Hope & Dread, Episode 12: Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?

As shifts in power scramble the chessboard, how are our guests reacting to the pace of change? Our interviewees—from critics to museum directors, philanthropists to an astrologer—share their tips for dealing with discomfort. The stakes are high: tune in to hear some of the solutions. 

New episodes available every other Wednesday. 

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© Dana Schutz. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner and Thomas Dane Gallery.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.

Charlotte Burns:

In this series, we've heard from people who are making change and people who are resisting change. We are living in the throes of epic transformations. And this is a podcast about just that. 

It's also a series that’s itself been shaped by change and unprecedented events. The pandemic was the backdrop to our remote recordings, while extreme weather—from fires, floods to heat domes—created logistical challenges for our interviewees. And yet, neither topic really made it into our discussions. It seems like some changes are still too big to see; too difficult to grasp. 

Both the climate and Covid are exposing fault lines in societies, governments, and the systems that support both. Old ways of doing things are under pressure. Rightly so. They've brought us to the point at which younger generations feel more dread than they feel hope. 

These seismic issues are central to some of the things we discuss in this show. We can't talk about equity without talking about the climate, which will impact health and wealth and the movement of people. Culture wars are presented as a kind of moral Superbowl in which you need to pick a team, but really they're about democracy and the extent to which we want to take part.

Incremental change has turned out to be no change at all. Diversity is often discussed as an add-on rather than an essential, but now more than ever, we need new voices, more seats at the table, and different solutions. 

Are power shifts always a win / lose scenario, or is there another way forward? Change is hard. In this episode, we'll try to navigate that. 

Here's the futurist Amy Webb. She's the CEO of the Future Today Institute and the author of a new book, The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.

Amy Webb: 

Most people cannot handle uncertainty. In times of deep uncertainty, people tend to seek one of three outlets. They look to a religious leader; they rely heavily on astrology; or they enter therapy. Very few people have the capacity and the wherewithal to sit with uncertainty and to be okay not having an answer. 

We constantly seek out answers, knowing deep down that there is no way to know the absolute truth, because it's mathematically impossible; we're never going to have all the data we could possibly need. And also, things are constantly changing. But this pathological hardwired need we have for answers, all the time, is what leads us into this belief system we have. 

And when we clash, in those beliefs, we wind up with problems in society. If we were able and willing to be patient and sit with uncertainty, take in new signal data as we were getting it, and allow ourselves to think more broadly and to re-perceive the world as we got those new data, and to sort of think exponentially, but be willing to make incremental decisions and judgments, most of our problems would go away. They just would.

Charlotte Burns: 

We didn't consult a rabbi, priest, or imam, and we'll keep our therapy sessions to ourselves. But we did talk to an astrologer. Here's Phyllis Mitz.

Phyllis Mitz: 

Covid was part of what was being shown in the solar system as the tool of the bigger purpose of what we're going through, which is extreme and permanent structural change of our world. Change in government; change in almost every institution we can think of; change in how we proceed. A huge change is coming in money, currency and commerce. Huge.

We're going through a great deal of hubbub with hierarchies and governments and the patriarchy, because we're learning a whole new level of leadership and how do we work together as humans and work as a team? And clearly we're not quite there yet, but we're learning and some are further along than others.

What is the highest good? What does that mean? And how do we personally benefit from doing something that would be for the highest good of all concerned? That's the new era. How do we really believe that it's not a win / lose paradigm, but a win / win? That's what we're attempting to find out. 

Charlotte Burns:

We talked about calls within museums for shifts away from strict hierarchies in episode five, “Infernal Affairs”. That kind of thinking is written in the stars, Phyllis says. We’re moving into the Age of Aquarius, an era about innovation, newness, and community.

Phyllis Mitz: 

In our world, in every institution, there is a collective awakening to this deep question of what is the right use of power? It used to be that it was, again, hierarchical. The strongest or the bossiest or the biggest brute would be the leader and everybody else just followed and hoped that they benefited.

That is being exposed for the problem, it is. In other words, what's really happening is individuals are beginning to awaken to their sovereign power as a human being. And this tendency to give the power away or want a daddy or a parent. I don't feel responsible for my life. Let me give it to you for better, or for worse. That consciousness is beginning to erode and peter out. 

Charlotte Burns:

We're seeing this shift towards coalition building and away from old models within the art world–and we're also seeing a dogged fight against those changes. 

Allan, in the old days, we might have begun this episode with a museum director and a critic. We've just heard instead from a futurist and an astrologer. Why are we shifting our gaze?

Allan Schwartzman: 

We're right now in the early phases of change, of massive change, of epochal-scale change. And the art world is really good at focusing on its details in the moment. It's used to focusing on individual artists on artworks and how markets develop. It's not so good at drawing out and trying to look at the big picture.

But the rest of the world, as we've seen with issues of climate change and Covid—how it brought the world to a stop—and issues of imbalance of rights of people of different races and backgrounds and histories are becoming more and more evident as systemically driven. The world's craving for greater insight, of a broader view sense, because I do believe that all of these things are linked. 

I know at a few points in my life when I've gotten into moments of uncertainty, that's when I've gone to an astrologer. It's not that I've ever lived by a rule book that an astrologer's given, but it's always helped to give me clarity as to where we are in history, in relation to the planets and how that relates to other times.

​​So I think culturally, this is exactly what we should be doing. We're so lost in the details of the moment, or we're trained to be lost in the details of the moment, that drawing out and being able to look at the kind of epochal shift that happens maybe a few times within the history of art, it requires other gazes. And so a futurist and an astrologer; I can't think of two professionals who are more forward-looking in terms of wider arcs of time than they.

Charlotte Burns:

I totally agree. What was so striking about preparing the script for this show was we asked ourselves one question, which is “which of our guests really concretely talked about the future?” And it was the futurist and the astrologer. 

But others did talk about new models. And here with more on new models for supporting artists is the arts administrator and funder, Deana Haggag, who's also one of three editorial advisors to Hope & Dread.

Deana Haggag:

I wonder a lot about shared cooperative models, sort of collective economies. And I think that, to me, is not necessarily to replace capitalism; I think it's just a more humane way to operate within it and perhaps one that could serve our field better than what the current alternative is, which is nothing, frankly. 

Charlotte Burns:

Deana recently helped organize the Covid Relief Fund, an emergency grant for artists of all stripes across America. The experience changed her perspective on the practicalities of coalitions. 

Deana Haggag:

We were able to do something much larger and much quicker together than we ever could have separately. The range of artists was so broad and that was across everything: age, race, geography, career stage, merit. I mean, it was just like every kind of artist you could imagine was applying for this money. 

And so I think it really laid bare quite plainly, just how damning our economic structures in our fields are. It's almost like it doesn't actually matter that you've won that Pulitzer; you're still one disaster away from homelessness, right? It doesn't really matter what part of the country you're in, no matter how cheap or expensive, you are on the brink of not being able to afford your insulin. 

These things I think just really highlighted for us all that we need massive systemic reform. That this idea that if we just get artists to be better at their work, that they will advance and advance and advance into a kind of financial stability, is a myth. There are artists who get that, do not get me wrong. There are plenty of artists that have matured into a place of extreme financial security but that percentage is so low. 

That can't be the only hook we hang our hat on, we need to build other systems that protect all artists and that all stand a better shot at just having a very baseline dignity. 

I want to build, I want to help support economic systems that just bring everybody further. Everybody, I don't care what you make. I don't care if I hate it. 

Charlotte Burns:

When Deana talks about building, it's easy to think that she's referring to the kind of unlimited expansion that's characterized so much of the art world these past few decades. But, she's suggesting something else. 

Deana Haggag:

I want a slower field, I don't want to get big, I want to get deeper, I want to root. I think part of that, again, money makes itself known in loud ways. And so this emphasis to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, I think is really just a way to make the money be heard. There's room for that in some parts of our field. And I will totally take some big flashy-ass building like I am, do not get me wrong, like I'm a bougie-ass B, I love that type of shit. But it's not again, it shouldn't be the only mode of operating and what we need in our field is a healthy ecosystem.

Charlotte Burns:

A lot of the growth in museums has been about broadening access, but as the sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom said on “The Ezra Klein Show'' by the New York Times last year, the way we've been thinking about that might be wrong.

To paraphrase, she says that the idea that access expands to include more people—and on the same terms as before–is counterintuitive. Those narrow terms benefited a small group of people. Now, we need to collectively figure out the new terms, which means instead of sharing equally in privilege, we all become a bit less comfortable understanding the new norms. We might have to pause before telling a joke to work out whether it'll really land. 

This is the “democratization of discomfort”, a term coined by the Yale psychologist, Jennifer Richeson, as Ezra Klein goes on to say. It's a great episode and one I kept referring to in conversation with our interviewees for this show, because this lived discomfort, this unease with shifting social norms, was a thread that ran right through our interviews. And it was striking to learn for whom discomfort was a shock and for whom it was rather ordinary.

With more here's the writer and editor, Roxane Gay, who incidentally used to co-host the podcast Here to Slay with Tressie McMillan Cottom. 

Roxane Gay:

I think that some people, and I would say primarily middle and upper-middle class and wealthy White people, they look at their privilege as a means of no longer having to experience discomfort, while people of color, working class people, or people with disabilities, anyone whose marginalized in some way understands that discomfort is the rule rather than the exception. I think that we do our very best to make that work and to make that tolerable in some way.

I think the people that are afraid of being called out know that they've done something that will demand being called out. It shows that their consciences are intact, which is not something that is often the case. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think good; spend a little bit of time feeling the way that the rest of the world has felt forever. Try to understand what precarity feels like. 

On the other hand, when people are afraid of taking risks creatively because they think that there will be some kind of backlash, I do think okay, why is that? How do we fix this? I hope that we can come up with those answers to those questions because I think that art should be free to be messy, and to make mistakes, and to be imperfect. I think it's also important for us to encourage that.

Charlotte Burns:

"Don't be afraid to make mistakes," agrees Kathy Halbreich, the director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Kathy Halbreich:

There may be virtue in making mistakes. Our whole education system is predicated on the fact that we're taught not to make mistakes. But again, every artist I know profits from the wrong turns, the dead ends, the confusion. And while I can't say I necessarily seek out ambiguity or dead ends, I've learned somehow to try to see them as signposts towards a way of improvising my life more than declaring one set direction. 

Allan Schwartzman:

The last three speakers were talking about issues that seem to overlap into an ongoing challenge for the art world. We want things to be very clear. As the system has professionalized, we've removed the possibility or the value of complexity, uncertainty, shifting our frames of reference in dramatic ways. We're used to this linear way of reading art through the history of Modern art, which is mostly very orderly. And as the market has developed, it seeks a greater clarity and precision about what is significant and what is not. 

Part of what we've lost. And I think is becoming all that more apparent right now today is the possibility of having uncertainty about what is significant and what is not, suspending one's opinion. A market doesn't permit that. Complexity, doubt of artists taking on risk and being willing to not only make mistakes, but to embrace the possibility of mistakes. That's where change and growth are most likely to occur.

Charlotte Burns:

Change is messy; it isn’t passive. History isn’t over: but the revolution probably will be televised, or at least live-streamed. And democracy requires our attention. 

Taking us full circle, back to where we began this season, here’s Hamza Walker, the executive director of the non-profit LAXART in Los Angeles.

Hamza Walker:

These things coming down, and as raw as these things can get, it's like — that's change. You think it's not going to be painful? You think it's not going to be hot? You don't think it's going to be feisty? Well, that's not change at all. It requires you to take a position, and you've got to take a stand, and recognizing that, “Oh yeah, this is a fight.” And it's not going to happen without one. Obviously. Blood has been spilled. The impetus for change. And to recognize that people don’t just give up power. 

Yeah, what do you arm yourself with? It's like, you get up and you've got to go face-to-face with these people. And realize, who are you arguing against, and to read this literature. And to recognize and identify all of its falsehoods, and call it out. And if it's going to be a war of words, if it's going to be a war of ideas, if it's going to be a war of images, to realize, like, get on the front line. So arm yourself with those very things. 

Charlotte Burns:

Monuments around America are being toppled faster than ever. Together with the artist Kara Walker, Hamza is organizing an exhibition on this very subject, which we explored in episode two, “American History, Axed”. 

Whose stories do we tell? Who do we crown as heroes? Who gets to tell the stories? Here’s the curator Maya Benton. 

Maya Benton: 

I think there is something about people today being afraid to speak out, and the reasons for that are different and I think the art world shares some responsibility for that. They're afraid to say the wrong thing. They're afraid to say it in the wrong way. They're afraid to be canceled or have it received in the wrong way or that they don't have the right to say it. So, people have these siloed conversations where their own views are just mirrored back at them.

Charlotte Burns:

You may remember Maya from episode eight, “Westward Ho!”. She organized an exhibition of photographs by Gillian Laub, documenting the recent racial segregation of school proms in a small town in Georgia.

As part of its tour, the show traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, a town that's 80% white. These demographics revealed themselves in the docents: they’re the volunteers at museums who help explain exhibitions to visitors.

Maya Benton: 

I think there were about 60 of them, and 58 were white and two were Asian. Gillian, the photographer, was giving a tour of the show. I could hear the people and the docents who would have to teach this material to visitors saying, "Oh, I don't know, this is tough. This is a toughie, I don't know if I can talk about this."

I kept hearing the word toughie, which is very Midwestern and coming from LA, I was like, "What's a toughie?" But, "Oh, this is a toughie. This one's going to be a toughie to talk about." They really felt, with the best of intentions, like they didn't have the authority to speak to what was happening in the American South.

At a certain point, Gillian got to a photograph—it's one of the most powerful photographs in the exhibition—of two young Black men, both of them wearing signs. “I was found guilty of disorderly conduct” and “I was found guilty of a DUI”. The disorderly conduct was that one of these young black men had gone to, I think, a nightclub or a bar and had to pee and the bar had closed, so he peed outside. He was forced to march for weeks on the main thoroughfare of the street and he had to lose his job, because he couldn't work because he was forced to march up and down wearing the sign. It's called public shaming. 

Several of the docents expressed their discomfort at talking about the photograph. They said, "Well, how do we describe it?" She said, "Well, we have the quote from the subject of the photographs talking about their experiences." They said, "Well, I don't know if I can really talk about this; this isn't my story to tell."

This plays into a lot of contentious debates in the art world about who has the right to tell which story. But I think it's very dangerous when we start to limit who has the right to tell which stories, because often it's in the communities like Portland and like Wisconsin that lack diversity, where if you don't have people able to tell stories that represent the deep divides that scar this nation, then they're only going to have their own White experience mirrored back at them.

I do worry that we're in an age where we're starting to really limit who is able to tell whose stories and who has the right to tell which stories. I understand the reasons for that, and some of them are incredibly well-intentioned and have a lot of historical and emotional validity. You don't have a right to be telling someone else's trauma and pain in a way that suits your own narrative and that doesn't account for your own biases.

But I was watching this room of 58 White people perplexed at how they were going to talk about racial divides in the American South and it concerned me to think that they'd never had to think about how to teach these stories or tell these stories. So, that's one thing that worries me about the shifts in the art world.

Charlotte Burns: 

Racial reckoning is just one of many difficult conversations. We've heard in earlier episodes the myriad opposing opinions of what museums are and who they should serve. How staff should be treated, where cultural institutions should draw moral lines and how free speech intersects with that. Some of the differences are generational–and that needs to be navigated too. Here’s Deana Haggag.

Deana Haggag:

I'm just very aware of what it means to age and to have the world move around you and you need to respond to that world in a way that you're not totally equipped, because you were never offered those tools, right? And so I want to hold grace for when we say, is it generational? 

And then I also want to hold the truth of, you know, some things are just wrong. And we know. We know when we're doing wrong. We know when there's harm made. And so I also don't want to excuse that thing, either. 

And I want to encourage us to really find that line between when do we need to be graceful? When do we make room for people to change and evolve? And when do we really hold them accountable because that thing is dangerous and it needs to be stopped. And I think we're all kind of wading in that right now, because sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. 

Charlotte Burns:

Listening to our guests' experiences has been eye-opening. It's brought home that, what is for some a political or a philosophical debate is, for others, a matter of daily existence.

Here's Deana with some good advice on how to keep culture moving forward.

Deana Haggag:

I think generally, a good organizing tool is, "Look at the most vulnerable person." The most vulnerable person's needs will protect everybody. That's how this works. We don't start at the top, we don't start at the person who's the least vulnerable, and then have them assess the needs of the group, that's not how that works. 

Listening to folks who are generally left outside of the considerations of institutions tend to bring everybody together further and faster. 

The reason diversity in a room is important is not to make our field look like some kind of Benetton ad; that's not what we're asking for. And the more diverse your team is, the more diverse your board is, the more diverse your leadership is, the more diverse your audience is, the better you get at speaking more than one language. Why on earth would I want to speak one language if somebody came down…it’s like, if the universe came down and said, "Deana, do you want to be fluent in 15 languages?" It's like, "No, thank you. I'm really just comfortable in my one little space." And I think that's how we think about the organization itself. 

Charlotte Burns:

Lots of listeners were struck by our interview with Dr. Kelli Morgan in episode six, “Take Me to Your Leader”. Kelli was hired by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in 2018, tasked with diversifying the galleries. She resigned in 2020 and has since talked openly about the discrimination she experienced–which ultimately caused her to leave curating for academia. She's now Professor of the Practice and Director of Curatorial Studies, History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. Kelli has described the situation between museum staff and leadership as “guerilla warfare”. And she asks why 30 years of "representative programming and exhibitions" has changed so little?

Dr Kelli Morgan: 

Matter of fact, it's worse. And the silence speaks volumes, right. When nobody can really answer that question, or people choose not to answer that question. And then that is where I kind of pour the salt. And even more, I push a little bit more to get people to admit that they... that it's not so much, like Raoul Peck says in his recent HBO documentary. "It's not so much that we don't know, it's admitting that we know, and we just haven't cared." That's a totally different thing.

Culture has always been powerful. Culture has been human beings' way around systems of power and oppressive systems since the dawn of time. And I've never been a person that's like throw all of the old White dudes out, like the baby out with the bathwater. It's like contextualize them truthfully. Interpret them truthfully. 

And it freaks people out, which is fun for me, but it also lets me know, or it sort of affirms that it's information that people in the field know is being left out. So I am, again, disrupting the narrative. Disrupting the space. And so, it really illuminates how White supremacist's patriarchal capitalism functions. 

And so, it's not so much wielding culture to just stomp on the necks of all the White people. It's like, "No, let's really talk about how Whiteness functions, what Whiteness has also done to you, White people. How it's completely misinformed all of you."

Allan Schwartzman:

Her words and her stories had such impact on us that she served as a cornerstone for us in understanding the complexities of our time, and particularly in our unexamined biases as a people. And what may have sounded radical is in fact thinking that has whether consciously or unconsciously is being absorbed actively by institutions. I don't know if they've learned fully from it, but we can see massive shifts just in the last year and a half in the hiring practices for senior curatorial posts in major museums of curators of color, who they never felt essential to prioritize in the recent past.

Charlotte Burns:

Twenty years ago, Kelli's story probably wouldn't have surfaced, but her story went viral because technology is broadening the bandwidth. And with it, the conversation, allowing voices that are typically silenced to now be heard.

But technology is also narrowing power in other ways. It's reshaping the workforce. Reliable career paths no longer really exist, whether in museums, media, or auction houses. Lots of people–of all ages–are having to reinvent themselves. Look around. I bet that many people you know are working differently or are in moments of professional transition. 

Jobs are changing. Meanwhile, consolidation and growth are causing massive disruption. Power in the workplace is mirroring wealth distribution, becoming much more concentrated in fewer hands. 

We're living through a technological revolution on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. It's reshaping society. And it's only the start. Here's Amy Webb. 

Amy Webb:

Anybody who feels as though they have had technology-induced whiplash, over the past few years, should make an appointment with a physical therapist. Get that neck strong, because the whiplash that's coming next is going to complicate matters for you. We are at the beginning of exponential technological change. And quite frankly, what's happened over the past 10 years is nothing compared to what will be happening over the next 10 years. 

Charlotte Burns:

You might remember that pithy piece of future shock commentary from Amy in episode three, “Controlling Culture”. Here she is with more detail.

Amy Webb:

Because the next area of seismic change is in the realm of biology. We don't think of biology as a technology platform and yet it is. And we are already capable of reprogramming biological code as though it is computer code. And in so doing, creating new materials. Often when we think about this future and this biotechnology, the conversation becomes very reductive and people talk about designer babies. And that's really not what's happening here. We're talking about redesigning life. In ways that are both powerful and provocative. For lots of reasons. Our solution to climate change might be resurrecting the wooly mammoth. For a lot of reasons, which would make sense, if I had two hours to explain all of them to you. But on the surface of it, yeah some of this stuff is, it's going to challenge what people currently believe. 

So this always creates tensions and if we don't start to resolve some of these issues in some way, then the cultural tensions, all of the other tensions just become exacerbated. These problems grow. They don't get resolved.

Charlotte Burns:

The art world needs to embrace tech, says Lord Vaizey of Didcot who was Culture Minister in David Cameron's conservative government in the UK from 2010.

Lord Vaizey of Didcot: 

I say perhaps completely facetiously that if I became a museum director tomorrow, the first thing I would do would be to close one gallery and turn it into a tech incubator, because I just think that relationship between startups and people with original ideas saying, "We live our lives through these screens now. What can we do as an arts institution by using this screen?," that conversation just doesn't take place.

And I'll be lambasted for that, because every time I say I think the art world or the museums or public institutions are way behind the curve on tech, I get told off and so, "No, no. We're totally on this. We're massively invested. We're doing so much." But I just don't see it, and that really ... it really frustrates me.

Charlotte Burns:

Of course, while we've been working on this show, a digital innovation known as NFTs has become an almost $18bn industry. One that to date has been very bad for the planet because it guzzles energy and emits lots of greenhouse gas.

This feels like further evidence of our inability to deal with apocalyptic news about the climate, that we must act now or never to forestall total disaster. It's striking that in a series about culture now and where it's going, so few guests have talked about the environmental challenges. There's been a lot of talk about which objects belong in museums–but not a lot about whether museums survive. 

Here's more from our interview with the artist, Hank Willis Thomas, who cited a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Hank Willis Thomas: 

He said, "We fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have and I know we will win, but I have come to believe we're integrating into a burning house." 

Let's just put that in the context of global warming. There are now whole collections of unseen artwork that have better air conditioning than whole cities and literally, are keeping those artworks cool, while heating up the planet. A lot of us, including me, are so eager to be consumed by that blob. You have to wonder, at the end of the day, will it bring the end of days, this obsession with consumption?

Charlotte Burns:

Artists are perhaps best placed to point the way. The act of creating new things isn't always the most relaxing career choice.

Hank Willis Thomas: 

We're obsessed with uncomfortability. It's like, who wants to sit in a room with themselves, trying to figure out how to make something out of nothing and failing, most of the time. I think a lot of great artists, most I would say, are very comfortable with critique, which is something that society also discourages. We see critique as something to shy away from or to be afraid of, but at least I learned through my training that someone giving their authentic thoughts, whether you'd like them or not, about what you're doing can be really informative, and generous.

Charlotte Burns:

Life and art are, of course, intertwined. Artist Tiffany Sia, who recently left Hong Kong for fear of her safety–as we heard in episode three–wants to confront things head on in her work.

Tiffany Sia:

The times themselves are not caring of the person on the receiving end of it. 

Like Covid doesn't take political sides, doesn't have any feelings about whose predictions are right. At the end of the day, these events are going to move in the pattern that they move at the relentless pace that they're going to move. So how we bear witness to them must adapt to this unforgivingness. 

But these events don't stop just because we want it to be more understandable. They continue to resist our desire to be comforted by this.

Charlotte Burns:

Cultural leaders need to be equally bold. Here's Lulani Arquette, who's President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in Portland, Oregon.

Lulani Arquette: 

It's not easy. It really is about just doing it, and practicing it and engaging that kind of a process. 

Many Native communities have this understanding because in our own communities there's quite a bit of diversity too, of thought and belief. But there's also practices that kind of ground us in certain values. Overall, the groups that I'm working with, the places that I travel to, people are doing hopeful things; they're focusing on what they can do in their communities with one another to create these pockets. In Hawaii, we call it aloha kekahi kekahi. That means you care for and you love one another and that is huge and powerful. 

Charlotte Burns:

Lulani also talked about a Hawaiian healing and reconciliation process called ho'oponopono in episode four, “Burning Down the House?”  This concept of healing and art is popping up in another, perhaps unexpected, corner of the art ecosystem. The art market. Here's the dealer, Tim Blum, co-founder of Blum and Poe Gallery in LA, Tokyo, and New York.

Tim Blum: 

Art and healing go hand in hand. Whether it's art that makes you rethink your place in the world. However it affects you, on some level, if it's great art, it does lead to some kind of healing, even if it's ugly and it makes you uncomfortable and all that stuff. 

You and I might've talked about a project that my wife and I are doing. We're developing a compound of sorts that directly relates to art and healing. It'll have a space for art and residency, studio, et cetera. But more importantly, it'll have a large healing garden in all of its permutations. 

I would love to know what other people thought of this topic in general.This, what we're talking about, is really one of the key and most important things somebody could talk about, and it rarely, if ever, comes up in general conversation in the art world. 

I think some people are just very uncomfortable with this topic in general because it may mean that they would have to also self-reflect. I'm afraid that most people just don't want to do that. They'd rather keep cruising along with all the apparatus they've developed as a survival system to navigate the world. They don't want to divest themselves of those tools. 

That's why most folk just are happy to keep sleepwalking. That big sale you made on Monday is the fix. Until Tuesday. It's like, that's the burn. 

Charlotte Burns:

But you can't sleepwalk your way through democracy. It's active and it's present tense. Here's Hamza Walker asking the vital questions of what our monuments, our culture, and–we ourselves–stand for.

Hamza Walker:

Nothing is forever. So even if only for now, do these figures embody how we think of ourselves now, and who we want to be, is kind of the question I think we need to be able to grapple with, and to talk about clearly.

How do we change? Where do ideas come from? What are our imaginations at any given moment? And what do we have as a check on our imaginations? I mean, we don't even realize how dim the light is in our imagination sometimes. 

Let's make good. What are we here for? What do we do? You want something to talk about? You want some content? This is what museums should be doing. It's like, you know. Turn it out. This is what time it is. 

Allan Schwartzman: 

And if ever there were a time for museums to be focused on what time it is, it is now. 

We're at this juncture where museums can be central to a changing culture and the changing terms of culture, perhaps even of what art is, how it gets defined, and how it functions, and how that changes in the future.

Charlotte Burns:

Well, let's hear more about the future with our astrologer, Phyllis Mitz. Join us in two weeks for our final episode of this season of Hope & Dread.

Phyllis Mitz:

If we want a change, how does that change happen? So I think that not only is what is valued is going to change. I do think the expectation and the rules of the game may change. The stars are basically saying that we have between now and 2025, let's say, for starters to decide, as a group, as a bunch of humans, what we want, or do we begin to set things in motion? 

Right now, there's this last gasp towards holding things; power, money, and there can be an undercurrent of a real power grab going on. That is not what the planets are highly recommending we move towards. I do think it's going to get much more exaggerated, much more intense through 2023, really intense, because I look at 2023 and the materialism is peaking. But after 2025, it really just looks, it's almost like we breathe a sigh of relief somehow, that we've changed the gear. It looks so much less critical and it looks much more playful and it looks much more like we're excited about the game. This is interesting. This is exciting. 

CREDITS and GOODBYES

Tune into Hope and Dread every second Wednesday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Follow us on social media for related show content, and tell us what you think @artand_media. 

Hope and Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new 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. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez and Ali Nemerov. 

Theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.

Podcast Art: Dana Schutz, Self Exam (2017). © Dana Schutz. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner and Thomas Dane Gallery.