The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 16: Deana Haggag, Mia Locks and Jay Sanders
This time hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman welcome their team of editorial advisors Deana Haggag, Mia Locks and Jay Sanders. They’re the brilliant trio who’ve helped steer this season’s conversations acting as an independent sounding board lending editorial advice and expertise—all essential in the creation of this podcast. This is (almost) the season finale—so time to reflect and look back at some of the surprises, delights and, of course, the many "What Ifs". Listen out in the next few weeks for some special bonus episodes!
From the left: Deana Haggag, Mia Locks, and Jay Sanders
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!. This is the season finale—ish– of a podcast all about imagining different futures.
[Audio of guests]
I'm Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I'm Allan Schwartzman.
Because this show is all about new possibilities for the art world and beyond, we don't do this alone. We want to welcome you to the brilliant trio of people who help steer our conversations throughout the season.
Charlotte Burns:
When we started this project, we wanted to build a group that could help us have some of the discussion you'd find in an editorial meeting but with perspectives independent of each other and of us. Our editorial advisory team has been essential to the creation of this podcast, so it seems only appropriate to round out the first season by talking to them.
Welcome aboard, everyone. Do you want to introduce yourselves?
Deana Haggag:
Yes, I'm Deana Haggag, a program officer at the Mellon Foundation, and it is a thrill to be here.
Jay Sanders:
I'm Jay Sanders, a curator, writer, and the director of Artists Space in New York City.
Mia Locks:
I'm Mia Locks. I'm a curator and a co-founder of Museums Moving Forward, which is a staff-led organization whose mission is focused on equity in the museum sector.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay, so everybody, what is the ‘what if’ that struck you the most from this series?
Jay Sanders:
I guess the core of it was maybe in Emily Rales’ ‘what if,’ which was around, what if art was a central priority for education for civilization? What if we’re on par with math and sciences as foregrounded, as essential? And I felt like thinking about Emily's ‘what if’ brought me to Naomi's [Beckwith] again, which is, what if we help people trust themselves in the face of something bigger than them? And then to Kemi [Ilesanmi], which was meeting people in their everyday lives. And I guess I found that kind of network of ‘what ifs’ really poignant to why so many of us work so tirelessly in this field, why we kind of impaled ourselves on all the complexities of it. And so the sort of belief in art’s capacity that those ‘what ifs’ expressed was really meaningful and inspiring to me.
Charlotte Burns:
I really like that. What does everyone else think? Deana?
Deana Haggag:
I really loved Rashida Bumbray’s. The one about what if we moved at the scale of human capacity and we didn't over-push. And so I was thinking a lot about not just what art does, and so many people had so many elegant ‘what ifs’ to that stake, but what if our field was structured to protect us and to make possible the work that we do and to not sacrifice ourselves in the face of it.
Charlotte Burns:
Mia, what about you?
Mia Locks:
I heard a lot of people thinking about trust and imagination and this idea of collective imagining, if not a collective liberation as all good for society and a real underlying belief about what if we really let art and culture be that space, right? Like, what if we actually made our museums, our institutions, be the space and be the engine and be the space of possibility for that? So that art could be essential, but also so that art could do the thing that literally no other field can do.
And I heard that a lot in Rashida Bumbray, but also Cauleen Smith stood out to me as someone who was unafraid. And she kept saying what if we just imagined utopia not as juvenile? What if we just opened ourselves and were sort of like willing to take the risk to believe these things because, actually, they aren't as impossible as we think.
And I just thought that was really inspiring as well as the comments we talked about earlier, diving in a way with Emily Rales and it's not, what's cool about your podcast, Charlotte, is that like I wouldn't outside of this space thought, “Oh gosh, you know, Emily Rales and Cauleen Smith are on the same page,” although they are in a lot of ways. It's what their core hopes and dreams are for art, and for this field of ours actually are sort of one on the same.
Charlotte Burns:
Something I think that unites all of the guests, as different as they are in many ways, is this lack of cynicism. Everybody came to this with a degree of vulnerability and a kind of optimism that's grounded in doing the work.
Allan, what stood out to you? What was the ‘what if’?
Allan Schwartzman:
What stood out for me was that virtually all these people don't live in the ‘what if.’ They're doing it all. Whether they're artists, administrators, curators, collectors, they've gone beyond the ‘what if,’ and they've gone into action.
I think about what Kathy [Halbreich] was saying. She believes in the power of artists to imagine futures in a way that no other community can. And so she's created a council in which she's given artists money to do so, and they've gone through their first cycle. That's now informing a next cycle. Certainly, she's done it in terms of leadership as a mentor. So I think these are all people who are putting questions into action.
Charlotte Burns:
We have lots of different visions of leadership here, from institutional leadership to artistic leadership. Did anybody's vision of leadership strike a chord with you? Did you disagree with anybody's vision?
Mia Locks:
One of the things that struck me, actually, Charlotte, was that there's something underlying that's never really said, although talked around—this generational shift in leadership. I really heard some openings between some of the comments that Glenn [Lowry] makes about the need for boards to hold all different kinds of expertise and that that is very important to him. And for me, that's a real space of ‘what if’ and possibility for the future. Similarly, Kathy Halbreich says something about like imagining that it was sort of less of help the money and more engagement with the people who work and come to the museum and really thinking about those two things and really thinking about those people who have had long careers and have a real perspective of leadership from the top coupled with these artists. Cauleen again and Rashida, Paul Chan, all of them seeing the little openings and pouring into those cracks, all these ideas. And that really made me feel hopeful and excited that, in that, I don't know, sort of like architecture of possibility that something really may happen in our lifetimes and I guess that was inspiring to me.
Charlotte Burns:
One quick follow-up question to that with you, Mia, because obviously, the work you do with Museums Moving Forward is focused on the idea of institutional change.
Do you think it's possible for the institutions to be what people need them to be, what people want them to be? Do you think new models are gonna have to be created?
Mia Locks:
You know, I'm not really an optimist by sort of nature. Like, anybody who knows me knows that I'm kind of a, I wouldn't say a cynic, maybe more of a skeptic in general, but I do feel a degree of optimism because, I mean, frankly, we have no choice. If you're gonna be in this field and you're committed to it, you kind of have to be optimistic about it. If you don't, then like, you should probably do something else because you'll just get frustrated. So in a way, I am optimistic about it.
I do think there need to be new models, but I think seeing current leadership and seeing the vulnerability and the self-reflection of existing leaders—especially folks that are of a certain generation, especially white folks of a certain generation in a non-defensive way, I think in a really capacious way saying, “There's things I don't know. There's limits to my knowledge. There's also limits to my imagination because of where I sit and I'm excited, and I wanna like open the door so that a bunch of other people can come running through.”And if they can kind of hold those doors open, if you will, like, I feel like your podcast and the conversations I'm in, there are people that are poised and ready to go. Rashida says like, just let us lead. Really give us that space. Like we're already doing it up against it with the door closed. Just imagine what would happen if you just like threw the doors open and all the windows, you know?
Charlotte Burns:
Deana, from your position, do you agree with that, that the institutions can hold that space?
Deana Haggag:
No, I don't. I think the thing I was really struck by, by the, especially the long-standing leaders in our field, like Glenn, like Kathy, et cetera, is that there are forces sort of beyond all of our control that informs how art making and art viewing can happen in this country, right? So like, themes throughout the podcast about like just how dominant the market has become, just sort of how unchecked capitalism has become, et cetera. And there's this moment where I realized like, “Oh, like Glenn and Kathy, like they're all dealing with the same, those forces affect how they do their jobs every day, but their level of exposure to that force is really different because of how big and vast their jobs are. And so I just was really reminiscing on like how much change has happened over the tenure like Glenn’s or like Kathy's in this field and how they've had to be responsive to that.
But one thing I've been thinking about a lot, and will sound very, very corny, but I deeply, deeply mean it; I had a baby a few months ago, and right before I had the baby, a really close friend of mine shared that the reason they thought childbirth hurt so much is because you are essentially birthing something infinite through your very finite body. And so your body breaks, right? It can't really hold like how magnificent it is to make a human life. It actually felt like a really apt metaphor for what it means to work in the art world. Like, art is this infinite force, what art can do. I mean, Naomi brings it up like trying to make, you know, the ineffable fable. Paul Chan, I think talks really beautifully about what it is that art does. Those things feel so big, and I feel like the exercise of moving something so infinite like that through the very finite structures of the institution feels really impossible.
I agree with the exercise of what we are trying to do. But I actually don't know that the institution, the art world, can ever get to the thing we all think art does inherently. But I do think it's still worth trying. I'm wondering, what if the art world accepted the inherent tensions of it? Like, what if we just knew fundamentally that it wasn't going to get any closer than this and that it was completely okay to work in an extremely contested space?
Mia Locks:
I mean, you sound like you're describing the project of democracy and like the limits of the institutions too, right?
Deana Haggag:
Yeah! Totally.
Mia Locks:
The project is to keep trying to get closer to the thing that you know you will never reach.
Deana Haggag:
I'm not an optimist, but I'm definitely a drama queen. And so when, like Charlotte says to Glenn, like, “Is it the end of an era?” And he's like, girl, calm down. I don't really believe in the end of eras because I too, I'm like these massive, and I'm like, “Oh, what if we're just slowly arriving at a place of real arrival and essentially, isn't that what all future is like?”
Mia Locks:
Yeah.
Deana Haggag:
You'll never get there. But it doesn't stop you from trying, right?
Mia Locks:
Yeah, totally.
Allan Schwartzman:
I'd like to offer a somewhat different perspective. Underlying so many of the interviews, be it artists, curators, museum directors, was the hope that money was not the definer of significance. Well, when I started in this field, it wasn't. There just wasn't money. People weren't collecting the art of young artists. Now that was, of course, a very different time, but I would like to suggest that the overdependence, the kind of surrender to the values of the market, is clearly not satisfying in the long run. And I can see the very likely collision of market forces with beliefs in recognizing that through this dependence on what it is that we financially value as also echoing what we artistically or culturally value, that's very shaky right now, and it's all likely to collapse or get reordered because if the vast majority of what is being shown and quote valued today is painting, the vast majority of which is very derivative of itself or of slightly recent generations or of their peers, that can only hold up for so long within a marketplace.
So I, in looking at it strictly from the perspective of the art market, I see that value system or that supremacy dropping off. It just, there's too much of a gap between what it values and what really resonates. And so the run to value was also the run to safety and caution and not making errors, all of which is antithetical to certainly the spirit of the avant-garde.
Charlotte Burns:
I love the idea of running to value. You gave me this sense of people on a sinking ship, scurrying to one end of it, causing it to kind of capsize. But we'll come to the, we'll come to the drowning.
First, I wanna go to Jay because it struck me that so many artists are talking about not wanting to make a thing, not wanting to make something tangible, that because the markets become so object-driven, so consumerist; Paul Chan just dropped out. A lot of his artist is immaterial. You have American Artist talking about how the job of being an artist is so different than the work of being an artist. It's this thing you have to do to get to the work.
Jay, you work with so many artists day in, day out. Can you talk more about that?
Jay Sanders:
Yeah. And first, Charlotte, as you were sort of recounting, I was so struck with the artists, Paul Chan, American Artist, Cauleen Smith, Pope.L. I mean American speaks about autonomy. A fair amount of the discussion was brokerage in relation to institution and to invitation and to structures and then trying to think of ways to work outside of those things or create autonomy.
Of course, Paul is for decades been trying to self-organize, and I guess maybe there's something in self-organization in some of these artists that's really inspiring and I think maybe speaks to Deana's point around the limits of institution, and what they need versus what an artist needs, which I think is really complex.
I like how Cauleen talked about a museum of the ephemeral or the impermanent. And I think too that we inevitably, like a lot of discussion around the market, is durable objects, but so much art is about experience and kind of reframing reality in temporal ways. So I think it is important to foreground those practices and how they inscribe into art history or how they inscribe into like transactionable durability is very, very different.
In the history of art, there's a complex dialogue between permanent and impermanent forms and, say, dance and music and poetry and performance have always co-mingled and informed visual arts practices. One thought in my mind was around immateriality and kind of what are the ‘what ifs’ that affect these other forms that are less about objects and durability.
Charlotte Burns:
Take that one step further. What are the ‘what ifs,’ do you think?
Jay Sanders:
We work with both durational art forms and static art forms at Artists Space, and I guess I think a lot about peers in dance and performance venues, artists, friends that choose to work in poetry and music in these really different forms. And I think all those fields have gone through cataclysmic changes in the last few years and they're picking up the pieces as well. And I think it relates a lot to what is happening in the visual art world. But I'd like to maybe dig a little deeper around what's different and what's the same, you know?
Deana Haggag:
In my very limited experience, but especially sort of as a funder in many different art forms, I feel like dance, performance, literature, they are free in certain ways because there's not always this market to kind of like ground them into a place. There's not a moment of arrival the way that the market can be in many ways an arrival point for a visual artist, right? But man, like, it's rough out there. Like just from a capital perspective, like there are really art forms that are surviving on a prayer. There’s no audiences, there's no venues. I mean, Covid has left such a mark on some of those spaces. And so I actually feel like I spend a lot of my job on the phone with theater, dance, performance artists that are really, really struggling to make it and trying to figure out how any of this work gets seen.
The advent of technology has shifted those art forms in a way that I don't think we've necessarily seen in the visual arts, though we are of course hearing about it everywhere. But the fact that you don't have to watch a performance live anymore, that you don't have to be in a room with an artist to experience something, I think has left a lot of open ‘what if’ questions for artists and practitioners in those spaces.
Charlotte Burns:
Moving from artists back into museums, Pope.L talked about making a mess at MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], about getting rid of the walls, which I thought said a lot about the relationship between artists and institutions. But we also had Kathy saying she wouldn't direct a museum now if you paid her. Connie talking about how museums probably won't survive unless they think about different revenue streams.
So there is this sense of institutions needing to shift and through this, we had the kind of counter counterbalance of private museums. We had Sandra [Jackson-Dumont] talking about the Lucas Museum [of Narrative Art]. We had Emily talking about Glenstone. Do you wanna say anything about the public, private that we're seeing? This has been a moment that we've seen a lot of private museums. I know that even public museums are ostensibly private in terms of how they're funded. They just have more private funding sources.
Deana Haggag:
I really loved Emily Rales’s episode, and I feel like I learned a lot about her, about Glenstone, about the sort of impetus to design a space like that. In my line of work, it's always like, why start your own thing when you can just be funding the existing ones and helping fix them?
And I really appreciated Emily saying that was never part of the plan and that it does not stop her and Mitch [Rales] from continuing their philanthropic support of existing institutions, but that they had a really specific vision and they really wanted to make it possible and then essentially knew that they would take care of it. And I imagine something similar for the Lucas's, right? That the vision for that museum was really uniquely their own and it made me wonder if private museums are a space that can start to get at some of the concerns that we have at public institutions today, where it feels like the boards have outweighed power based on how much they can fund a thing. Someone at the table always is in charge based on what kind of check they'll write. And I wonder about what it means to just start your own thing. It just made me really reconsider all of those models and those notions.
The other thing I was thinking a lot about was what Connie specifically said about how we need to figure out how to take money from different spaces and ways that our industry needs to open that up a little bit because there isn't enough capital. And Kathy said there's very few places she would not take money and that it is her job to find capital to realize what artists are trying to do for society. What does that mean for museums? Like, are there spaces where we really need to let it go?
I don't know how to think about that because there's a group of artists and young administrators that think we already have, right? That like that is the core problem is that institutions at this point will take money from any place. But here are leaders in this field saying, “We haven't even scratched the surface of that thing. There's like way more places we can go to for capital that we haven't quite really dug into.” And I guess for me, the question is like, can institutions exist in the face of completely unchecked capitalism? Can we do this? Or does it inherently shift what artists are trying to do, the value sets that they have? And I guess sitting here as a funder and as someone who, prior to this job, spent 10 years fundraising, there are also very few places I think I couldn't justify how I raise money to get the work done, and it really made me question like my own sense of self around some of those issues.
But yeah, I don't know how to make this work possible without really thinking about where the money comes from and where our lines are about that thing.
Mia Locks:
You made me think of a ‘what if’ just now, when you were talking Deana, and it kind of relates to what Allan was saying earlier about sort of like running to value, not just market value, but like in a way what I'm imagining, like what if institutions were just brutally honest about that? Deana, I mean, you were very honest about it, and I think the people on the podcast have really tried to grapple with this in a way.
But institutions are not particularly vulnerable and honest and clear about these things. And I think we've seen that raised by artists and activists saying, “Well, at the very least, like, what are your lines in the sand? Do you have any? Could you share them with us? Could we talk to you about them?” And that has been a battleground because of that sort of lack of transparency and lack of desire to relate even to artists who we claim to be the center, but then when a bunch of artists come and ask a question or poke holes or protest something, you see institutions back away.
And so I'm imagining like a, what if that just is a sort of different type of institutional communication and posturing that might, I don't know, it just made me think like, “God, that would be interesting.”
[Laughs]
Allan Schwartzman:
I think most places where one might want to draw the line in the sand would ultimately result in the collapse of funding for museums. At the end of the day, if you start to dissect the wealth on boards and let's just say, where money's invested and through what kinds of funds and how across the field these funds are. I just don't know that it's… I'm kind of with Kathy. I don't know that that's so practical. I'm sort of impatient, would rather see change through the money you get so long as it's not, I guess it depends on where you draw the lines morally.
I was thinking back to the discussion on private museums, and I realized that over the last several decades, there have been quite a number that have come into existence and almost all of them, in one way or another, were vanity projects and were without a plan for long-term sustenance. When you talk about Glenstone, Crystal Bridges, the Lucas Museum, each of these is a museum whose impulse initially started in a somewhat similar way, but as happened so often with collectors, some evolve far more broadly than others.
Charlotte Burns:
I was thinking about money this morning when we were prepping for this, and I think something encouraging about the candid nature with which people discussed it that I responded to as a positive thing. There's still something kind of depressing for me, coming from an editorial point of view about this sense that, okay, you know, all bets are off. We'll just take any money from anywhere because as a journalist, how are you gonna get any data then? How is there any transparency? If everything is private, everything is coming from private companies or shell companies or something, something, something, there's no accountability to a public and there's also so much distance from a public. You're conceiving of something and it's an act of imagination because the degree of wealth that it takes to fund these things is necessarily at an enormous distance from this imagined public. So how is that not just squaring the circle back to the Victorians when we just decide what's good for people?
Allan Schwartzman:
Until you can shift the way a society thinks about culture and its value—and clearly there was a unilateral belief that there is a greater need than reality in this country to see art as central to life and to a healthy society—then I don't see how that shifts. I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of the foundation of museums, but the wealth that produced museums, whether it was royal wealth or robber barron wealth, it was all questionable.
[Laughs]
There were bad practices in terms of wages and working conditions. Always in the royal system, you just raped another colony of all of its wealth, and therein came so many of the jewels to show off and the wealth with which to build it. This is the whole colonial dilemma. So, can you pick away at that or can you change it from within because that's where the money is? And then does that then begin to shift the way a society thinks?
But I do think what we're talking about is no smaller than coming to grips with and living in a more conscious and moral way than that through which colonialism created conquest and wealth around the world.
Deana Haggag:
I mean, I think Charlotte, when I, you know, at United States Artists, I used to think a lot about what it meant to give artists unrestricted funding. And the first thing I did when I got that job, it was the first job I'd ever had where there was an endowment at stake, or just an endowment period. And when I got there, I really wanted to like, quote-unquote divest the first few months. Just like, we gotta divest, we gotta divest, we gotta divest. And it is impossible. It is absolutely impossible. Green energies you think you're investing in are ultimately owned by BP and Shell or, you know, minority and women-owned businesses that you think are doing something specific, if you just follow the paper trail, it's like all the same problem. And by the time we dwindled down to like, what would it take to really make this endowment hurt less, hurt my moral center less? It's like we couldn't make awards. And I was like, okay, then we just wouldn't exist. There's no way to do this. And what was at stake was being able to give off artists some money to take some pressure off their lives, and I don't know that the art world was ever built off of some moral grounding that we're trying to return to. I think the thing was always founded on some really shady, really controversial sort of inequities that we're now still reckoning with.
But I don't think it takes away from what artists do, you know? And I think increasingly, this podcast and every podcast done by this particular production company, it reminds me that there's artists and then there's the art world, you know? And like I think many of us are straddling both worlds, especially on this call, and I don't know that they'll ever really arrive at a place together because artists have always done what they do, and the art world feels like a new kind of venture that we're all still knocking around. But you know, as someone who I think still holds the values that I hold and still wants the jobs that I want, those two things don't feel like they align.
I don't, I don't really know where we go from there.
Charlotte Burns:
Question for you all then, which is something Mia has brought up before. So if we're gonna say, “Okay, it's impossible, you have to take the money.” Can you separate governance from funding? Is that possible?
Deana Haggag:
I think that we can all do a much better job having really candid conversations. The one thing I loved about the United States Artist’s board, despite all of the complexities around the money, was that was a board I could break the fourth wall with. We could have really difficult conversations. It does not mean that my feelings weren't wounded. It does not mean that I didn't leave that boardroom sometimes really annoyed. And it does not mean that for many of them, they didn't leave wounded and really annoyed. And that thing didn't happen immediately. It took years of building trust to arrive at a place where we could sit down and say things at one another. For me, the conversation about governance is less…The money thing is very real, but for me, it's actually the ways we can't say things in boardrooms. We can't talk candidly to the people who run our organizations and they don't make space for their leaders to speak to them candidly. They don't want to hear difficult things sometimes. And those difficult things have to go beyond the ledger sheet or the profit and loss statement.
And so I think there's like a kind of conflict resolution space that we haven't arrived to in the boardroom. And so, for me, it's how we talk about governance, how we talk to governors. It's not necessarily who they are because I don't know how quickly we can change that, to be frank. But I think we can exercise our muscle for discomfort a little bit more gracefully in some of these rooms.
And I think if you are on the board of an arts institution in the United States in the 21st century, to have a good time, you have to be kidding yourself.
[Laughter]
Deana Haggag:
That is not the room to go to, to feel so good and sparkly and shiny about the world we're living in. The country is crumbling. You have to be in that room willing to sacrifice something to make it so that we as a nation, we as a globe, we as a species can survive. Maybe this was something in the early days, you could sit in a salon and have a white wine and like, chat. But today, we're talking about really complex shit, and I think you need to be able to receive that information in your body.
Mia Locks:
I think, though, that there's something that comes before the like honest, candid conversation, which, of course I agree with you. Like right, that has to happen. There needs to be a level of vulnerability. You need to be able to get in the shit with the people in the room to solve the thing that's really shitty because otherwise you're just never really saying anything.
But before that, and I think we've touched on this a couple of times in this conversation, but for sure, through the podcast is like there is a foundation of trust and that is lacking profoundly in this field of ours. You see the complete erosion of trust anywhere you look. You know, artists don't trust institutions. You know, staff don't trust the board. The board doesn't trust the staff. Leadership doesn't trust their own leadership team. But on a really like human level, and this is where I go back to Cauleen Smith, and she's been such a like, I don't know, bright spot for me, but also like helpful for just kind of expanding my thinking, which is like, we don't have to be that way with each other. Until you're willing to kind of be self-reflective, until you're willing to really not just be wounded, but really give a moment to think and reflect on like how you got here, what are the ways in which you've benefited from these very problematic structures? And to do so in a way that's not about shame, it's not about like guilt, it's not about like demotivating anybody, but as a necessary step to have the candid conversations and to open up the creative capacity to imagine something different. And I think where I personally have seen a lot of resistance and a lot of struggle is in that first step, it's not the difficult conversations. People are willing to argue, people are willing to have their opinions and scream at each other, and you know, whatever. Emotions not the problem.
Allan Schwartzman:
And Mia, what you're saying, I think that's the key. I don't think you get anywhere until you find a way to acknowledge problems that have been around for a long time. I think that one can find the groundwork upon which to introduce certain needs and to create awareness without looking for blame but looking for solutions. And I think there are quite a number of significant institutions that do have that capacity. If you have like one or two big success stories, then you can have a lot more. But I do think there are a number of museums that will not survive.
Mia Locks:
Uhuh. I agree with that.
Charlotte Burns:
I have my own secret wager museums on that list.
Mia Locks:
That's a separate episode.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, that's a late-night show.
We talked about the market a lot, which is interesting because we didn't have that many market shows, but as Deana put it in an email to me, the market has a chokehold on the industry.
Do you have faith in the market as it stands now? Where do you think the market chokehold is taking us? That rush to safety, that run to value that Allan talked about? Do we see value staying there?
Mia Locks:
I love to imagine it collapsing. I mean, just as an exercise, like I love to imagine the market crashes, a bunch of institutions fail, like quite literally shut their door. Like just to be like apocalyptic for a moment, just imagine that all happens. And in the ashes of that or like out of that rubble, I, and I'm, this is where I'm not an optimist, I don't believen fundamentally that what comes out of that is, you know, some beautiful opposite of that thing. I think, unfortunately, because of power structures and personalities and ego, some version of what we already have. So that's where the lack of imagination and the need for artists comes. If the people sitting around that rubble are the same people or some versions of the same people, then we have the same problems.
Charlotte Burns:
This reminds me of the show that Allan and I did for In Other Words, during Covid, where I'd been talking to people for our episode, and a lot of people were saying, “You know, we're gonna have the time to reflect, and we're gonna have time to rethink.” And I was realizing that the people who had the time to reflect and rethink were a fairly homogenous group of people. And that the solutions, therefore, may not be what we needed because the people who did not have time were not able to add anything to that conversation. They were the most affected by the crashes, and they were gonna be most adversely affected by any rebuilding because their point of view just wasn't factored into it.
I'm gonna go to Allan.
Allan Schwartzman:
There are shifts in taste and value, oftentimes very dramatic in tough economic times and in good economic times. These are inevitable cycles as more voices come in and assess, and we get greater clarity on where it is that we are. I do see that it is inevitable that there will be a lot of disruption in the art market. I don't see it as monolithic. I do see it as being somewhat case-by-case. You know, this is a very fatten pig at this point, this whole system. We've produced a lot of sense of likelihood that people can pursue art making as a career and a lucrative career.
As the number of artists multiplies, as the amount of dollars going into collecting art multiplies, greatness does not multiply proportionally at all. We built into this big self-congratulation society of a market. All of the factors that describe safe markets, and have not historically described great art. So there will be disruption, and yes, we’ll lose a lot of collectors. We’ll lose a lot of artists. We’ll lose probably a lot of galleries. But that's when other voices that have always been present have their opportunity to emerge, I think that, if in the next few years, museums begin to put more faith and power into the hands of curators, which I think I'm seeing in very small ways, that there'll be something to fill that hole. So, you know, time changes, and yeah, there are periods where the market explodes and it's a very cautious market, but it survives.
Charlotte Burns:
We began talking about trust and imagination. And this is something I think you brought up, Jay. There's been a lot of talk about imagination and dreaming ideas into reality, believing that something better is possible. Jay, where were the surprises for you? Where were the leaps of imagination?
Jay Sanders:
They were kind of across the board. I mean, my first answer, I wanna say the artists, but I, of course, I expected that there. But the frankness throughout as we were talking about structure, one smaller thing came to mind was like Kibum [Kim] from Commonwealth and Council talking about de-mythologizing genius and refocusing the work in a collective way among the artists and the team there on human dignity, on vulnerability. Some of these discussions around institutional change, I kind of agree with things that Deana and Allan and Mia have said about change at scale. And maybe I'm thinking that when there are collapses and when there's crisis and when there's transformative possibility, it's often in smaller, more contingent, more interpersonal spaces, and harder, of course, as we all would know in larger vertically integrated institutional space. So, I'm often looking in smaller spaces for glimmers and so something Kibum said in that rethinking what a gallery can be while knowing they have to work within the kind of belly of the beast was inspiring to me.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay, guys, we're near the end. Let's talk about who's missing.
Deana Haggag:
I find myself really wondering about Gen Z, like the voice of a much, much younger generation. And I know they're still coming online in a very specific way. Alongside that, I'm really curious about the whole higher ed in the arts world. So that's everything from art schools to universities with art concentrations. Like what does it mean to be like raising or educating, you know, a portion of the next generation that will come online as both artists and thinkers and curators, et cetera?
I'm really, really curious about that perspective on things. And I'm wondering if those voices are missing in some of these future conversations.
Jay Sanders:
Yeah, I could not agree more with both of those. And one, the kind of weird area I was thinking about was sort of around discourse. And I know we've touched upon this a bit informally, but like spaces for art criticism, critical reflection, artists and in their work, like want to be read and want to be understood. And we are trying to do that for this field in spaces like this podcast, but obviously, the institutions for art writing, art criticism are also evaporating and in crisis. And that also then links me thinking about, we've been speaking to these brilliant artists and curators and institutional leaders about who can speak very frankly and speak about public. But then often the voice that does reach public is marketing and PR. And I'd be curious to actually think a little bit more about how contemporary public relations, marketing for institutions is functioning right now because I think it's more prevalent than ever and at the level of reviews and profiles being pitched and just how the field is articulated by the sort of dominant forces is often very often mediated through these entities. And I think to understand that a little bit better might get to some of the questions around public that we're thinking about.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that's a really interesting point, Jay. And I think a lot of it is to do with the media landscape as well, and the situation that independent media's in.
Deana Haggag:
To the thing you said earlier, Charlotte, about if we privatize the whole industry, how will we have any transparency? And I think before we even get there, in just the 10 or 15 years I've been working in this field, what's happened to the media landscape is already begging that question for me, who is looking at the work we are doing objectively? And I feel like the sort of demise of the arts media landscape, I think we are really feeling the effects of that and I don't know how we survive it in the next, like, few decades as it continues to get decimated. It is one of the reasons I'm so appreciative for platforms like this, but I don't think platforms like this are a substitute for the fact that we essentially have no arts media landscape or increasingly so.
Charlotte Burns:
If you are a journalist, there are very few places you can go. And it changed very, very quickly. The idea that you could have a career in a certain way just completely collapsed. And so there's a lot more private money, but most private money has its own ideas, and it can be whimsical and it's not totally stable.
So another question, which is, do you have a ‘what if’ to round out this season?
Mia Locks:
I do. That came really from this conversation today and thinking back through a lot of what was said, and it picks up a little on what Jay was pointing to, some comments that Kibum Kim shared just about this question around dignity. And I guess I'm just wondering what if we really valued human dignity above all else? What if the hottest artists were the ones that were the nicest to their studio assistants or like shared their money with the people that they collaborate with. Or what if the best institutions, the hottest quote-unquote institutions were the ones that paid their people really well and that their workers were really happy. Like what if value really did come from this place of like truly understanding the value of human dignity and like what it means to like live a life. What if we could, as workers in this field of ours thrive because of our commitment to arts and culture and not in spite of it?
Allan Schwartzman:
What I came away from the series with was less the ‘what ifs,’ even though that was our framework and more the who's and the how's and the what's. I think we achieved quite a bit in this season. It was rooted initially in this question of ‘what if.’ I'd like to now think about what a next season can be if it's rooted in a question or in a topic or in actions and how that can be structured. I think having a focus that is relevant to the times focuses us on some extremely interesting and productive people and it gives them several angles from which to be talking about the time.
Deana Haggag:
I think my ‘what if’ is what if we were better at conflict resolution? And I think so many of these places were trying to arrive, including what Mia shares here about like, the places in which we honor human dignity above all else. I mean, I think so many of those things are stopped by the fact that people really cannot sit in conflict and discomfort. And so I think many things about the world will get better if we were better at resolving conflict, but especially in our industry.
Jay Sanders:
It's poignant. Mine relates a lot to Mia’s and to Deana’s but I was thinking, what if the structures of our field meant its participants felt less fundamentally insecure? Which I think is a lot like what Mia was saying, just in a slightly different pitch. But, but precarity for arts workers and institutions and also sort of barometers for success for artists who I think this system does make them feel sort of isolated and ever struggling no matter where they're in the system.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, thank you, guys, so much. This is the final-ish episode of the season, which means that there may be some bonus episodes. Otherwise, that's it for the season of The Art World: What If…?!,
Thank you, Deana. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Mia. Thank you, Allan. Thank you, Tamsyn, our producer, and thank you, Julia Hernandez, who’s done loads of work on the research. So, that is this team.
Mia Locks:
Thank you, Charlotte, for inspiring all these conversations and for getting us thinking about the art of the possible. It's been a real pleasure.
Deana Haggag:
Yeah, Charlotte, like the Oprah Winfrey of the art world. I'm just like, also thank you for being such a skilled interviewer. I don't think people arrive at these places to be vulnerable. I think you have a very special gift for teasing that out of folks very humbly and gracefully and with a lot of care. So thank you.
Jay Sanders:
Yeah, Charlotte, I wanna echo all that. It is astounding to have these brilliant people speak so frankly to you and really that this show could get so under the hood of our field. So yeah, much gratitude for having us be a part of it.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh my god, guys, my face is going bright red. So it's a good thing this is audio. That's so nice.
Thank you very much and thank you to all of our guests this season. To our editorial advisory team, Deana Haggag, Mia Locks, and Jay Sanders, without whom none of this would've been possible.
Look out for some bonus episodes of The Art World: What If…?! This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.