustain these giant, behemoth institutions, that, that has to shift. But my fear is that actually they're the only ones that can afford to survive. Like we're already seeing the closure of galleries at midsize, organizations, artists spaces that, by all accounts are wonderfully designed and people love them, but…
Deana Haggag: Yeah.
Mia Locks: …they can't make that leap, that capital leap. And I just feel like we've seen that show before, we're seeing it again. Are there still going to be makers? These are really big questions. But like in our field, the hardest part about it, which is different from those other sectors is, the like proximity of that precarity and that power being like literally down the hall is so intense…
Deana Haggag: Yeah.
Mia Locks: …that we have to deal with it in a way that is different than those other sectors. We have to deal with it on that like human, relational level. And that's the part that I'm like, maybe not hopeful that it's going to be easy. I agree with you. It's going to get harder before it gets better. But I feel like that's our opportunity.
Allan Schwartzman: It's a tiny number of these large museums that are actually self-sustaining financially. Glenn himself spoke about always being in deficit.
Mia Locks: Structural deficit, yeah.
Allan Schwartzman: It's a massive problem. Once you step beyond the three or four, five cities in this country in which the museum has always been central to the identity of that city, the basic give for board members is a fraction of what it is in places like New York. And so all these places struggle and at a certain point, you have moments where new approaches are more enlightened approaches to giving develop, but by and large, these are not sustainable in the same way that the highest concentrations of wealth are not sustainable.
Deana Haggag: I don't think that the large museums, the ones we perceive to be sustainable, even though I agree with Allan, I think very few are if any at all. I think there's like new things coming that will occupy the vacuum lift when inevitably the entire field shrinks down.
We don't have to talk about this so abstractly, we lost two art schools this year. They have shut down. They no longer exist. They are closing. If you had talked to leaders in that field, they knew that in 2020, they predicted that by 2025, we would see a three percent shrink, that in the next 10 years, maybe half might close entirely.
We're living in a world where someone like Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it X. And I fear that because of the wealth inequities that the art world might look really similar in the next 50 to 100 years, where some of these institutions are straight up purchased and rebranded to do a similar thing, but not the exact thing it did when it was quote-unquote “publicly owned.”
And so I don't think, Mia, sorry to add, I don't want to like, even more sinister than the small place will close and the big place will survive. I think it's like until we get the economy in check, we're actually facing something so much worse. And I say this sitting on Andrew W. Mellon's wealth, who single-handedly props up so much of this field. And that was a billionaire, however long ago, whose wealth has now made this field possible, but you could not have told people that.
Charlotte Burns: The other thing I'll just add to that, to the point of art schools is, of course, Alvaro talked about this in his episode that he graduated with something like quarter of a million dollars in debt. It's a really different kind of industry to saddle young people with that kind of debt.
[Audio of Alvaro Barrington]
Alvaro Barrington: The amount of times I've walked into a classroom and as a teacher, know that there's at least five of those students who have become sex workers because they cannot afford the education, and the housing, and so many other things. It's one of those things that make me so upset. But I just think that we're creating these conditions in which people are making decisions that 10 years from now they will realize how fucked they are.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: There's two things I want to ask you about. I was talking to someone today inside a museum. Not inside, they weren't locked inside. [Laughs] I don't know, they might have been. Everyone works long hours.
I was talking to someone today in a museum and they're working on a kind of data project and I was asking them if it was appreciated and they were saying that the way that museums are organized is such that they aren't by nature forward-looking institutions. It's not really the way they're organized, it's not really the way they think, it's just not part of their business. Even if you are meant to be a standard bearer for your field, you leave the reflection on whether that's a success to other people. So you will organize a great exhibition, but then you'll leave it to the critics to say whether that was a great show or not. So the reflection isn't something that museums really do and it got me thinking, apart from artists, I couldn't really think of a particular area within the art world that was future-focused. And it made me think maybe this is why we have so many problems because you can think of other industries that are geared to the future.
Is there a part of the art world that you can think is future-focused?
Mia Locks: Artists.
Charlotte Burns: Apart from artists.
Mia Locks: [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: Who are also engaged with the past.
Mia Locks: But they're always thinking about the future because they're making a thing today that they're going to share with the world tomorrow, or next month, they're thinking about their work in the future.
Deana Haggag: I think the entire intellectual class around artists is future-forward. Curators and writers and educators and the whole apparatus that helps us transmit ideas from artist to audience and vice versa is really future forward. I feel like just around the time that folks opened up the possibility that you could do that thing for a living alongside people that you respected, the economy will shut it down. I feel so sad actually, that there isn't…I think the entire workforce in this field is remarkably future-forward. It's just not sustainable to be in the field anymore, and what does that mean? Where will we all go? Where will we put this interest in talking about what it means to be a human being among other human beings? Like, where will this vernacular, where will we go?
Charlotte Burns: That sort of brings us back to the beginning, that question of the systems. If the creativity is not valued by the thing, by the system, where does the creativity go?
But then Alice is our first guest this season. She found a new path. Our last episode was people talking about working past crises and finding new ways. Maybe they find new ways.
Mia, you were our guest in that last episode. Do you think you find new ways?
Mia Locks: Um, I don't know. I'm thinking about your sort of hypothetical question, Deana, more literally than, like, where will we all go? We were talking about shrinking and doing less and the field getting smaller and there being less museums and I think with all change and with all loss, there's like some amount of grief in that process, but I guess I wonder that if that time is coming and if we can have some collective understanding that is a reality that will come, maybe not tomorrow, but in some future tomorrow, could we actually think together about what would be a succession plan, so to speak? If we actually could all make a plan together, I feel like we might be okay. But what's gonna happen, or what I fear will happen, is that there'll be—and honestly this feels like such a metaphor for everything else in our country but—there'll be some people that are denying the reality of that future coming. There will be some people in the sort of moment of that and in the wake of that trying to hoard as much power for themselves. But I just feel like there's an opportunity for us to be like, “Huh? If our field is going to look different in 20, 50, 100 years, what are some steps and actions we can take now and in the next 5 to 10 years that will start to take us toward, I don't know, a world where the field has far more racial and ethnic diversity across the workforce and throughout leadership? Or like a world in which an ecosystem includes not just the tiniest and the biggest, but a pretty healthy middle, right? These are like all much bigger political questions, but I feel like they're so meaningful, both in terms of what kind of culture can be seen and who gets to survive, but how we, in the very like capacious sense, want to see this thing happen.
Deana Haggag: I think that's why I care so much about the organizations that are not downsizing, but like really trying to figure out what they can do with the resources that they have that take care of the artists they work with and take care of themselves and their staff. So, I guess, Mia, it doesn't get to that, the sort of cliff. It's like thoughtful and mindful. I'm struck by museum directors who are saying things like, “We're not going to expand, we're not going to get a new museum. We're not going to do a big architecture project,” even though that's the board that inherited them, that's what they wanted. That's the milestones and they just won't do it.
Jay Sanders: I was struck by something you said at the very beginning, the question of the system being broken or there being a solution, and then you sort of reframed that. I'm thinking about like some of our guests this season, like Karen Patterson and Salome, maybe there's their leadership model, and their kind of organizational model isn't quite like a structural reinvention but there are these very sensitized, active, caring question-asking entities that are trying to work in the morass or something that some of the leaders to hold up are working at that wavelength and not the kind of master builder or, of course, not huge scale, but that attentive, like situational way of working feels practical right now, and maybe more apropos to the moment than grand claims for reinvention, which, I think we're saying don't feel so possible right now.
Charlotte Burns: Karen is working at that scale. It's a different vision of power.
[Audio of Karen Patterson]
Karen Patterson: Money is the tool that the US speaks, and it is very effective. But there are so many other tools at our disposal, and so I think about the ripple effect of the funding, absolutely. But I think about the ripple effect of the ethos and the ethics in a more creative way, because I think about how people mostly remember Ruth [DeYoung Kohler II] will eventually be her ethics and her ethos over the generations.
Charlotte Burns: It is an enormously well-funded organization that just has a different vision of support and growth and what it means to support the field and whose power she wants to lean into.
Mia Locks: Yeah. I was super inspired by her episode for maybe somewhat obvious reasons; she was a curator, she understands what it's like to be applying for funds or asking for support, but also to be like in an institution thinking, trying to be creative, throwing ideas at a dartboard. And she's so reflective in that episode of what that experience has taught her but also just thinking about the ways in which, you know, foundations and philanthropy can not just support in literally like transferring of funds, but creating an opportunity, increasing ease or relieving burden beyond just financial, right? That there's also like a relational aspect that I felt like she really understood and articulated quite beautifully.
Charlotte Burns: A big part of her work is those retreats which is the opposite of direct impact philanthropy, this sort of Silicon Valley idea of hoops that you have to jump through to prove that the money has had a certain impact and it's just this idea of there will be positive outcomes to making people feel supported and enabling them to do better work, asking them what they need to do that work. And you're seeing so much more of that in philanthropy, with Melinda Gates's recent announcement.
Does any of that make you feel more hopeful?
Deana Haggag: Yes. I think the thing about Karen—and, full disclosure, I work really closely with Ruth Arts, so I know them quite well—they don't think the money is the most important thing at the table. And I think that is such a shift in how we think about philanthropy. The hope goes in so far as we believe in others. I am hopeful that other people are working night and day to make the world better and if I am in a position to have money, the thing that very few people actually have, then it is my duty to get that money to them and to care for them so that they can go do the thing they're doing. I've gone to those Ruth Arts retreats and they are, no hyperbole, like the single best thing I've attended in the decades that I've worked in this field and it's because they do not want to take anything from you. It is really a place of just understanding that you are doing so much with so little and inevitably the people that are on those retreats take a sort of similar to the season, a kind of vulnerable tack that they don't get to take in their day to day, but it's to just take care of the people that are doing it.
If all philanthropy operated that way, I'd be so hopeful. Then we could solve this. There is enough money on the planet right now to solve for the issues that ail us in this problematic economy. It exists. The issue is, I think for so many, the money has given them a sense of, I don't want to say their importance because it's not even offensive. Like some of these humans in foundations, individual philanthropists are lovely, but I think there's still something about the importance of the money at the table. It no longer acts as one resource. It acts as the resource that makes it like, impossible to let go and let people really get to the work.
There are thousands of Bryan Stevenson's. But we don't support all of them because we need the money to transmute and transmit a sense of importance and social class and it takes on a meaning and Ruth Arts just doesn't do any of that. They barely talk about what they do. They don't see themselves as important as the work itself. And there's something about that I find so hopeful, but I don't think that's the trend. I don't think that's the trend. People aren't just like calling up museums and giving them unrestricted gifts because they believe in them.
Allan Schwartzman: Is it not possible that this degree of wealth is still young…
Deana Haggag: Yeah.
Allan Schwartzman: …formed mostly in the ‘90s, maybe built upon bad values that were entitled in the ‘80s, and that as is often the case with growth and development that when people, individuals reach a certain level of maturity or of proving their worldly success, they then start to look for meaning. I think having the examples of some very enlightened people moving forward, whether it's financially or in terms of concepts and communities, I do believe that can build. I don't think that most people on museum boards consciously took on the position of creating elite environments that did not evolve with their audiences.
So I think it, it takes examples, and it takes examples who others look up to or who have influence over other people. We happen to live right now in a moment where negative power is far more present and commanding than positive power. But it doesn't mean that that can't shift. Despotism eventually gives way sooner or later. Similarly, somebody owning all the coins in the world gets to be a little lonely there. So that's my hope that there's enough, especially, most of this leadership is coming from women and people of color who are bringing to these fields a kind of fresh way of looking because they're of communities that hadn't been empowered or populations that hadn't been empowered to that extent.
Mia Locks: I agree with you, Allan. Obviously a lot of the people I see out there that are women, that are folks of color, that are relatively new to leadership, or are leading, and part of me is “Yes,” but also protect them at all costs. We're all watching what happens in higher education. Like it is real, and the people that have been there a long time or who look the most like the people that have been in this field a long time, they're going to be fine.
That's the thing I'm worried about. How can we keep those folks in the situation that they're in and support them as this kind of bridge between whatever the hell we're in right now and wherever we want to go? Because I agree with you, Deana. It's dark. It's not going to be good. It's going to be bumpy. But the people that are trying to do the thing, there is no system set up to support them. And actually, I would argue that the system is designed to like quickly expel them.
Deana Haggag: Yeah.
Mia Locks: The second there's like a whiff of trouble.
Allan Schwartzman: I think the more meaningful the art we produce, the greater likelihood that these kinds of enlightenments spread.
Deana Haggag: I think people need to decide what they want to last for longer. Do they want art and ideas to last for longer, or do they want their money? This is really it. It's just you can either spend your money in lifetime to make a world in the present that will make the future better, or you can hang on to that dollar after you're dead. But you don't get to take both. And I think right now, there's too much focus on building a wealth for an imaginary future that says something about the life you lived in the present versus actually just like engaging your present.
I agree with you, Allan, that there are trends that's not the majority, that might influence what will be a very different wealth and economy in the next 50 years or so. I think the reason I'm anxious is Covid was at least one of the only crisis we've all navigated in modern times where we weren't sure there would be a tomorrow, right? It was very present. It was very real. It was like in the moment. And it did not dislodge the majority. People still hung on.
I did not see such a free-flowing everybody just helping out in what they thought maybe, like, the quote-unquote “end of times.” That's not what happened. And so I'm like, “Oh yes, okay.” Even at our most terrifying, people are still imagining the wealth in the future, not people, not art, not community, not ideas. So I don't know, but if philanthropy moved in the realm of where Karen's taking Ruth and where a few other folks are really imagining—what Kathy [Halbreich] did at [Robert] Rauschenberg [Foundation]—like if things moved in that direction, I think we'd solve the problems of our field and if not the world very quickly, actually.
Allan Schwartzman: I think it's very possible. We now have generations of artists producing in various ways wealth on a scale that never existed in the hands of artists before. And we are especially seeing in real time how artists of color are putting that money to use to make real change and to create opportunities that they themselves may not have had. So we can see pockets of it.
Yeah, it's like the it's the devil and the angel are both at play and can have impact on where things go. But I think ultimate believers are what is going to sustain art period if it sustains itself. Maybe art becomes something very different in this epoch we're entering than how we've seen it before. And maybe that's interesting and good.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: I really appreciate all your time. It's been such a brilliant season because of all of your input.
So Deana, Mia, Jay, Allan, thank you so much. This has been the second season of The Art World: What If…?!
But before you go, of course, I'm going to ask you what are your ‘what ifs?’ What is the what if this season that keeps you up at night? What is the what if that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Mia, I'm going to start with you.
Mia Locks: Well, I was gonna offer a ‘what if’ based on what you just said, Allan.
Charlotte Burns: Okay, let's go. Let's go rogue. Mia, you go then.
Mia Locks: Allan, you were just saying that you're seeing a lot of artists of color if they're successful in the market, reinvesting that in various ways. That's, it's like a new trend and I see that and I obviously really honor that and respect that and would invite all of the white artists or older artists or all the other artists to jump on that bandwagon so that it's not the responsibility of folks of color to feel like they have to be the redistributors of the wealth. But for the, all the, whatever the highest, the living artists that are all making all their, those folks could follow that trend and then I think I would be hopeful that we might see, and I say that for basically every corner of the art world, but that it isn't those that are new to power or new to wealth that have the largest responsibility. I think they feel that. It's like that metaphor of if someone finally lets you in the room, you like try to hold the door open to bring all your friends versus the people that have been in the room for a long time and don't even realize that the door is still there.
So yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's not the best ‘what if,’ but I just thought of that as you were saying that, Allan.
Allan Schwartzman: I'm trying to work on that, Mia.
Mia Locks: Thank you. Keep going. Keep going.
Allan Schwartzman: So, the ‘what if’ that I'll add is hopefully, I have enough brain power in my aging head to keep myself moving forward doing the work that I believe in.
Deana Haggag: What if every philanthropist individual and foundation doubled or quadrupled their annual giving over just the next five years and without making people—oh, sorry. Caveat, as general operating support.
Mia Locks: Unrestricted funds.
Charlotte Burns: Jay?
Jay Sanders: The ‘what if’ that gets me up in the morning, I think, what if art and culture are essential to our lives? And I guess that's echoed throughout so many of our guests this year. And I think about it 24/7.
And then maybe similarly broad and basic is what if the one that keeps me up is what if the industry is fundamentally working against artists, and I think that's something I also really worry about.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you all so much. Thank you. I love this group.
Allan Schwartzman: Thank you.
Mia Locks: Thank you, Charlotte. Always such a pleasure.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Thanks so much once again to our peerless editorial advisory team who are inspiring as always.
This is our official season finale, but we do have some bonus episodes coming up—including next time with Dr. Mariët Westermann, the new director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. So listen out for that and follow us on social media. Search for Schwartzman& to be the first to know who’s coming up.
If you’d like to hear more from our extensive back catalogue, you can delve in. I’d like to thank all of our guests this season including the Los Angeles art collector and philanthropist, Jarl Mohn; Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of the Laundromat Project; the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier; and Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Biennial; and everybody else. They’re all there to be enjoyed. Please dive in.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
The Art World: What If...?! with Deana Haggag, Mia Locks, and Jay Sanders