The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 13: Kathy Halbreich
What if we could change the dependence on capital and be more engaged with the enhancement of the people who work in our institutions? This episode, Charlotte Burns is joined by Kathy Halbriech, the outgoing director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, who’s led some of the most dynamic institutions in the art world. They discuss freedom, finances, and what the future holds for museums and those who work in them. “You could not pay me enough money to be a museum director at this point in my life,” says Kathy. “Maybe that's just because I really know what the job is, and I think it is one of the most misunderstood and genuinely taxing jobs.”
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello. I’m Charlotte Burns, and this is a podcast all about imagining different futures. Throughout the series, we’re meeting people who are inventing new ways of doing and seeing—and being in the art world. They’re all making change in their own ways, innovating and exploring life’s ‘what ifs.’
[Audio of guests]
This time, I’m joined by Kathy Halbreich, who’s led some of the most dynamic institutions in the art world. She was the director of the Walker Art Center from 1991 until 2007—a period in which it was arguably one of the most progressive museums in America. She left for a role specially created for her at MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], the associate director, Laurenz Foundation curator, and advisor to the director Glenn Lowry between 2008 and 2017. Hired to help the museum think differently, Kathy also oversaw major retrospectives of two of the most significant and least understood artists of the postwar period, Bruce Nauman and Sigmar Polke. Kathy recently announced she gonna be stepping down as director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation—which she’s led to critical and peer praise since 2017.
Kathy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kathy Halbreich:
Thank you, Charlotte. It's always an extraordinary pleasure to talk with you.
Charlotte Burns:
So I wanted to talk to you about freedom because, as I was starting my research for the show, I realized there was a thread through a lot of the interviews you've given, which is this focus on freedom. So if we look back to the Walker, when the Walker was expanding to ensure its creative independence, you foreswore millions of dollars in potential state aid for the addition. At MoMA, when you took that job, you gave The New York Times a phone interview, and you said, “The job Glenn [Lowry] has sketched out for me is the cream of any director's job. Our conversations went all over the map. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and this role seemed to offer me the greatest freedom.”
I was struck again in your recent letter announcing your departure. You said, “I arrived at the foundation animated by an enormous sense of possibility and permission. My initial responsibility was to refresh our mission, and for me, that meant embracing the freedom exhibited by Bob in both his daily artistic practice and in his daring to champion a more progressive and benevolent world. This spirit activated everything we did to enhance Bob's legacy.”
So Kathy, can you talk to me about freedom? Have you found it? How did you maintain it? How did you protect it?
Kathy Halbreich:
I think freedom is transitory. It would be an impossibility to have a sense of freedom lodged in your brain and body all the time. Our life on this planet, and our life together, just doesn't make that anything other than an abstract concept. But when I am most happy—which is working with people I adore and respect—there is a sense of elation that comes very close to freedom. I have had an enormous sense of opportunity at the foundation. I spend my days looking across the room at a portrait of Bob done by Andy Warhol, and I know not to ask him for what he would do because the one thing I know is an artist of that kind of electric creativity and intelligence would not be doing today what he was doing in 2008 when he died. But I do look to him for the stability of values: nimbleness, responsiveness, iconoclastic behavior, a sense of empathy. All those characteristics, for me, are part of the ingredients of freedom. When I hear you recite the repetition of freedom in my vocabulary, I wonder what was in my childhood that made me want to embrace freedom at every turn.
[Laughter]
And actually, I came from a kind of complicated childhood. I had enormous freedom in terms of walking to The Metropolitan Museum [of Art] and purposely getting lost. And the extraordinary exposure to cultures I knew nothing about. There was just a history of animation and invention when I was in places such as the Met. My home life was a little bit more traumatic and troubled and parental complications. So maybe I did see a need to be free from that and a wish for my mother to be free from some of the pain she might have been experiencing in a relationship that was unraveling.
So, I think freedom has many temperatures. Many ways of seeping into your psyche, but I think for me, looking at art and absolutely spending my time around a table with artists is my definition of where freedom springs from.
Charlotte Burns:
So you found freedom in art?
Kathy Halbreich:
I guess it's in art, but it's also in the people who make and think about it, which is why I have stayed in this field for so long. The world of ideas is very expansive in the arts. Being with people who start from almost ground zero and build up a reality that then becomes a representation of who they are is almost miraculous to me.
But I also am very aware, as we're speaking, that freedom is also a sign of some privilege. And I don't mean just financial privilege or educational privilege or any of those things. It has to be aligned with some sense of possibility and some sense of comfort. And working at the foundation on philanthropy has given me an enormous sense of what a certain quality of wealth stops you from seeing, that that kind of privilege actually turns out to not be really a privilege. Who cares if you can take a helicopter? I think it's much more important to really have a sense of the lives below you as you fly over them.
Charlotte Burns:
You just mentioned this idea of wealth and the different qualities of wealth, and when you worked in museums, you were often lobbying for more wealth or trying to fundraise. At the Rauschenberg Foundation, you've been on the other side of the desk. You've been giving the money away, and you've pioneered new ways of doing that, which I want to get into. But what I want to talk about first of all is this idea of philanthropy. It's kind of wild that an artist can amass such wealth in their lifetimes and beyond. It's a different flavor of philanthropy to run an artist foundation than it is the foundation of an industrialist. I wanna talk to you about that artistic responsibility. But, before that, a bigger question, which is, do you think that philanthropy can solve more problems than the wealth inequality it springs from creates?
Kathy Halbreich:
It's a really good problem. The honest answer would be I doubt it because the problems we face are so massive and in so few hands that I think it's very hard to disrupt that level of being.
By the way, the money that the Rauschenberg Foundation has actually did not come from Bob in the sense that it wasn't his estate. His estate had next to no money in it. What it had was a lot of art, illiquid assets. It's really been a challenge to assist Bob's sales and then invest that money, and it's the investments which really have created the wealth of the foundation because of his art. But he didn't die with a ton of money. He had real estate and art.
Charlotte Burns:
One of the things that people used to say about the Rauschenberg Estate before you joined, I remember years ago when there was a big sale of a Rauschenberg or something came up, was that the estate had been cherry-picked over by galleries a decade or so ago and that the stuff that remained was stuff that wasn't so easily sellable because it was the less obvious stuff, the stuff the market wasn't as interested in. You've done a lot of work since you've been at the foundation in repositioning a lot of that work, a lot of which comes from the second half of Bob's life; work that he made in Captiva. How did you approach that? Where is that now in terms of his reputation for those things and I guess also that question of how you manage an estate to build a long-term thing rather than just cherry-picking the best assets at the top of it?
Kathy Halbreich:
Well, I clearly don't believe that's what happened. I think what happened is people knew a very limited band of Bob's very expansive career. Since that's what they knew, they thought that's all that was good. This is the problem of a market mentality. It's inherently conservative. You know, I spent many early hours at my desk with my head in my hands wondering why Bob's cohorts, let's just say Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, were pulling down extraordinary amounts of money and Bob's work was somewhat depressed in price. Particularly at auction were often the things that were put forth were not his best but not everybody knows that either. And I finally lifted my head up one day because I also live with his art in my office and I thought, “Oh, all the reasons that I love it are the reasons he will never achieve that level of financial valuation,” because these stick out from the wall if they even sit on the wall. They're made out of junk. They're only extraordinary if you actually know what real invention and artistic genius—a word I hardly ever use—how it manifests itself. And I just realized, “Oh, stop that. It's your job to get people to just look at what they don't know.” And I think that despair sometimes leads to opportunity, led me to begin to work with Allan.
One of the things I would say is, no matter where you are, turn to the best for help because none of us know everything. Allan really helped me see a less melancholy future for Bob, and the shows that were seen at the Gladstone Gallery and at [Thaddeus] Ropac and at Mnuchin [Gallery] at the same time gave people a sense that he was fearless. It wasn't about feeding a market, it was about feeding what he needed, and there was such a big hole somewhere in him that he never stopped expanding what he needed. And so, yes, there's remarkable stylistic diversity and what we're trying to show people, bring people to, is a sense that within that diversity of style, there's also intellectual continuity.
So people have to pay attention. That, of course, is the billion-dollar question of today; how do you get anybody to lift their head up from their phone? But somehow—this is where again, my optimism gets fed—the show that Barbara [Gladstone] did at both of her galleries, being in a room with people whose heads were exploding, it wasn't just a light bulb, it was an entire power plant that was going off in their brain because they'd never seen this work. They understood it as what art should be, made by somebody's hands on the beach, a bunch of cardboard and sand and brilliance and fever and fearlessness, fearlessness, fearlessness. You know, try it. And I think artists have led us to understand today that you don't start and necessarily go from A to B. You may go from A to T, loop back to B, and then zoom off into an alphabet that we don't even know exists.
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about artists because the way you work with artists has always been so specific. You give a lot of time to their work. You really go deep into their practice. At the Rauschenberg Foundation, one of the things you did was set up an artist advisor council. Wallis Annenberg gave you some funds, which you used to establish an artist council of roughly 12 artists, different disciplines, generations, and aesthetic perspectives. The board of the foundation agreed to let the council distribute roughly a quarter of the philanthropic funds every year. The artists ended up giving the funds in ways that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And this is gonna lead us to our first what if, which is what if the art world trusted artists more?
Kathy Halbreich:
If only when people respond, at least among the artists that I know best, there's an empathy, intellectual, and emotional commitment to making the world better. And I don't mean that artists change the world by the virtue of whatever's hanging on the wall. I actually don't believe that. But I do think the circulation of radical ideas can change the world. I believe that the way Cameron Rowland holds up a mirror to a community such as Frankfurt, Germany, where I just saw his show, a place that many people said to him, “Why are you here? We have no issue with slavery.” And, of course, slavery runs through every system of water we have, and people who live in this city who thought they were immune to the degradation of slavery that they weren't has to change something in the civic fiber of the city. Is it going to feed people? Probably not immediately, maybe not ever. But if people begin to understand that the self-satisfaction of this very comfortable city probably isn't earned, needs to be explored—I think Cameron’s show can do that—that's the kind of change I'm talking about. Self-awareness, the moment of, “Jesus, me?” That’s the way things change.
But Bob believed artists could change the world. So I've had to really struggle to understand that. Project ROCI, which was his desire to travel to places, primarily those under oppressive regimes, in order to have conversations with artists that he thought would stimulate greater freedom. I just don't really know if I believe that's how it happens. So I think Bob's naive. But I then began to hear from artists who met him, they saw a little break in the wall. They heard somebody speak with a permission they might not have felt they had. So I've had to do a lot of thinking about that. These are the questions that are so much on people's minds now. How is change formulated? What is the role of creative practitioners? Where are the radical ideas in an arena of such unusual wealth?
Now, I guess I'm gonna say something that I might have to really think about later, but I've talked to my friend Glenn Lowry about this over the years because both of us have been on the other side of the table from the one I'm on now. In other words, we've had to ask people for money, and if I were being totally honest, I would tell you there are very few people I wouldn't take money from in order to do what I believed in, in order to help artists create new ideas and new things. Now, I know some artists are very particular about who their collectors are and who their patrons are, and I respect that. But when I was running an institution, I had a lot of people's lives in my hands. People to pay and healthcare, research opportunities for them, and the wherewithal to let them be as creative as possible. Our institutions need to aspire to a level of creativity that they see in the artists they support. And I've never understood why there were so many rules in artist foundations or performing arts centers or museums. We should be pliant. That's what freedom also is, the ability to create unique situations for artists. So if somebody's willing to give me money to make these pliant situations for staff and artists available routinely, I'm gonna think very hard before I say no.
Charlotte Burns:
Where would you say no? Where on that sliding scale would you be like, “Okay, that's money I won't take?”
Kathy Halbreich:
I knew you were gonna ask that. Well, I was gonna say I wouldn't take money from Nazi perpetrators, but that would sort of eliminate a lot of companies in Germany, for example. At this moment in time, we are in this country living very close to a totalitarian regime, or were—I think it's significantly different with Biden than it was with Trump. But I think if you look around the world, it's unsavory. This would be a conversation I would love to have with artists. We did have it with the artist council when they first were formed. They asked to know more about how our money was invested, and so I asked the board member who was the head of finance, which oversees our investments, and I asked the board chair to meet with the artist council to discuss how the investments were made. There are certain filters that we do put on our investing. In my own thinking, I'm still confused about those filters. I mean, one of our investment people said that we could invest in low-income housing in India. And I said, “But how much interest do you charge these people?” and actually, I never got an answer. So, you know, all this social impact stuff, I'm not sure how different it is from investing in any of the corporations.
Okay, here's the easiest way to say it. Museum directors have a huge responsibility. I think it starts with the people who work there, and it's no secret that by and large the people who work in such institutions, they're not making tons of money, but you have to protect somehow those salaries and healthcare costs, which rise every year. You have to have some program. You have to have some way of reaching beyond your walls. You have to take care of the work you own. So there are many, many obvious responsibilities, and in this country, there is no government support. So that kind of leads you with admissions, and if people were to pay how much it really costs for their visit in a day, nobody would be able to afford it. So that leaves us with private individuals. I know billionaires who I think are really good people and who want to use their money for good things. But I also believe that you cut some corners as you go up the financial food chain. If you're looking for purity, it's probably not there. I never really think purity is that interesting an idea anyway, but that's another conversation.
Charlotte Burns:
Have your thoughts around funding shifted being on the other side of the desk as you look ahead to the next phase? You're someone who spent your career interrogating the role of the institution. You said you're not retiring, but you're done working with institutions. What do you want to do? Do you know? What if you could create your dream job, and how would you think of funding that?
Kathy Halbreich:
I am going to spend the next summer months lying on my back, looking at the clouds and looking for messages. I think I have a great luxury, which is not to jump at anything immediately but to let some time enter my brain and create space. I would say that it will involve artists. That is what I know after all these years is the thing that brings me the most pleasure.
I've really loved how I've had to learn with the artist council, whose process is entirely unlinear. And I remember once in the middle of a four-hour conversation where it didn't seem like we were going to reach any resolution, “Children! Did any of you do your homework?” And then I realized, be patient—not my greatest quality—watch this rollout because this is what you are paying for. You are not paying for your process. You are paying for a group of people who have come to know each other from very different points of reference and who have learned to trust each other, grapple with what today is the most important set of issues for them. And I stress today because we have to allow for change in what we think is most demanding at any one time.
The artist council has been very interested in, again, the world that they live in has to be able somehow to rise above despair in order for them to be able to make work. I think that's really how they think about things. One of the areas that they've been most interested in is shelter, and what we can do is encourage small models to survive so that others can see that if you put money in the hands of those who are going to be most affected by it, they may turn out to be the most effective at figuring out how to change circumstances. So we are in the process of paying for the legal fees of an organization called Reclaiming Our Homes, which grew out of another organization we funded, Moms 4 Housing, which were a group of women who squatted in abandoned buildings in Oakland, California, where there are four times more abandoned buildings and unsheltered families leading one to believe if there were the political will, the housing problem could at least theoretically be solved. That's what the artist council is doing, and they have really helped me understand that we're not involved in global change. We're involved in helping small, sometimes startups, sometimes very wobbly existing organizations stay alive.
Charlotte Burns:
Something you once said, and I'm gonna quote you, “Suffice it to say the best museum director probably is an unwed celibate with a gift for marketing.” You've been a parent while running a major museum and having these major leadership roles. Did motherhood change your work? Has the field changed? Is it kinder to parents, mothers particularly?
Kathy Halbreich:
I wouldn't think so from the young women I know who are constantly racing home after an evening activity or can't quite get the family to move to the next city where there's a good position. Maybe the partner makes more money. I just don't think the world has changed that much, even though I'm going to be 74 next month. I think there's still intractable difficulties. But that said, yeah, I think my son changed a lot of the ways I see the world. First of all, he gives away a great portion of his salary every year. And I don't know whether that came from watching me crawl around on my knees trying to raise money or whether it came from the jar we had on our kitchen table for the person who swore or smoked a cigarette to put a dollar in each time. And I can tell you I was the biggest patron of that jar. But at the end of the year, Henry, our son, had to choose where to give it. So from a very young age, he had this idea that money was to be shared.
Charlotte Burns:
I wanna talk to you a bit about leadership and the future of leadership, I guess in institutions. Women are leaving corporate leadership roles at a higher than ever rate, and women in museum leadership are leaving at roughly twice the rate of men. Do you have any thoughts on why that's happening?
Kathy Halbreich:
You could not pay me enough money to be a museum director at this point in my life. And maybe that's just because I really know what the job is, and I think it is one of the most misunderstood and genuinely taxing jobs. And I think you have to have a vision to fight your way through all the landmines. And you have to have something important that's out there in the future that you march to because you will get distracted, you'll get beat up, you'll get disappointed, you'll get turned down. But you also will have the opportunity to think about what are the salient ideas that are not present in this institution that could shape it in a way that reflects more of the community or more of the ups and downs of a global approach or looks at the extraordinary absence of people of color in these institutions. And all of those questions were really big ones for me.
I was lucky. I was at Walker at the right time with the right group of people in the right community to build a model that I don't think is as well known now as it was. I mean, time marches on, but it was prescient in the questions it asked, and in the solutions it found. Here's the thing that's not a ‘what if’ this is real. I look around the world and I see people, I call my children, probably they don't like that any more than my child likes it, but people who I mentored and I cared about, and I wanted to succeed, and they are now running major institutions all around the world. That's not a ‘what if’; that happened. And that really is genuinely the greatest reward I could imagine.
Charlotte Burns:
I was asking our editorial advisors and Allan questions to ask you, and two of them, seconded by everyone else, wanted to talk about this idea of Camelot. People have said that the Walker felt like a Camelot when you were at the helm. That it was this amazing crew of people working together and that, again, back to this idea of freedom that people said they felt free. People including Kemi [Ilesanmi], who we've interviewed on this show, Michelle Coffey, Doryun Chong, Yasmil Raymond, Philippe Vergne, and many, many others flourished.
Kathy Halbreich:
My children, see!
Charlotte Burns:
They flourished during your tenure, and then they carry that energy elsewhere like you were just saying. And the formula sounds quite simple to recruit and support brilliant, diverse curators and staff, empower them so that they can meaningfully help shape an institution in its program. But it's obviously very rare because it doesn't seem to happen. You know, the Walker really did pioneer lots of different programs, it set a tone and a template for some of the issues that lots of museums are only just beginning to grapple with now, two decades later. Can you share your thoughts on that time and what it takes to make a Camelot, and if a kind of Camelot can exist today?
Kathy Halbreich:
Of course, it must be able to exist today. It may just not be in a big museum, or it may be in a kind of alternative space. There are so many spaces that are doing great things. The ones that I know we are interested in tend to be smaller. I don't really know how to answer this question because I don't think day-to-day we knew we were building Camelot. Day to day, we were just pouring the road so that people could travel over it easier. I don't know where that metaphor came from, but I know when I left, some of the staff said to me, “We had no idea how much you protected us.” And I did think very consciously that my job was to work with the trustees who were absolutely essential to the success of everything we were doing but who may have been, in certain ways, behind the curve of the staff because this wasn't their job. This wasn't things that they grappled with every day, but to like buy the staff the time to work these things out.
The other thing I learned I remember the first money I raised was to make the first Saturday of every month free because I thought, “I'm a working mother. I can't bring my kid to a program in the middle of the week at three o'clock.” The day that people are freest often is Saturday, and I got corporate support for it. It was electrifying. I think the best thing I ever did in that regard was I said to the board, okay, this is such a great program that I want each of you to volunteer to be at the door with our community partner and welcome people. “Oh geez. Really?” You know, that wasn't the universal response, but these were very busy people. So, I got the first person to do it, and that person was so exhilarated by the experience of seeing people come to the institution they cared about, might have been their first visit ever, that she went back and told her peers, “You gotta do this.” And that's often the way that change works. Sounds scary at first, and then somebody tiptoes in, and they see other people engaged in ideas that they didn't even know existed. And then they take that home and talk about it with their partner, and they realize, “Oh, these ideas are actually also pertinent to the businesses we run.”
It was Camelot because no idea was a bad idea until it was proven that it sucked. I mean, we just spent a lot of time, maybe people would think it wasteful thinking about every aspect of our institution. It was a luxury. We were able to really be creative and experimental, and we weren't dependent on income from tickets as much as other organizations were. We were dependent on fundraising, and honestly, that made it easier to be a more porous organization.
Charlotte Burns:
You also are a big fan of empowering other people. We've talked about the artist council, but at the Walker, you had a teen arts council, which is 12 members from various high schools and different socioeconomic backgrounds who were selected by peers. They served terms of one to four years, and they worked with virtually all the museum’s departments. They had a not-insignificant budget of around $30,000, and they were in charge of the things they were in charge of. That kind of model of empowering people and letting their decisions be private is this sort of mix of empowering and protecting through opacity. If you were gonna make another council now for the art world, who would you put on it? Would you put the teens? Would you put the artists? Would you put all of the above?
Kathy Halbreich:
I'm really actually thinking about this because I have, throughout my life, really enjoyed working and creating councils that didn't exist before with people who are really brilliant and creative. I mean, the Teen Arts Council, it was the first in the country, and it definitely sprung out of my own experience as a teenager where the status quo was not where I wanted to be. And I realized the perfect combo, teens who don't wanna be part of the status quo, artists who don't want to be part of this status quo. It was like, “Oh, everybody's struggling with teenagers. Give them to me.” And when people actually have authority, they can really start to work. I think before the Teen Arts Council was in business, we did a program with the Parks department and we had a sculpture garden that they maintained, so it seemed logical to have a partnership with them. Most of the teens they worked with had had some kind of fallout with the police. They were pretty hardened for young people. Like one kid, every time he would see me coming, he would pretend to be sleeping. And I don't know, I still chuckle over this, but it was his form of, “I'm not really interested in you and I'm here because I have to be here.” But rather than just having the kids mow the lawn, I decided A, we should feed them lunch. B, we should, with the Guthrie, give them public speaking classes. And C, they would adopt a work of art in the garden and go through the whole process of conservation, also learning how to use the library. And the only requirement was at the end of this period of the summer, they would have to give a tour to a few of us. This kid who pretended he was sleeping every time he saw me adopted the Richard Serra, and I thought, that's so perfect. This intractable, heavy obdurate sculpture that cuts through space so you can't see to the other side. He started his tour with, “I asked myself, what is this work about? And I answered just the facts,” and I thought, I wish I'd written that. So there are so many opportunities to be optimistic. That was a long time ago, and I still remember this kid.
Charlotte Burns:
So if you were going to do your council now, what would you do? Or I guess you're toying with the ideas, but what are the ideas you're toying with?
Kathy Halbreich:
You know, it really is not even half-baked. It's still eggs, milk, sugar, flour, vanilla, so it's not really cool to talk about it because it will just ruin it for me. As I start to put the pieces together, I may not do this. It's always easiest to think you're going to do what's familiar, and I've always most enjoyed doing things that are unfamiliar. I believe each of us can make small differences, and those small differences can bring an enormous amount of pleasure into our lives. That's where I am at the moment. I still have a lot to complete here. And…
Charlotte Burns:
And then get to the sky gazing for a while.
Kathy Halbreich:
Yeah, get to the sky gazing. I probably will continue to assist on programs that aren't quite baked yet, like the Black and Indigenous Land Rights and Agriculture project is just information, and I would very much like to keep it rolling till there's a new executive director. There are a couple things like that; the artist council that I believe should be here when a new ED comes, and it takes a while to find people. So I think there will be months where it would be better if there isn't a hiatus.
Charlotte Burns:
So I'm gonna ask you some ‘what ifs,’ Kathy. You’ve been someone who’s worked in lots of different institutions, you really know them inside out. What if you could change one thing about the institutions, or we don't even have to be stingy, we could say more than that. What would you change if you could?
Kathy Halbreich:
So I'm gonna change two things that are related. We're in fantasy land, okay? I would change the dependence on capital and be more engaged with the enhancement of the people who work and come there. This is fantasy land. Capital is a real thing. It can't be avoided. The best thing you can do is make really good use of it and know what you mean by good.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you think museums and their current guise will survive, will prove durable? The ones that aren't focusing on the people?
Kathy Halbreich:
We're at a moment when a lot of organizations are gonna teeter-totter. It probably wouldn't have happened with the acceleration I think it is happening if the pandemic had not happened. You know, look, hospitals are ceasing to have obstetrics in places that have no other alternatives for delivering babies. It's the same thing. These are not organizations that necessarily have financial wherewithal, or maybe it has to do with they want to make a bigger piece of profit. But a hospital in a region that has no other hospital that doesn't deliver babies anymore is likely not making profits.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, that's kind of life and death stuff, which is the business you'd think of hospitals.
Kathy Halbreich:
Yeah. Maybe I'm as naive as I thought Bob Rauschenberg was in terms of my expectations. I mean, it should be better. I'm a capitalist. No big secret. But I think capitalism has come to a point where if it's not reexamined soon at the highest levels, a lot of things will fail. So my ‘what if’ would be if all of the Democrats could actually grow a spine and all of the Republicans who are less moderate than Romney could disappear, maybe something could happen that would be good for this country.
Charlotte Burns:
Kathy, one last thing before I'm gonna let you go. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night, and what's the one that makes you get out of bed in the morning?
Kathy Halbreich:
The ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is the general state of the planet we live on in all respects. I'm not a huge environmentalist, my son is, but I am aware, after all of his years of lecturing me, that he was right, and things are upside down, and we have done such destruction. I stay up at night thinking about the number of children who are starving and the general economic inequities that make it very, very difficult for people to invent new futures for themselves. But I do think that's what everybody wants to be able to do, is to invent a future that's more dignified and comfortable.
I am deeply worried about the war in Ukraine and the battle between Russia, the United States, and China. I mean the leaders of these countries not talking to each other. I'm not naive. It's about power, but who wants to be powerful if the world is in tatters? You wanna run that place? I don't, but I've never been so interested in power per se, and maybe that's where Camelot grew out of, and that was maybe my model. None of us were there to become more powerful. We were there to attract more permission and greater freedom to speak out, to be creative in ways that might have rubbed some people wrong, to empower people who didn't usually have a voice, to make new work. That power means nothing if you can do all that other stuff.
Charlotte Burns:
We're sort of ending where we started, which is with a toast of freedom.
Kathy Halbreich:
Yes.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Kathy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, and I'm really excited to see what you do next.
Kathy Halbreich:
Oh, thank you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks so much to Kathy. Join us next episode when we’ll be talking to the artist
Pope.L.:
Even though I've tried to put some mess into institutional situations, I really haven't had the chance to really go at it. But you know, like removing every wall in a space and just have them agree, “We’ll do the show in winter”
[Laughter]
That would be fun.
Charlotte Burns:
That’s next time on 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.