The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 1: Naomi Beckwith
“Not just what if—but what are we missing?” In the first episode of this new podcast, host Charlotte Burns is joined by Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Someone actively working to recalibrate the field in the most exciting and dynamic ways, Naomi starts this episode with science before moving on to museums—and how we can create change. What if our textbooks were Black? What if we decentered the Western world in conversations about art? Tune in for more.
New episodes available every Thursday.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!
I’m your host, art journalist Charlotte Burns, and this is a series all about imagining different futures. We’ll talk about how we navigate the churn and change currently shaping culture. What are some of the biggest shifts that need to happen for art to stay relevant in a changing world?
In each episode, we’ll be talking to some of the most interesting people in the art world, asking them ‘what if’?
[Audio of guests]
In this episode, we welcome Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Over the years, I’ve been a journalist, if ever I have something difficult to think about, Naomi is someone I like to try to talk to because she is such a precise and a completely independent thinker. Naomi is not someone who says what everyone else does, instead, she approaches art and the industry on her own rigorous terms.
Naomi and I began our conversation with something that inspired her from an early age—the link between science and art…
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
Naomi, thank you so much for joining me today.
Naomi Beckwith:
Hi, Charlotte, you're very welcome. I'm thrilled to be here.
Charlotte Burns:
So, I wanted to start in a slightly unusual place, which is in the world of science, because you didn't intend to be an art person. You initially trained as a scientist. And prepping for this conversation, I watched a PBS interview with you. You were talking about how you'd written a paper on the Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, who came to America to work on the Manhattan Project. And then later, you realized there was a monument to that process in Chicago's Hyde Park by the artist Henry Moore. And you talked about how the sculpture [Nuclear Energy (1963-67)] represented the new possibilities and the shiny new world of this tech—but also meant that something we didn't know was coming.
And that seems like an apt place to start this interview amidst great change, great potential and, also deep uncertainty.
Naomi Beckwith:
You're right, it actually is an interesting crossover from the world of science into art for me because both, essentially, if they're doing their work right, are dealing with questions of the unknown. And I think that's perfectly appropriate for a podcast called, What If?!
Essentially, I grew up in this neighborhood with this monument, and it was something quite different from many of the other monument-like things that I'd seen around. There were plenty of Grecian figures in and around the South Side of Chicago. There were men on horses—of course, as usual—roaming around the city. But here, outside the Library at the University of Chicago, was a sculpture that was completely abstract.
But if you can imagine it, Henry Moore loved the idea, as did the rest of the St. Ives group, of a kind of abstract language that was fielded through the forms one could conceive of in nature. Biomorphic forms that looked a little bit, in this case, like maybe a knuckle, a bone structure, something that had a big rounded top, and then an overall rectangular form with a void in between.
And it was this shape that, on the one hand, reminded me of the mushroom cloud. I am a child of the ‘80s. I grew up in utter terror of nuclear annihilation. I’m sad that we find ourselves pondering these questions again. But I was also a child that knew that the more that you began to play with forms, the more that you could neutralize it.
And I think this is what Henry Moore was doing—trying to give us the sense of the shape of a nuclear reaction, but also understanding that if you harness it in the correct way, you could do something with this great power. This great potential. This thing that could, of course, destroy us, but could also give us endless energy. That could also be a sign of our intelligence and our curiosity. And that could also lead us into a future that we couldn't imagine before.
What on earth are we going to do with the knowledge that comes after that? And what on earth are we going to do with the power that we still hold?
Charlotte Burns:
Well, they're great questions, indeed. What are we going to do?
I'm going to bring it slightly into a more prosaic space by asking how you bring that to bear, your scientific background. As the oceans rise and temperatures increase, what can the art world what can museums learn from the scientists? You're at the head of leadership now in a major institution. How much is this spoken about?
Naomi Beckwith:
If anything, there's been sort of two divergent conversations around this. Really, you know, our survival as a species, and then the role of art institutions inside of those conversations.
The first conversation is really how do we, as museums, just do better as global citizens? How do we reduce our carbon footprint? How do we recycle the majority of our materials? These are things that have been coming to us, both in terms of municipal pressure but also been long-standing conversations internally.
We've been working very deliberately and diligently with external groups and are part of a consortium of museums answering this very question. You don't hear about it because it's not sexy, right? It's not sexy to talk about the cardboard we use. It's not sexy to talk about our waste management systems. Nobody wants to hear that. The mundanity of it isn't dazzling. And that's okay. Because, in many ways, it is our mundane actions and our carelessness in our mundanity that has gotten us to this current crisis.
On the other hand, there is a very public sort of conversation that we're seeing, which is this series of protests that you see with, for instance, [Just] Stop Oil and tomato soup going on a Van Gogh. I forget at which museum people were gluing themselves to the surfaces of framing. This is another kind of forced conversation that we have, but it's a conversation that really asks, I think, a very key question around this climate crisis, which is where do we turn our attentions? And where do we turn our resources as a society?
Obviously, I agree that we are well within, I think, a decade of sheer, irreversible terror in terms of the way the Earth will or will not function. And while I very much agree that we need almost a kind of desperate stunt to call people's attention to it, I don't agree that it's a zero-sum game between culture and climate. Thinking about it as either the arts or the climate, thinking about Van Gogh's sunflowers or mashed potatoes, I think, lacks; lacks serious imagination. We have all the resources and power to do both. And we shouldn't be pitting one against the other.
Charlotte Burns:
An interesting thing related to this in terms of museums is, of course, museums preserve the past and in very specific climate-controlled conditions. And what we've experienced over the past several decades is this boom in museum building, and in terms of our travel around the globe as a kind of community, but also the expansion of museums domestically. When we think about that—this idea of phenomenal growth of institutions that have gone from, you know, maybe 30 or so people inside an institution, like the Guggenheim, to now corporations spanning the globe, like the Guggenheim—how do we think about collections?
And this is a kind of two-pronged question because, on the one hand, there's always the imperative to grow more. And right now, we can discuss that in the lens of diversity, and the time it would take, the drive and scope and capital investment it would take, to grow the collections of the Guggenheim, for instance, to achieve any kind of equity or parity.
And on the other hand, there's this sense of so much stuff. When we look at the annual acquisitions across major American museums, the number of works coming in as gifts, specifically, is enormous. It's about 60% of the figures that we look at in the Burns Halperin report. So it kind of makes us scratch our heads and say, well, museums are talking a lot about equity and parity, and they are trying to do the work. And then directors and curators will say to us, well, there's this tide of gifts coming in that means that we're kind of dampened in what we can achieve.
Is there a moment in which we have to say, Okay, are museums just taking too much stuff in? Do we have to rethink accessions? Both from the point of view of achieving parity and equity and, and also from the point of view of sustainability. Can we keep growing?
Naomi Beckwith:
First of all, every museum has to be judicious around what their mission is. We're always going to be offered far more objects than we ever can absorb.
I think we want to take museums at their word when they say they want to conserve culture. Now, there have been so many challenges to what that means. There's so many challenges to what we define as culture. And so all those kinds of challenges, I do believe, actually, if anything, has allowed museums to think about an expansion of their remit, which I don't think is the same as growth for growth's sake.
That said, it is the case that we are all limited in the ways in which we can acquire. I think it behooves every museum to look very deeply at those missions and decide for themselves, where are we going to focus energies? We not only have limited physical space where we have to hold everything, but there's a limit to what you can ship where. There's a limit as to why you should be shipping. And there's also a limit to your mission; your mission is not just there to be an all-embracing thing, your mission is there to focus.
You and I have spoken very much about the fact that there are calls, in these renewed missions, in these growth of collections based on a real, almost maniacal, need to conserve things, which I don't think is the problem. The question is how. We know that in those calls for equity and diversity, we’re still looking for the end game.
The question for us, really, I think, for all museums, is if diversity is going to be a goal of yours, what are you looking for? Are you looking for a kind of parity in your collection, assuming that your collection is primarily Western Europe and North America? Are you looking for a kind of specific percentage representation? I don't know.
But I do know that if I look at the collections of many museums, especially around North America, you're going to find if you're not a culturally specific institution, that your collection is pretty much 85% White and the vast majority of that White men. So what do we do about that?
I also realize that many institutions have taken very specific steps to then remediate that. And the steps sometimes have been incredibly radical. We see stories of massive, major de-accessions of work that bring in millions and 10s and hundreds of millions of dollars toward the goal of diversifying collections. But if you were to look again at those numbers, and let's say the first time in which I looked at those numbers was around 2013, 2014, if you were looking at those numbers again today, you will find that they've barely budged. And I do think this is where simple math helps here to do the analysis to realize that when you have thousands of work in your collection, buying 10 works a year or buying 15 works a year, it's not going to put a dent in your statistical numbers overall.
So if we are reaching certain percentages, if we are reaching a real parity in the collections, those are the goal, if we're even reaching majority people of color in the collection, we need to understand that it will take many years, many decades, and millions and even billions of dollars to actually reach those goals of parity. If it took you 50 years to get to 85% White Men, it's gonna take you 50 more to get to a kind of balance. And I do hope that my colleagues and I begin to really get a grasp on the long-tail enterprise that this is going to be.
Charlotte Burns:
I want to dive into that with you, this idea of the mechanisms that we need to ensure this, and actually, that's something you said to me in one of our last conversations, you said this is like the climate. There's a need for immediate action. But this is also going to outlive us, not only our tenures but our existence on this planet. And we're talking about the same stakes really, with what museums are and who they're for, and how they prepare themselves to be more than sort of precious jewels as they move forward through time.
But also thinking about change. I think you're totally right when you look at the contextual totals that, of course, you know, buying 10 works this year and 20 works next year isn't going to make a dip in your overall collection. But it should make a difference. What we should be seeing in the data is that, if we look at the data of the last five years, or 10 years or 12 years, we should be seeing, if we just focus on accessions, we should be seeing greater change there. And we're not really seeing that either. I mean, the biggest volume of collecting of work by women peaked in 2009. For Black Americans, it peaked in 2015. Our latest study shows that those results are both around a fifth of what they should be if you look at the demographics of America. And the figures are especially compounded if you are a Black American female-identifying artist, in which case, the problem is around 13 times as bad as it should be. And so we're not actually even really seeing that shift in terms of acquisitions.
Which gets us to your first part of what you were saying; why are we doing this? Is it representational? Is it reputational? Is it a means to an end? You know, why should museums do this? And are they having that conversation?
Naomi Beckwith:
So, first of all, thank you for reminding me of my climate analogy. It is true, you know, we have a planet burning, but we also have, in many ways, museums burning. They’re not literally burning. They’re burning, I think, with a hope from the public, that we would be able to demonstrate a better way of being in the world, a better citizenship, a better cultural responsibility. This is the kind of burning question that people are throwing at us. And absolutely, you know, like the climate, we're gonna have to do long-term changes in order to stabilize and then move on in a kind of happy cohabitation with the world.
When we ask why we're doing this, I think it's a bigger question than just numbers and statistics. I think it's a question of what does it mean to actually engage with culture now, in the world where we do not have the kind of luxury to act like a little village anymore?
We all now have too much access to information. We have too much access, I think, to critical thinking around how we receive information to then uphold one kind of model of cultural excellence as the model for the entirety of the world. That's just not going to work anymore.
And I do believe that, from well, at least in the case of my colleagues, we've all come to understand that, right? So when I began to do work, like advocate for Black artists, I'm not advocating for Black artists just for the sake of having more Black artists in the collection, which, yes, I do want. What I'm advocating is for a broader conversation around what culture does and means and how it can function. What begins to happen if you stopped looking at, let's say, painting as the highest form of art, and think about it in terms of sculpture, or performance, or the interrelation of media, what kind of stories do we tell about human history and human excellence if we just began to kind of, if not invert, at least pivot some of the foci that we have in our cultural conversation.
I also think that, in many ways, this question of bringing in these other narratives, making other artists and other kinds of objects visible, has been too much of a success in which, in the media, especially the social media sphere, there's so much more visibility for queer artists, artists of color, much more celebration of women, especially we began to look retrospectively at artists of a certain age, that kind of revival of the careers and the presentation of the careers of artists within their 70s, 80s and now even 90s, right? These are the things that we're seeing rising to the fore of, I think, our kind of media imagination. And when you see that, right, when you see so many incredible Black artists on the cover of magazines and on billboards, then you begin to imagine that we've come to a better place. So the danger is to equate, then, that kind of media visibility with equity. And that's not the same thing. And I do believe that's why people are shocked when they hear the numbers, but at the same time, right, imagine a much more equitable and equal world.
I’ll also say one thing too; don't underestimate the number of objects that an institution brings in, year by year. 10 objects a year, 15 objects a year, for an institution, my size is fairly normal. Yes, we get massive tranches of other gifts. We, of course, like many institutions, rely on incredibly generous people. But you know, we're talking about collecting work in the dozens, not hundreds, year after year.
So I think even for a lot of art professionals, when you say 10 to 15 works a year by POC artists, that sounds radical to them. But again, as I said before, that doesn't put a dent into the work that you have to do. That becomes step one of a multi-generational task.
Charlotte Burns:
There was a symposium about the future of collecting at the Whitney [Museum of American Art], and you talked about the stubborn percentages and the need for new interpretive strategies.
Naomi Beckwith:
What we are asking really is, what do these objects do once they join the family of the collection? Right? It is basically like intermarriage. If you have an intercultural marriage, you should then have intercultural exchange. And that's what I mean by new interpretive strategies, right? Greenbergian formalism will not work on the Khartoum school. Don't try it! [Laughs]
So the question then becomes, how do we make sure that we bring in new voices and new forms of knowledge, as well as new objects? That's going to be paramount.
It's also the case that we work in museums, clearly, because we're thinking of a future beyond ourselves. But we have to imagine ourselves, if we're going toward a future of a different kind of collection profile, then we have to imagine ourselves then doing the work of making sure that that collection profile happens. It also has to be about cultivating young collectors now, to imagine a different remit for what may be even right now against the grain of the market. It also means really training people to broaden their own perspective on collections now. We have to be sort of active partners, with our patrons, with our supporters, up with our market friends and asking questions. How do we do this long work of making sure that we are going to see this long-term growth in diversity in our collections?
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
The market right now has become the biggest voice in the room in most rooms that we're in, and museums can't really separate themselves from that because they're funded by trustees, and most trustees are collectors and there's a spiral. How do we move away from that dominance of the market? Because we hear from curators that, as they advocate to buy a work, say, by an older artist, who's being rediscovered as they become a nonagenarian—if you outlive them, you might find success—they spoke to us of their frustration that you can do the work, you can bring in the scholarship, you can even have the exhibition, but the market creeps in because it creates a sense of urgency around certain figures. How do you, as the chief curator, navigate that?
Naomi Beckwith:
It's really funny. I love the way you describe it as a spiral, right? This shows with spiral, and I'm in a building that is a spiral. But I think you've mentioned in terms of a downward spiral, maybe.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, I meant certain curves of repetition, perhaps.
Naomi Beckwith:
I think there's a way to turn it into a vicious, not a vicious, sorry, but a virtuous cycle. [Laughs] Maybe I’m making a Freudian…
Charlotte Burns:
Freudian slip there.
[Laughter]
Naomi Beckwith:
Exactly! Exactly. Listen, you know, the market is dominant because it's glitzy, and it has things that people understand, like numbers. I mean, let's also understand it's graspable. My job, and the job of my colleagues, is to do something that gets people to grasp the ineffable. I think every curator hopes to do that, and some are better than others, I'll just be real.
But at the end of the day, you're a) not going to win every battle, but b) you have to build the trust of your patrons and supporters. There is a reason why you've ascended to the position that you're in. You have to find the language and the ways and the means to advocate for that which is important to you. And it's not going to be the same for every person.
There is always going to be a person who's only interested in the market. But I don't think any board or any support group of an institution is wholly comprised of people like that. They are people who are there because they care about objects, and they care about future, and they care about the reputation. So if you begin to talk about the ways in which an artist has reconfigured your mind, and reconfigured the language of art, and maybe done something that was the root of what is the white-hot market now that we ignored some time ago? These are the conversations that are worth having.
But I'll also say, look, the market is not everything to everyone, either. There are plenty of artists who want to sell, obviously, but they are still looking for that validation inside of institutions. They're still looking for the publications. They're still looking for scholarly respect. I don't know any artist who wants to die with nothing but sales and no retrospective. Right? Nothing but sales and no survey.
So it also behooves us to tell our supporters that we actually sometimes have to remember that we are the goal and not the sales. We are the prize, and why are we the prize? Because we actually have the foresight and maybe a little bit of discernment to really think about what's going to be important into the future. Or at least we have the foundation and the platform to create importance for the future. I think we can't underestimate our power. Just like Henry Moore, I guess we'll just say.
Charlotte Burns:
I love that. You also talk about your trustees there. One of the kind of ‘what-ifs’ of this show is thinking about that idea of governance. What if we could separate governance from funding? Would you advocate for something like that?
Naomi Beckwith:
Something about that sounds incredible. I have to think about this just a little bit. What if we could? Yes, I actually think that could be interesting.
But if I were to give a counterexample, which I don't know well, the question is, is it that much better, let's say, in a European context, where funding might be coming from the state and governance might come from other people? I don't know. Right?
It's really a question about where do you put your energies? And then what do you get back from those energies? How much time do you spend really trying to justify the moves that you make with your supporters? And, you know, institutional leaders? Do they trust your vision? Right? Do you have a vision?
But I do agree, right, that the boards have become the primary source of funding for institutions. And while I don't have a total distrust of that, I actually think it puts a lot—an incredible amount—of pressure also on the board. Right? I don't think they enjoy being in that position. But they feel responsible. So many of them rise to the occasion.
Charlotte Burns:
Talking about leadership, you're back in New York now, you're at the Guggenheim, which is about to undergo a change in leadership with the departure of the longtime director, Richard Armstrong. And I want to talk to you a little bit about that new direction, how that's feeling internally.
But also, I want to talk to you about New York itself. It's about to undergo this enormous generational shift. You have, obviously, Richard at the Guggenheim, at the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art], there's a new leadership structure in place. There's change expected in institutions all around the city from MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], possibly New Museum, possibly Whitney, possibly Studio Museum [of Harlem], there's a lot of talk in the air about change coming in the next several years.
And this is also happening in the market if you think of legacy plans happening around kingpin galleries like Gagosian, Gladstone, Goodman, the closure of Metro Pictures, galleries like that.
So it seems that this is an unprecedented moment of sudden, rather than staggered, generational change and new leadership vision. We're in the moment before the enormous change, and it feels like it could be momentous. New York is the center of the art world and still is the hub of activity. What do you feel about that big generational change?
Naomi Beckwith:
Yeah, it's a surprising one. Honestly. This sounds really naive. But I don't think I saw it coming so quickly. But you're right, it does feel like something's on its way, though. You know, look, I'm not trying to kill any icons or running institutions out. [Laughter] I wish you all long and healthy careers. But that said, it did feel we do see something on the horizon.
You know, yes, there's an exciting—a super exciting—generation coming. And I do think they're going to grapple with very different questions around institutions than the generation that has been, you know, my educators and my leaders for the entirety of my career in education as of now.
And it first starts with, I think, the deep questions that this current generation had to grapple with, probably over the last 25, 30 years. How do we sustain institutions when the state just plummeted in support? How do you talk about culture in the realm of a globalizing world? Right. Those, I think, were the big questions. How do we sustain ourselves? How do we become global?
The generation to come really still have to, I think, grapple with those; we just talked about this idea of patronage and who's supporting the institution. We have, of course, talked about the idea of institutional survival in the climate crisis.
But I also think the bigger question now is citizenship and the role of museums now, when you have a world, especially a Western world, that is so deeply cynical about the possibility of nationhood, and the possibility of public space, and civic belonging. So there's a reason why, when someone wants to get attention, they walk in a museum and they tape themselves or glue themselves to a famous painting.
It feels as though museums are almost the last site by which we can surface all these questions around our future. It's a scary thing, but it's not, I think, an uninteresting one. Why are museums the last public space? And what becomes the responsibility of a museum as the last public space?
I am not someone who's so Pollyanna, who believes that art and museums will change the world. But I do believe they can, right? I do believe they can become the sites where we begin to imagine change. I do believe they can become the sites where we can literally talk safely around certain ideas. I do believe they are the sites, especially through artists, that allow us to deal with our anxieties personally and politically. So why not take advantage of that platform? And imagine what the museum can be in trying to hold this world together that is still grappling with its own post war legacy.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that’s so interesting. And it's only going to happen if museums can change themselves, of course, first, which is a big responsibility. How do you go about thinking about that, and how much of that is rooted in this sort of balance between local placemaking and global thinking? And by which, I don't mean globalized in this sort of, which is a business word, really. More the idea of cosmopolitanism.
Naomi Beckwith:
I don't see a distinction between the two, honestly. And I think my model for that really comes from my sort of Southside of Chicago upbringing in, you know, a kind of post-Black Power, pan-Africanist way.
Two things really came out of that, and one is, for my kind of education with the capital E—the breadth of the way that I've learned to navigate the world—there was no distinction between me imagining myself as a kind of political figure, and imagining myself as a cultural figure. This project of Blackness and Blackness and formation was about a kind of being able to exist in an American polity, with an identity formation that had been informed by certain cultural practices, real and imagined. Right? Real: the food. Imagined: you know, a kind of, I don't know, a sartorial relationship to Africa. [Laughs] Everyone running around in Kente cloth, right, and dashikis, right?
So these things were one in the same for me. But it also engendered a second thing, which is to say that, in that relationship to Africa—again, both real and imagined—there are Africans in my family, right? But though, at the same time, there was a kind of fantasy of Africa as a place inhabited wholly by kings and queens, right, there was no underclass. [Laughs] And all those kings and queens had been then denigrated in the Atlantic crossing to the States. That was, again, a fantasy. But what it began to engender was a real curiosity and relationship to the African subcontinent. So by the time that I am sort of rising with my interest in art and culture, and Okwui Enwezor becomes one of the dominant voices around cosmopolitanism, he makes perfect sense to me.
The locality of the version of a cosmopolitan Africanism, on the South Side of Chicago, was exactly the thing that allowed me to imagine then not only relationships to the African subcontinent but the relationship to what we now call and probably shouldn't call the global South. These were shared understandings of our unfortunate relationship to a narrative of cultural teleology in the north that needed to go. That then becomes a global, international, cosmopolitan project that sat right beside those little African dance classes that I took on the South Side.
Charlotte Burns:
You spoke recently to me about this idea, you sort of lamented a little bit this sense of cosmopolitanism on the wane in the cultural imagination these days. Can you talk a little bit about how you're experiencing that?
Naomi Beckwith:
Yeah, I do think that there's a way in which people are trying to revive the local at the expense of the cosmopolitan, but not in relationship to it. I'm thinking about a kind of deep interest in a kind of Black study that really wants to focus just on the US, a very specific kind of historic moment, maybe right after the abolition of slavery. And I'm not saying it's not a problem historically; I'm deeply interested in it. But I began to really wonder what happens when we lose the idea that there wasn't just a distinct Black culture that grew up in a crucible of one site, i.e., the American South, or became the American South. But there had always been these cultural exchanges with Africa, and the Caribbean, and North America, all the way up to the quote-unquote emancipation of slavery, right? That never stopped. I think we have a way of fixing some of these narratives around what certain places and what cultures are at present, when in fact, there's always going to be swirl and exchanges at different understandings.
There's something, I think maybe about my own instincts, that feels as though if we're not thinking about any kind of cultural moment as a continuum and as an exchange with other peoples, other languages, other cultures—and we're not imagining what happens in both that collision and that melding—then we're probably not really doing a very good job of grasping what's happening.
One of the reasons I constantly go back to someone like Okwui Enwezor, besides this sort of capacious genius in general, is because, for him, there is no shame in history. There is no shame in colonialism in Africa. Was it a problem? Yes. But it's not something that he needed to be ashamed of. He's much more interested in what happens when you take these kinds of colonial structures and try to overlap it over a pre-existing cultural and political hegemony that already existed in Western Africa. And what strange surprises begin to come out of that? What happens when you try to recuperate that in decolonization?
He was not ashamed of the Nazi past of Haus der Kunst. And that it was, in many ways, a Nazi design project. And so, instead of sort of sweeping it under a proverbial rug, he was much more interested in what happens when we talk about that design project. And when we talk about where objects literally went, how it passed through the Haus der Kunst, and how that actually can be helpful in restitution projects.
This idea that we don't have to kind of recoup a glorious past in order to give ourselves credence, but we need to actually not be ashamed of what's happened and begin to grasp it for ourselves and talk about the possible worlds that can come from that.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
I guess what you're talking about is, what if we could imagine different futures? And this is your point of the spiral that I know you've talked about as being such a part of your practice, this idea of, again, not a downward spiral, but a reaching back and forward at the same time, and having that relationship between the both of them.
And you mentioned as well, growing up, you're born and raised in the South Side of Chicago, you came of age in the 80s, in the wake of the Black Power movement, and you you attended a very experimental public school that fostered high academic achievement in its pupils, 98% of whom were Black American.
And a sad thing about this is that you had no idea that as soon as you left school, that Black history would no longer be part of your formal education anywhere else. That's also a kind of huge, what if, like, what if that continued? There are models that have worked that just haven't been expanded or developed or picked up enough, you know, this is, you're a product of something very specific in so many ways.
Naomi Beckwith:
You know, in many ways, my education was like a fish in a fishbowl, you don't realize that not everyone else has undergone the same thing. I just assumed even White people knew about Black history, obvi. [Laughs]
Actually, I didn’t. I did know it was something distinctive, but I didn't know how much till much later. And I, I agree, there have been models in terms of trying to create new citizens. I mean, that was a project in new citizenry. Again, not at all distinct from cultural history and arts and imagination, those two things always went along with each other. We have to keep doing that work. And in fact, I did a whole series for the BBC called What If My Textbooks Were Black? And I walked through certain kinds of cultural histories, centering Black figures in that culture history and had conversations with people across disciplines—dance, music, literature—beginning to recoup a notion of American history.
I also believe that there doesn't have to be some massive exchange, i.e. that we throw out all the history books—or maybe we do throughout the history books, we can rewrite some of them. [Laughs] We don't throw out the history, right? No shame. But we need to explain those histories. We need to really begin to either understand how we can talk about, let's say, in my context, American history, with the contributions of immigrants, because that's what we all are, right?
I'm kind of tired of living in a country where people constantly turn to me and ask where I'm from. They don't turn to people with white skin and ask them that question when my family has been here for hundreds of years. So what is that presumption of Blackness as foreignness? So what if we began to teach our history in a different way? That doesn't presume that Whiteness is the norm? Which it is actually not and hasn't been for quite some time?
What if we began to do a kind of cultural education that allows us to imagine that there are all sorts of forms, not even integrated in the market, that allow people to understand what aesthetics are, what beauty is, what object-making is, what community means? What if we actually spend time archiving and researching those things?
And again, not against object-hood, but along with. And if we do that, we might have, let's say, a better understanding of the work like an artist like Nick Cave. We are dazzled by these objects. But those objects have a very specific material history to them. So I'm really interested in a kind of model that is always about expansion, always about asking that question: what are we missing? Not just what if, but what are we missing? And that takes that as the core of its intellectual enterprise, rather than one that starts with certainty and begins to say, this is the best, this is the greatest, and this is the only way forward.
Charlotte Burns:
I love as well how this extends back, this is something so formative for you because you've spoken about growing up in such a vibrant cultural scene where the object was just one thing that was one part of that creativity and imagination and the value of creativity and culture. So it was art, it was dance, it was performance, social spaces, and so much more were enmeshed. And then you spoke about how when you became a museum professional, you were sort of like, oh, wow, we're just talking about the object?
And so this has been a concern in your practice for a long time, you know, from your exhibition, “The Freedom Principle[: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now]”, specifically looking at jazz and experimental music in the 60s, especially in Chicago, and the influence of that on contemporary culture. And now, of course, visitors to the Guggenheim, between now and April, can go and see the amazing survey of works by Nick Cave. So tell us a little bit about that strain of thinking in your practice.
Naomi Beckwith:
I'm not the only one doing this work. And that's exciting. I just think that that's part of that generational shift. I think many of us either weren't raised with the same kind of academic presumptions. And many of us, of course, again, don't have a shame about where we've come from. Even if we weren't raised in the depths of those kinds of academic presumptions. I'm not ashamed of a wonderful sort of working-middle-class background on the South Side of Chicago again, I thought it was vibrant. So I just want to share it. There is a real glee in talking to people about the beauty of the free jazz movement. Because, you know, where would we be without it, we'd be a much poorer world.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also, you know, the everydayness of it. It's the conversations, it's the music, it's the food you eat while you're talking about the music you're listening to or dancing to. And it is life, rather than a relic of a life past, which is a shift, I think, that you're right is a generational one.
Naomi Beckwith:
Let's not forget that that's not new, also, to the Western art project. That was exactly the shift that got us the great Modernism enterprise of the 19th century. That's the shift that got us genre painting. That's the shift that got us Manet, right? The question is, whose mundanity is going to be, quote-unquote, valued?
Charlotte Burns:
I love that. Will you remain in museums? Do you see your future in the institution?
Naomi Beckwith:
Yes. I hesitated because I have no crystal ball. I wish I did. If I did, I’d work in the markets. [Laughs] But look, there is only one site that I can think of that allows you to do multiple really incredible things. To sit with objects. And it is amazing to be able to sit and stare at something for a long, long time. It is amazing to have the benefit to study something in-depth and make friends with something.
It is also amazing to come together with colleagues who are all about the mission of the care for history through objects. That people are trained to tell stories. That there are incredible resources put to the idea that art objects are important. And it is unusual to be in a place that is wholly committed to sharing that with the broadest possible public.
And I don't think there is an institution that has really worked to rethink itself over the centuries, moving from these kinds of really idiosyncratic gentleman's collections to one that really begins to ask questions around civic practice and civic life. There’s something so incredibly important and exciting about that. And I can't imagine another institution that would do that for me.
Charlotte Burns:
It's really interesting because it's sort of like the job that museums said they wanted but didn't really apply for.
Naomi Beckwith:
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
And then now they're sort of landed with it because there's been this complete shrinkage in the public sphere, otherwise, of spaces, which is why you see, like you say, these big arguments around monuments and museums, because where else are you going to go?
Do you think they're up to the challenge? Can you think of museums doing that work well right now?
Naomi Beckwith:
I think it will take some training. I don't claim to have all the answers to, you know, how to engage with this new pressure of the expansion of our civic roles. I think we have to begin to reimagine ourselves a little bit. We have to reimagine our public as very different from that kind of enlightenment subject.
I think we still have to reclaim some of that space from the white-hot market and and tell a compelling story about why we exist. So it'll take some work, but I don't think we have a choice.
Look, you brought up a very important example of the destruction of monuments. Most of the people who took that statue of Colston down and threw it in the river will not be able to give you a disquisition on the importance of monuments, right? But they do understand symbolic value. And we, as museum professionals, are the keeper of symbolic values. And we need to respect people's understanding of that and walk with them through that.
But I also want to think about the ways in which, when the world began to open after the pandemic, or when I was living in the city in the wake of 9/11, how many people ran to the Met? How many people went to museums? People still trust us, and it doesn't look like trust. But I think that agitation and advocacy inside our spaces is a sign that they're really looking for us to help them also navigate all the symbols thrown at them, especially when those symbols come in the form of death and destruction.
Charlotte Burns:
I think you're right, that's so true. That’s where people go to find that connection with—communion, I guess—with other people's emotions, whether past or present.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
So I'm going to ask you a couple of ‘what ifs’ just to round us out.
Naomi Beckwith:
Okay.
Charlotte Burns:
I was watching one of your videos that you've done. It was a show called My Chicago, and you're driving around Chicago. You were talking about the role of a curator as being a translator, and the host said, a lot of people just say they don't understand that it makes them feel uncomfortable or stupid. And you said yeah, this happens every day of my life. And I thought, well, what if art didn't make people feel uncomfortable or stupid or lacking in some way?
Naomi Beckwith:
Art doesn't make people feel stupid. People just don't trust themselves. So I think the question is, what if we actually help people trust themselves in the face of something that felt bigger than them? And I think if we did that, we’d probably be better able to talk to each other about things, right, we'd be able to talk to each other in this kind of social space of political agitation, and we’d definitely, I think, be able to talk to each other much more cogently around cultural exchange.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay, another question for you. What if the canon didn't matter? By which I mean artists today, not all of them find the canon to be totally relevant anyway to them. What if it doesn't matter?
Naomi Beckwith:
Every artist has a canon that matters to them. I think first, it's important to talk about multiple canons. No artist, or at least one I find compelling, sprouts from the head of Zeus fully formed. Every artist is looking at something that came before them. The ones I find the most compelling are the ones who are the most self-aware around that. So I think the question is, what if we took a little bit more time to understand what those canons are that are important to that particular artist and then begin to judge for ourselves whether or not this is something we want to engage with.
Charlotte Burns:
What is the ‘what if’ that motivates you?
Naomi Beckwith:
That's a good question. The ‘what if’ for me is, what would I do if I had unlimited resources?
But I think that's a utopic. What would I do? This sounds really selfish but I’d build other Guggenheims. [Laughs] They wouldn’t look like this one, though, and they probably wouldn't be in the form of Abu Dhabi. But I'm really interested in what would it mean to have a proper network of museums, right? Not just distinctive ones but a network of museums doing that work of cultural exchange, as we do on a small level now at the Guggenheim, sharing exhibitions. But you know, what if we were a multi-sited institution that thought of itself much more unitarily?
What else would I do with unlimited resources? I’d do a lot of conservation work. I’d do a lot of arts training. I’d do a helluva lot of professional development for people who don't traditionally have access to the arts.
But I also think it's very important to not ask the question about winning the lottery. But also imagine, what am I going to do with what I have now? And again, in that spirit of not being ashamed of what might be perceived as not enough, or a lack, but really understanding, I still have a gift. I have a gift in this position, I have a gift in this incredible institution, I have the gift of access to a wealth of incredible colleagues who have intelligences beyond my imagination. What are we going to do with it now?
Charlotte Burns:
What is the Guggenheim going to do with it now?
Naomi Beckwith:
Right now, I think we're going to open Abu Dhabi. And we're gonna ask the question, ‘what if the center of our conversation around art isn't going to be cited in the Western world?’ What are the stories that we're going to tell when we have a global collection in the Middle East? And what, then, is our responsibility to the growing stories that are going to come out of that amazing remit?
Charlotte Burns:
Naomi, this has been a true pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us.
Naomi
You're welcome.
Charlotte Burns:
I always love our conversations.
Naomi Beckwith:
I also always love our conversation Charlotte, and really, really look forward to more and thinking about what happens if we don't just change the numbers but begin to change our hearts and minds.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that's a perfect, perfect question to end us on.
Naomi, thank you so much for joining us.
Naomi Beckwith:
Til soon. You’re welcome. Bye bye.
Charlotte Burns:
Thank you once again to Naomi Beckwith for that conversation and for helping us untangle some fascinating ‘what ifs.’ Naomi is a next-generation museum leader, someone actively working to recalibrate the field in the most exciting and dynamic ways.
Next time we’ll be talking to Glenn Lowry, who’s been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. We talk about his concerns about democracy itself, divisiveness in culture, among many other things.
Glenn Lowry:
If we start to believe that trustees whose political positions are different than ours, or whose financial investments don't align with our values are no longer welcome in our institutions, I think of that as fascism. “I don't like what you do. Therefore, you are excluded.” That's a bad place for us as a society to be. It doesn't matter whether they're of the progressive left or the reactionary right if they're supporting the programs and artists we believe in.
Charlotte Burns:
That’s all coming up in the next episode of The Art World: What If…?!
The 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.