The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 6: Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels
What if the art market had more faith in its own future? What if we could improve the health of the swamp? This episode, we consider the state of the market—and who better to join Charlotte Burns than co-host, the art advisor Allan Schwartzman, along with Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, director at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and founder of We Buy Gold. Together they discuss the boom and bust, aspiration and desperation—and much more.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome back to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this is the podcast all about imagining different futures.
[ Audio of guests]
This week, the art market. Who better to join the conversation than my co-host, the art advisor Allan Schwartzman and Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels.
Joeonna is one of those dealers who actually has an eye. She can tell great art from the rest and she works tirelessly to support the artists she believes in. She works within traditional models but constantly innovates within them. A longstanding director at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, she also founded We Buy Gold in 2017, a roving gallery space that doesn’t represent artists but works instead with them to present exhibitions, commissioned projects and public events.
Asked about the name We Buy Gold, she said: “It’s important to think about what we value, who we value and how we value it. It is a sign, slogan that we see all too often with its undertones of desperation and aspiration that I think can inform the way we think about the art world.”
In this episode, we’ll discuss some of that desperation and aspiration. What if we could improve the health of the swamp? What if the art market had more faith in its own future? But let’s begin at the beginning—talking about the state of the market right now.
First of all, just to say thank you for being here, both of you and wanted to talk to you today about markets, about models, about artists and art, and about value.
So, people are expecting change this year. What kind of change are we expecting to see in the art market? Where are we in the cycle? And when I say cycle, I mean the boom and bust.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Hmm. In terms of the boom and the bust, which are so extreme, I don't know that anyone knows where we are right now. There's a lot of conversation around an impending slowdown, recession—if we’re not in one already. I definitely hear a lot of conversations that revolve around that. I can't say that I have seen or experienced that, you know, firsthand, but that's certainly central to a lot of conversations right now.
Allan Schwartzman:
Overall, we are in a very cautious period. There's a lot of talk about an impending slowdown in the art market that is based upon talk about the general economy overall and not based upon patterns within the art market, per se.
As we've seen in the past, most times when the stock market goes down, the art market goes up. And that's primarily a function of the fact that people who are rich tend to get richer, or they stay rich and they put less money into stocks. And they therefore look for other places to put their money. The number of people collecting art has increased so dramatically over the last 10, 15 years that now you have that much more wealth that believes in art as an ongoing value.
So I think that, barring a major international financial catastrophe, such as what was experienced in 2008, I think if we experience a sharply measurable slowdown in the art market, it could very much be rooted more in anxiety-wish fulfillment than in a reality of what needs to take place. And I have more of a caution for the talk around an expectation of a slowdown than of one naturally occurring by its own flow.
Having said that, there's been so much of a spike in collecting both at the top end and at the emerging end over the last couple of years, there could easily be a slowdown that would have nothing to do with the economy but have to do with the cycle of where a new generation of collectors or collectors who emerged X years ago, are now with their collecting.
You'll often find new collectors, particularly at moments where there's a lot of interesting work by younger artists that's very inexpensively priced, that you'll find collectors buying quite broadly. And then at a certain point, whether by budget or by volume and the shrinking of available wall space and the increase of storage, where people step back and say, “Wait a second, what really matters to me? Let me look at it differently.”
So slowdown is…I really hate talking about the potential of a slowdown as so inextricably tied into the general economic cycles of the US economy.
Charlotte Burns:
There's a couple of things you both said there. There's a lot of talk—talk doesn't necessarily mean anything. But the art world is often led by conversation, and increasingly so, conversation and algorithms. And so a sense of softening might become a softening based on it not being totally rational anyway.
But also, in previous downturns, it seems that the art market was more detached from the broader economy. There was less of a close connection between the two. But in those around 15 years since the last major crash—and like you say, Allan, that was a much bigger seismic collapse—it seems that the art market has become much, much closer to the broader economic markets, not only in terms of the language it uses and how it markets itself but also in terms of the people that it has successfully attracted into the art world. And so I wonder about that. The art market behaves much more like a financial market now, if you think of, like pumping and dumping, and BOGO, and all of these kinds of things, and also the mechanisms of things at auction, and the ways in which people think about value and the data they can use to track it. A lot of that behavior is quite different than other downturns. Do you think that changes things, that that closer connection between the art market and other markets?
Allan Schwartzman:
What I would say is that there are many things that affect buying cycles within the art market. In the last few years, concurrent with Covid, when most of the world was at home, you had a tremendous increase in collecting the work of young artists. As people go back to work and spend more time on their businesses, I think it's natural that you would have a slowdown regardless.
And I would also say that there are always events that happen in the world that trigger parallel shifts in taste in terms of art. There are always periods, in strong markets and in weak markets, where the market kind of unconsciously, or as a broader pattern, begins to re-position what it considers valuable.
I often point to the 1980s; the first half was all about bigger, better. As that market grew, things got more expressive, more and more physical, sometimes more decorative, often more ego-driven. By the end of the ‘80s, the taste had shifted completely. And artists like [Anselm] Kiefer and [Julian] Schnabel, that work was tended to be viewed as excessive or about a kind of glory day of play and entertainment. Whereas by the end of the decade, you had entire arts communities dying from AIDS, very young artists who didn't yet have time for their work to develop. And so, by the end of the ‘80s, taste had shifted to work that was far more introspective, psychological, modest in scale. No one could have, I should say, it would have been very hard to anticipate in 1982 that Bob Gober and Charlie Ray would become two of the most representative artists of their generation.
So you could also see a shift in the market, a slowdown in the market, that's related more to shifts in sensibility and values than in money. But I think all these factors play into it.
Charlotte Burns:
Joeonna, do you see that sort of shift in taste? Do you see that in the gallery?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Because I work very closely with a particular group of artists over a long period of time, while I definitely see new groups of collectors coming in, new generations of collectors coming in, micro-shifts in taste within the roster, I don't know that I can speak to a shift in taste, in a more broad sense.
It complicates it when I work with a group of artists for, you know, over a decade. And so when I speak to a shift in taste within the roster over a decade, we can maybe have a conversation about how, you know, people have shifted towards it, but we've always been there.
Allan Schwartzman:
So that leads to a question for me, Joeonna, which is that your gallery does indeed represent artists who have been at the forefront of a shifting awareness and sense of significance to artists, some of whom had been there for quite some time, and some of whom are younger artists, but that are representative of wider cultural arcs that hadn't been quite so visible until your gallery, in fact, came into a focus that parallels some of the most sentient issues of our time. So, do you see a shift in the kind of scope of collector who has become interested in collecting the work of artists that you represent?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Absolutely. Yeah, we've definitely seen a shift, and we continue to grow through the expansion of people that have come to know us and get to know us and who we've worked with. Our collector base has grown exponentially, of course.
And I also don't like to reward so much people who, you know… I mean, I don't want to center necessarily every conversation around, you know, who finally showed up, right? Or who, like, decided to start thinking about society more broadly in every conversation about value and what we're looking at and where the art world is today.
I mean, yes, it's quite obvious that there are a lot of new eyes on a certain segment of the art world and the art market. But I wonder how we can continue to be committed in what we do and where we are interested in looking as more curious people.
What if we are less interested in who's coming late? And more interested in what the artists are doing and where they're going and maybe continue to look in directions that maybe even we have not been looking in?
Charlotte Burns:
I think it's a really great point because it's also to do with the language that’s used. And this is something you've talked about a lot, Joeonna. When you opened We Buy Gold in 2017, there was a lot of press around this roving art space that you created, in addition to your role as a director at Jack Shainman Gallery.
And you said that your gallery had been discussed as focusing on non-White artists, and you thought it was a really interesting thing that the journalist had focused so much on that, because galleries who are mostly exclusively showing White artists aren't discussed in those terms. And I thought that was a really interesting distinction to make, is who gets categorized?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Yeah, I think it's also a distinction, but I think it's also a normativity that I think needs to be always acknowledged, that sits with us everywhere we go. And it's really important for me to name it. Because otherwise, we start having conversations that continue to center that normativity because we're not acknowledging that that's where that conversation is.
And I certainly question why so much press was around working with non-White artists, but that's also, you know, a catch-22. Certainly, like, it was a choice. Yes, they were just artists I was looking at and interested in—of course, we all work with artists that we're interested in. But you know, there is also a purpose that is beneath that surface and an intention about it. And I like to play with not talking about that intention in a way that a kind of normativity is not spoken about. But it's always, you know, wanting to acknowledge it and also wanting just to talk about the work in a different way. And we dance that line all the time, right?
Charlotte Burns:
Jack Shaimman is obviously expanding this year. It's moving into a 20,000-sq ft home in Tribeca on Lafayette Street, opening with an exhibition of work by Nick Cave this fall. That's obviously an enormous expansion.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
It's always Jack's and the gallery’s intention and interest to support the artists in the best ways that we can, and that means growing with the artist. It means reacting to their needs and their needs for expansion.
We have been looking for another space for over a decade. And practically, it's just really difficult to do in Chelsea. There's really a shortage of spaces that were interesting to us, that made sense financially as well. And Tribeca has a similar energy as Chelsea had when Jack moved there.
We were able to find a space that was just really, really exciting. We could think about our engagement with the architecture. We're kind of creating cubes within a very ornate structure, a kind of temple of sorts, as it's been referred to by Jack. That's another conversation.
Yeah, I mean, for us, it's about sustainable expansion, as opposed to, like, imperious leanings of like wanting to buy up a bunch of real estate all over the world and expand in that kind of way. That's not really our interest. New York is our home, and we want to do what we do, and we want to do it well. In the same kind of way that our philosophies around working with artists and long-term strategies, we want things to work, to grow, to expand, but to not expand in a way that is a fever dream, responding to what other people seem to be excited about in the moment.
We want to be there for the artist in 20 years, as opposed to reacting to a fresh gaze with a kind of delight that maybe overextends ourselves. But it's gonna be exciting as we open the space, I think it'll take a little bit longer than we had hoped to get in there just because of the amount of work that's necessary. But that's also really the fun part, thinking about how to create this new space, react to the existing architecture, but also how to create architecture within it that can respond to all of our artists and all of their different needs.
So with every exhibition, you know, the walls are going to change. Nick really wants to respond to the existing architecture and wants to limit the amount of walls that we add into the space. And so we are listening to those requests and thinking about what those needs are, and really excited about how it can be this kind of ever-changing, ever-evolving project. And we'll be staying in Chelsea, too, because we're homebodies. And that's our home, it's been our home for a really long time.
Charlotte Burns:
It's really interesting, the idea that the artist can come in and just change the space. That's something that was happening quite a lot at some point in the art market, I think in the early 2000s and has really shifted as things got much bigger, and much more white cube-ish, and much more corporate-looking. I remember when I worked at Hauser a million years ago, they were in that Lutyens building on Piccadilly, and it looked totally different with every single exhibition.
How much of it's also about scale, about the sense of what you offer your artists in that, there are obviously the mega galleries poaching artists aggressively and ruthlessly. How much of it's also being able to compete in that sense of scale—if you have a massive project Jack Shaman can help the artist realize that?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Of course. I mean, I would say that that is certainly a consideration, with the exception of the poaching and the mega galleries. I mean, it's related, sure. But I think that it’s really about responding to what the artists' needs are and growing with them.
I mean, yes, 28-foot ceilings is what we're going to end up having in Tribeca. Artists need to be able to do things that they just could not do in the 20th Street space. That's also along the lines of why we went upstate with The School so that we could have exhibitions that we just could not do in Chelsea. And this is just a way of continuing that thought, continuing that ambition, a little bit closer to our home base.
Charlotte Burns:
And this brings us back to artists.
So Allan, talk to us about strategy here, too. How do you think of long-term strategy for artists’ careers?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, let me just say so much of the art market is rooted in primary galleries that represent artists. We can talk about the shifts from a focus in the primary market to the secondary market, which has taken place over the last decade or so in a notable way.
But Joeonna represents artists, and there are many, many artists, and I would venture to guess, especially at Jack Shainman Gallery, that have very healthy and growing markets that are not reflected at auction and that are very sustainable, regardless of the market's lazy dependence upon data.
Having also said that a few of the artists that have become, quote, “sensations” or have set records at auction that have become visible to a wider public through published data are a few of the artists that are represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.
So, I'm imagining that Joeonna’s experience in terms of primary market and the solidity of that across various artists—and then how that gets reflected or not reflected at auction in data—happens to be somewhat different than most other primary galleries. So I just think that's worth stating as a kind of understanding of a market.
If none of the artists you represent appeared at auction and set records or not, you would still have an extremely healthy primary market for most of the artists that you represent, probably to a much higher percentage or extent than most primary market galleries.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point. And hopefully indicative of part of a strategy. We, of course, want sustainable careers for our artists, and there are a lot of artists that are doing very well and are not reflected in auctions, and part of the strategy for us is also doing our damnedest to keep them out of the auction house.
Certainly, we understand how it can be helpful in terms of data, people need certain benchmarks for understanding and making them feel more comfortable. They need a little bit of a backup to feel good about what they're doing. We understand you know, not completely head in the sand about those things.
But we certainly try our hardest and try certain strategies to keep the work out of auction as much as possible because that's really where we find the most volatility lies. And we can do a pretty good job of helping an artist grow a really strong career without that happening. It's generally more helpful to be outside of the auction than it is to be within it.
Charlotte Burns:
Your gallery model is like you’ve said, it's a traditional model, but actually, in a way, it's somewhat rare in the degree to which it's maintained that position. It's managed to grow with its artists, it's managed to steer them away from the more dangerous market volatility. Are other galleries equally able to do that? It seems to me that there are fewer galleries able to do that.
Allan Schwartzman:
Jack Shainman Gallery is in an increasingly rare and certainly unique position. A significant number of artists amongst their roster are artists that are very actively collected, where the demand is greater than the supply. And the gallery has always done a great job of placing the work well, as Joeonna mentioned before.
If you look at most galleries that emerged in, let's say, the last decade or so that represent younger artists, by and large, they have one or two artists that attract a great amount of early attention and very little elsewhere. And so it creates a very vulnerable situation. Those galleries are much more dependent upon maintaining the relationships with one or two artists for their survival.
In my work, the area in which we've expanded the most is in the realm of advisory for artists. This is work that we do without any desire to compete with what galleries do—we're not seeking to be in the realm of sales—but there's an increasing number of artists who are aging out and have not prepared fully, if at all, for their legacy.
And there's an increasing number of younger vital artists who have needs that often go beyond what a single business or entity can serve. I mean, we've been extremely successful in the growth of the art market through the growth of our collector advisory as well.
But I've become increasingly aware that all of this is because of artists. And so much of this art market has kind of sidelined the notion of an artist as an evolving being that needs all kinds of support, in many ways, whether it's an artist who sells or an artist who doesn't sell. And that ultimately, the long-term health of this market, ultimately sustainability, is through a long-term faith and belief in the value of what artists do. And an ecosystem that supports it other than a market or beyond what a market is.
Charlotte Burns:
You used the word “faith.” When you're working with an artist or when you're looking at art, what is it that can make you believe in an artist's long-term vision, in their staying power, in them as being an artist of importance?
Joeonna, I'm gonna go to you here; What do you look for? How do you know whose work you want to believe in? I was looking through the exhibition history of We Buy Gold. It’s a really rigorous program. But you seem to stage exhibitions when you have something to say. So how do you decide when you have something to say? What are you looking for? How do you bring that together?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
They're such distinctly different projects, We Buy Gold versus Jack Shainman Gallery, in so much is what we're looking for, what I'm looking for.
With We Buy Gold, it's not representation, it's not a long-term relationship. I've had the privilege of working with a number of artists through We Buy Gold, well, they're all fantastic, but who've gone on to do really incredible things.
With Jack Shainman Gallery, it's with an intention of working with an artist forever. What do we look for? I mean, Jack always, I have to shout him out with this, he always uses the expression that his “socks roll up and down without touching them.” That's his favorite thing to say. But I think that that kind of speaks to what you mentioned around faith, Charlotte, that kind of intangible, that kind of unknown, that feeling that you get?
I'm particularly interested in what artists are thinking about and how they're thinking about what they're thinking about. Of course, seeing what they make materially, there needs to be really good bones in that regard, of course, but when you think about history, and over time, and when they're going to go on and do, like how rigorous are they with their ideas? How expansive are they thinking? How curious, really, I think it comes down to, that makes me really excited about what the future could be with an artist, you know, and that's not speaking to a market. That's speaking to a career and a voice and an impact.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, what gives you faith in an artist?
Allan Schwartzman:
What gives me faith? When I'm looking at art that I'm not familiar with, I'm not necessarily looking for it to be one thing or another, I'm looking to respond. You can easily be seduced by things, and one has to be careful about that.
Often there's something, whether it's an energy or a take on something that seems fresh, or something that seems very unknown, that draws me in, in terms of curiosity. Those are the things that trigger interest in younger artists.
There are a lot of artists emerging that one finds compelling initially that don't necessarily sustain themselves over time. It takes a number of years in order to begin to get a clear sense of who has range.
Within my work as an advisor, we're often looking beyond where other people are looking. It's become of particular interest to several collectors I work with and to myself to look at periods of time or arts from certain cultures or by individuals that didn't hit a mainstream notion of significance. And that has opened up huge opportunities in developing collections over a period of time. But if one has too many articulated criteria for judging art, I think you'll often miss the boat because certainly, in terms of newer work, the work that tends to sustain itself is work that you might not really be able to comprehend so well at first.
I learned something very early on in my involvement in the art world, which is there was an exhibition by Gilbert & George, I think it was around 1980-82, somewhere in there, at Sonnabend Gallery, and the show really offended me. I felt like they crossed a moral line in terms of their relationship to their subjects. And in a way that the subjects weren't aware. It seemed to me they were being taken advantage of or being exploited in a certain way that could be considered titillating or prurient.
And after the third time that I explained to someone why I found the show so objectionable, I realized that all the reasons that the show bothered me were the reasons why the work was interesting. And that flipped so much for me. It made me realize that my own sense of my own standards for day-to-day life only take you so far. With art, you really have to remain open and to be prepared to look beyond. What one ultimately looks for is the same. And that is to not fully understand it and to have a curiosity to always face it, and not know it fully but to be moved by it, which I guess is my version of Jack’s socks moving up and down. You know, it's a certain feeling in the gut.
I believe we're in a very exciting time for very young artists and emerging work. I think that the work that I find interesting spans a much wider range than I've witnessed in previous decades. But at the same time, I see a lot of work emerging that has attracted a lot of critical, collecting, market, and auction attention, that I say, “Wait a second. That's so much like what so and so was doing in 1979 or 1982.” So there are times where I'd love to be able to transport whole chunks of the art world and the art market into just a few decades earlier in order to have real criteria to hold on to. I mean, it's funny because what needs to be open and looking at new work, but one also needs to be critical.
Charlotte Burns:
If you could innovate any particular model, now, if you could create one change, what would that change be? If you could build a new model with ease, just tomorrow, and it all worked out—you didn't have to worry about scaling it, funding it, sustaining it—where do you see that need? Where are you interested? And what would you do?
Allan Schwartzman:
One thing that I think there's a desperate need to change is the art market’s faith in its own future. So often, the behavior of the art market has become increasingly cautious, safe, dependent upon what's been validated. And often, that validation is at the highest financial levels, meaning by the biggest bucks that go into the market.
One of the things that distinguishes art collecting from so many other activities is that the richest person doesn't usually get the best collection. It's somebody with a vision, somebody with a unique take on things and with an extremely precise eye. I think there's become so much more dependence at the top end of the market on a consensus notion of what a trophy is. I think that this increasing conservatism of collecting doesn't parallel what sustains healthy art production.
I'll give you something else that I would love to see change. I would love to see curators more greatly empowered financially to pursue their notions of significance rather than what has become a somewhat standardized pattern of the exhibition activities of museums echoing the behaviors of the market.
There have been times where I think collecting and curating have been appropriately aligned. And I think that we're in a time where they're not.
Charlotte Burns:
Joeonna, what about you?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
I absolutely agree with Allan. And I think my “what if” is similar. To echo what Allan said, the health of the ecosystem and what that means in several different directions.
And so much of that is financial support and allowing the ecosystem to thrive; the health of the swamp is so important, and it's so rich, and it's like, the whole planet falls apart when you don't have these places where people can be incentivized to explore their own ideas, their own relationship with art.
We live in a society where the nucleus may always be, unfortunately, the market in some sense, but I think that we can kind of kick that ball around a little bit and play with how we center that and make sure that it is at least not obscuring the sun and the health of everything around it.
I also hope that we challenge our relationship to ideas around growth and what growth is and what it should look like. And to bring it a little bit more inward and to be kind to ourselves and to think about how we grow as people and what healthy growth is. And I mean that in like every area of our lives. But that is also to mirror the conversation around sustainability and more broad-based health of the ecosystem.
Allan Schwartzman:
I'd like to posit a “what if,” and maybe it's not a “what if,” but it’s a when. Given that the high end of the market has become increasingly focused upon and effective at identifying the most extraordinary trophies by the most validated artists—be they living artists or long-dead artists—what happens if that changes? What happens if the market no longer has that same appetite for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on increasingly rare top-level works by the historically most significant artists? Or what happens if that supply dries out in the near future because there's been so much concentration of what would seem like bottomless wealth seeking to buy such works, whether they spend $50 million or $150 million or more? So what if, by dint of supply, that part of the market withers out, or simply that fashion or that taste loses its luster? What does that do to the art market? And what does that do to collecting?
Charlotte Burns:
I think it's a really interesting question. It reminds me of something an auction person said to me recently, which is that they are seeing a lot more supply in their inbox. People are trying to sell stuff, and it's not necessarily the A+ stuff.
And that's to do with economic reasons, and taste shifts, and all of the things we talked about at the top of the show, but they're also saying that they're seeing a generational transition happening suddenly. There are various collectors who are dying. And so what does it mean if you get one [Mark] Rothko in a blue moon come up for sale? It means that Rothko gets a record price as it did. If you get five Rothkos coming up for auction, what does it mean if you're an auction house? Well, it probably means you're going to price those five at that same level because you're going to compete with the other auction houses to get the work. But you're probably not going to sell all five of them at that point.
And so that's an interesting moment, too, because it's going to be totally dependent on the next generation of buyers wanting the same trophies, supporting the same artists, having the same tastes and being interested to pursue it with the same vigor as more of that material comes to the market.
I think that's kind of interesting because it's a big generational shift. And that is a big “what if” like, is that going to continue? Or are you going to see other collectors wanting different things if art itself means something different to a younger generation?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, here's part of that, “what if.” As the appetite to buy works, extraordinary works, at prices beyond whatever could have been imagined in the past—with no ceiling basically—as the markets become increasingly focused there, it has become increasingly less interested in works by those same artists that don't meet up to the same standards of excellence.
So is it not more likely that with the estates that will come to the market over the next 10 or so years that there'll be an increase in the number of average or okay examples by those same artists? And should that be the case, would the absence of the highest examples dampen the market in general for such artists?
What's become very evident is that a good work by an “A+ blue-chip artist,” at least as far as the market is concerned, it's much harder to sell at half or less than the exceptional work. There's just less appetite for it. So as more of those works come forward, does that dampen the market for certain artists in general? And if the exceptional work becomes so rare that it's only seen every 10 years or so, does it make it a kind of albatross?
Charlotte Burns:
That “what if,” Allan, is about value. And there's another one that you and I have talked about conceiving this show, which is, what if there's a market crash and everything we valued was wrong? What does that mean? And what if we come out the other side of a market moment, whatever that looks like, and it turns out that that doesn't look so good anymore? What do we do, then? What if? What if that happens?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
I definitely think anything can happen. There's so many “what ifs,” so many different directions and so many ways that we can shift our understanding of what's valuable. Anything could happen.
Allan Schwartzman:
Change is good.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Change is great.
Allan Schwartzman:
Change is good. Volatility is dangerous.
[Laughter]
Unless that volatility surrounds work that's been overvalued and needs to be reevaluated.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Right.
Charlotte Burns:
I'm going to just ask you a “what if” before we leave. Well, there’s two really—the night and day of it. What is the “what if” that keeps you up at night? And what's the one that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
I no longer allow the art world to keep me up at night.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
You texted me at three o'clock this morning. So that is not true. That is a lie.
[Laughter]
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
It’s called wisdom, Charlotte.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
You were very much up.
[Laughter]
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
The excitement and the possibility gets me up in the morning. I like thinking about uncertainty. I like thinking about “what if,” even if I don't have answers. I like thinking about change. And being surrounded by people who are thinking in every which way. I find it really exciting and really hopeful.
At the end of the day, after all the market talk and after all the strategies, art is the most important thing that we as humans can put out into the world in a certain way, and yeah, it gets me up every day, I'd say. Is that corny and lofty?
Charlotte Burns:
It's lovely. If that's what gets you up in the morning, how do you build that world for yourself? You're in that world already. But do you, do you think a gallery is the place for that, for you, for the rest of your career? Is that how you see having those conversations? Do you have things in mind for you and your future?
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels:
Yeah, or some model thereof, right? For me, it's about experimenting, figuring out what interests me, following those leads, but also being anchored in what works and what works the best for artists and putting their needs at the forefront.
So I don't know what I'm going to be doing. I really love what I do. But I'm also really always excited and curious about the ecosystem and being engaged in different ways. But I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I think that perhaps my involvement with a bunch of different things all the time is an example of that. And I hope to do more and engage more and hopefully one day, I’ll be able to look back and say that there was a bit of an impact somewhere. But in the interim, I lived a pretty amazing life by being surrounded by all of these artists and thinkers and folks.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, for you, what keeps you up at night? What gets you up in the morning?
Allan Schwartzman:
What keeps me up at night and what gets me up in the morning are the same things. Which is I have ideas of collections I'd love to be able to form. And so I'd love to be able to find the right collectors through whom to do that. I think there's a lot more to be done than what I and others have done.
I think of myself as a pragmatic idealist. Basically, there are ambitions that drive me that fall beyond my own ambition. They have to do with my belief in art and my belief that we can affect change through our commitments to art.
So I have ideas on different kinds of collections that I would love to develop, including some very fresh takes on collecting extraordinary works, be they contemporary or historical. Ideas on much more experimental ways of collecting as well. And I have ideas on ways in which the legacy of this massive and unprecedented population of artists that has come into existence with baby boomers, that is, with artists educated from the 1960s forward, ways in which they can be served.
So it's really about fresh ways in which to be collecting, supporting a sustained engagement with a curiosity for a wide range of work that the existing system is simply not able to fully absorb.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, thank you very, very much. I hope you sleep well tonight.
My huge thanks to Joeonna and Allan for wading through the rich swamp that is the art market and its ecosystem.
Next time we welcome the MacArthur Genius Prize-winning artist, Paul Chan, who tells us all about his “what ifs.”
Paul Chan:
Maybe one way to talk about pleasure is a capacity to control our own time. Time may be the only non-human thing I really care about losing. I can lose everything. I think I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost everything! I’m willing to lose it all, but I’m not willing to lose time.
I can’t wait. Join us 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.