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<\/p>\n\n\tWhen the pandemic hit, the author and cultural consultant Andr\u00e1s Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3 didn\u2019t let the crisis go to waste. He picked up the phone, calling museum directors for a series of interviews that formed his 2021 book The Future of the Museum. That led to his next book, about the physical trappings of museums, which gathered conversations with architects under the title Imagining the Future Museum (2022). Rounding out the trilogy is Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3\u2019s latest book, the considerably more ambitious The Future of the Art World, which brings together a full 38 interviews conducted between April 2024 and June 2025 with numerous different stakeholders in the art ecosystem, from artists, curators, collectors, patrons, and members of the art trade (dealers, auctioneers, art fair directors) to sociologists, philosophers, and policymakers.<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n
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\n\tAs with the previous two volumes, Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3 spends much of his time discussing museums, and how they should evolve. But he has let artists into the room this time, and not all of them think museums will be on the menu in the future. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI think it\u2019s possible that the museum as a construct may not survive,\u201d the Polish-born, New York\u2013based artist Agnieszka Kurant tells him. \u201cI have a strong feeling that maybe in a thousand years there will not be any museums. Changes in society, culture, and technology will be so rapid that it will be more important to be up to date with what is new. We\u2019re already observing this acceleration. Instead of museums, there may be places for enabling contact with what is happening now or for creating new, unknown forms of experience, which will be hard to categorize.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBy far the most interesting parts of Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3\u2019s latest volume are those where his subjects are willing to stick their necks out to either criticize the current state of things in the art world, or to make predictions about how the future might turn out. Not surprisingly, the most compelling speculations come from artists.<\/p>\n
\n\tAt Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3\u2019s urging, artist and writer Joshua Citarella sketches out a dystopia and a utopia, the former a scenario in which museums \u201cbecome the foreground in displays of political disobedience\u201d in such an extreme way that the function of the museum as a kind of \u201cpublic square\u2026could be shut down.\u201d Alongside that, museums could become \u201cgiant private collections available only to the ultra-wealthy.\u201d By contrast, Citarella\u2019s utopia involves \u201cinvestment into artist studio spaces\u201d and \u201cthe cultivation of an entire generation of artists within the domain of the museum.\u201d \u201cThose institutions,\u201d Citarella says, \u201cwould produce novel works, the likes of which we cannot yet imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe science fiction-obsessed Kurant imagines \u201ca fusion of collective and non-human intelligences, from microbes and animals to AI, as co-creators of future thought forms and art forms.\u201d Her \u201cfirst advice\u201d for artists preparing for this future \u201cis that you probably shouldn\u2019t go to art school. Study sociology, anthropology, or literature. Read books and newspapers. Travel. Go to a demonstration or a conference, intern at an NGO.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tKurant doesn\u2019t mince words when it comes to the negative effects of professionalization. \u201cTrying to replicate professional career patterns or market success leads mostly to cookie-cutter, commercial, uninspiring art,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\n\tShe is also refreshingly frank in her assessment of digital art.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cA lot of contemporary digital art is not challenging intellectually,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is essentially data visualization. To ask philosophical and political questions of technology, we often need to use old or dead media, not the latest AI. What interests me is not the most up-to-date app, but the political, economic, and social mechanisms that govern the evolution of technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t(Because the interviews are arranged chronologically, Kurant\u2019s comments come later in the book than those of Refik Anadol, and come as an inadvertent riposte. Anadol, whose artworks one suspects Kurant might just be alluding to with that \u201cdata visualization\u201d comment, tells Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3, \u201cMost likely, AI will become an invisible layer in humanity\u2019s fabric. \u2026My inner voice says that this new field of imagination will be about constantly generated reality. As such, it will not be easy to grasp or to define.\u201d)<\/p>\n
\n\tAnother refreshing voice is Jose Kuri, founder, with his wife Monica Manzutto, of the gallery kurimanzutto, which is based in Mexico City and has a second location in New York. The new mega-galleries may seem like they will last forever, but Kuri, who sees a gallery as a fundamentally creative enterprise, is not convinced that galleries can or should exist beyond their founder. \u201cWhen Gerhard Richter dies, could the studio of Richter continue making his paintings?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHe also has some harsh words for art fairs. \u201cThey are reproducing the power structures that we\u2019ve been living with in the gallery system,\u201d he says. \u201cThey are replicating those structures instead of questioning them.\u201d Case in point: booth locations. \u201cThey put the five largest galleries at the center of the fair, giving them the best access. The smaller galleries, which could be super-interesting, are way back next to the bathrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tSpeaking of fairs, the book\u2019s best self-own comes former Art Basel CEO Marc Spiegler, who observes that, \u201caesthetically speaking, the rising importance of art fairs spawned \u2018art-fair art.\u2019\u201d To be fair to Spiegler, I\u2019ll give you the whole quote: \u201cAnd let me be careful with my wording here,\u201d he says. \u201cYes, it\u2019s truly rewarding when I take time to systematically go through the booths of a strong fair and discover so much great art. But there\u2019s also a kind of art world merch\u2014domestic-size, bright-colored, less-expensive versions of artists\u2019 better works. Simultaneously, a somewhat homogeneous International Style has emerged, like those lounge bars that feel the same the world over and always play the H\u00f4tel Costes soundtrack.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAs for the current CEO of Art Basel, Noah Horowitz, he has thoughts on how his fair needs to evolve. \u201cWe need to think beyond exclusively being a fair,\u201d he says, pointing to Art Basel\u2019s \u201cnew retail initiative.\u201d In plain speak, this would be the Art Basel shop, where everyone was buying Labubus in June. Back to corporate speak, Horowitz muses, \u201cCan we become an accelerator for other modes of connectivity?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHorowitz doesn\u2019t mention the upcoming Art Basel Qatar\u2014presumably Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3\u2019s conversation with him happened before it was announced\u2013but he does hint at it. \u201cAre there other cities where we could land full-fledged Art Basel fairs? Maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd so, later in the book, does Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. \u201cWhen we founded Qatar Museums twenty years ago, many art fairs wanted to establish themselves here,\u201d she says. \u201cI personally did not feel it was the right time. Countries just starting cultural investments and attracting galleries or auction houses inevitably end up subsidizing them, and that doesn\u2019t necessarily serve them well. Instead, we wanted to first build knowledge, cultivate collectors, and create our artist base.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tMega-galleries looking for their next location might want to pay attention to this part: \u201cNow, moving forward two decades,\u201d Sheikha Al-Mayassa says, \u201cif someone wanted to open an international gallery in Qatar, I would say yes\u2014because now we have the knowledge, we have the appreciation. People now understand that art is an asset, like real estate\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tElsewhere in the Gulf, we go behind the scenes of Saudi Arabia\u2019s museum-building-boom with Riyadh-based cultural advisor Mona Khazindar, who shares that the kingdom aims to establish around thirty national and regional museums by 2030. Two are on the horizon: the Red Sea Museum in Jeddah, which \u201cwill be devoted to the civilizations of the Red Sea\u201d and the Black Gold Museum, which we learn will be located in a one of a complex of five pavilions that the late architect Zaha Hadid conceived in 2013 for the King Abdullah Center for Science and Petroleum. (They ended up not using it as a library.) We learn that another museum will \u201cshowcase artifacts, artworks, videos, and interviews that tell the story of [date] palms in the kingdom.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tOne of the main lessons of Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3\u2019s book is how different things look in the art world depending on where you are geographically. If Saudi Arabia has the goal of building 30 new museums by 2030, Mia Locks, who cofounded the organization Museums Moving Forward to assess the health of U.S. museums as workplaces, has the goal of \u201csunset[ting] the organization in 2030, so there is an urgency to our work, because we\u2019re on a deadline!\u201d She has a lot of work to do: her recent survey results found that about two-thirds of museum workers were considering leaving their jobs, the top three reasons being low pay, burnout, and lack of opportunities for growth. Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, founder of ART X Lagos, Nigeria, offers yet another perspective: \u201cThe museums that are going to come out of Africa over the next five to ten years are going to be very, very different creatures from their counterparts in the Global North.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe interviewees are often torn on globalization and expansion\u2014the big ballooning of the art world over the past two decades. \u201cThe art world,\u201d says Carol Yinghua Lu, director of Beijing\u2019s Inside-Out Art Museum, \u201chas expanded enormously, but at its core, its ability to think and to lead imagination has not grown commensurately. It has become too regulated, too capitalized, and too bureaucratic for the development of art. We need the wildness back in our thinking and practice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThroughout the book, the dominance of the art market is lamented. A typical assessment comes from Atsuko Ninagawa, founder of Art Week Tokyo. \u201cOne issue we all have to consider,\u201d she says, \u201cis how we can continue to support art that is challenging and makes people think when there is so much pressure from the market, the attention economy, and privatization to make art that \u2018pays for itself.\u2019\u201d For Kurant, the bright side of the market\u2019s current dip may be change in artistic modes. \u201cThe current political and economic meltdown, the absolute commercialization of art, and the current downfall of the art market are about to result in a refreshing wave of conceptual art that is not grounded in market value at all,\u201d she tells Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd yet, there is no talking about the future of the art world without contending with the future of the market.<\/p>\n
\n\tMarc Spiegler\u2019s \u201cworst-case scenario\u201d for the future \u201cstarts with the premise that the art market of today is radically tipped in favor of collectors. That super-dominance creates a fear\u2014completely justified\u2014that trying anything new will undermine deals. And this blocks the adaptations that are essential for smaller and mid-tier galleries to thrive. So the worst-case art market of 2050 is radically consolidated\u2014a smaller number of galleries speculatively selling a small number of artists. The only people starting galleries are those who don\u2019t need to make money. Being a mid-tier gallery becomes a hobby for the super-wealthy, like playing polo.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIf this sounds like a bang, it\u2019s more of a whimper. \u201cJust to be clear,\u201d Spiegler clarifies, \u201cmy concern about the art market of 2050 is not that it won\u2019t exist. My concern is that it will be extremely boring.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the pandemic hit, the author and cultural consultant Andr\u00e1s Sz\u00e1nt\u00f3 didn\u2019t let the crisis go to waste.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,2524,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-228614","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-book-review","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}