The Round Up: Live From New York

22:39Kate Brown:Yeah, no, I think it speaks to the malaise of the current moment. but my critique of it would be also that there's a lot of overlooked artists who are alive who are in their mid to late 40s who maybe had to have families or don't have the income backgrounds and I think that some of the and you know this Roberta Smirth article which critiques some of the marketing around these storylines which you touched on like that's that's a less interesting story to tell about a you know a 48 year old who maybe just had some hard times and is still trying to make work and I think that we have to be cautious of some of the PR spin around these things and and look a little harder for overlooked positions that are in the present.

23:17I think also one other thing that happens is and it's sort of it's endemic saying the world of outsider art is that the artist's biography tends to be put in front of the work so they becomes a story so that the artist the person becomes a story and the work is an illustration of the story and I think we're seeing a lot of that in terms of the recovery the rehabilitation or the repositioning of historical work too. But I think it does really fundamentally come down to a kind of lack of confidence in the present and a sort of apprehension about what constitutes the contemporary. Because biennials used to be almost like thrilling occasions to encounter new things from all over the place.

24:00And now there's thrilling occasions to encounter historical material juxtaposed in relation to contemporary art. and the whole dynamic of them has shifted. Which is, I mean, the magic trick in a lot of those shows, like the Cecilia Alemani, Milk of Dreams show, for instance, is that it does make the contemporary art seem more interesting. You bring out these aspects of weirdness in contemporary art that could seem kind of like... That's the danger is it makes contemporary art seem less interesting. Interesting.

24:32Kate Brown:Or that you can't tell the difference, and I think that's what's really riveting about it as well. One other thing I did want to mention is something that I guess kind of concerns me. I do think there's a rewriting of the canon partly because people could talk back, right? Because social media was telling, allowed more people to demand representation, to demand that their voices be part of the conversation. But it's also kind of disintegrated the canon itself. And one of the things I was thinking about is Hilma Af Klint because I feel like she's one of the great rediscovered artist stories that was the biggest the show at the Guggenheim was like the biggest Guggenheim museum show and I feel like when the MoMA reinstalled their galleries she's right in in there and people talking about how you can't tell this story of modern art now without her and then I feel like they've got this new show at MoMA of her botanical drawings and it just I really am disconcerted by it hasn't been as big of a deal.

25:35And I do wonder if there's an aspect to the rediscovery boom that is less permanent than we think. Like the discourse is much more malleable and the same reasons that we, some of the same reasons that we could mix up the canon now also lead to a much more unstable conversation where you think you've maybe corrected history and maybe you haven't. Maybe you're not on as firm a footing as you think. What do you guys think about that?

26:01Kate Brown:Well, it's super interesting. I think that it's because it's still fitting into hype cycle logic, right? Like the first time, like the first kind of ever of this and that. And I think maybe that's part of the problem is that some of these positions are quieter and sustained looking is not always like, you know, something that we see when we're scrolling through Instagram. So I think there's something to that, that people forget to continue to pay attention. I think there's also kind of a, there's like a time lag in our experience, looking at the work that the work might have been neglected for half a century but then it's exposed in the context of a mass audience biennial and it's absorbed almost over the course of a weekend so all of a sudden something that had no audience no context no narrative no consensus is immediately absorbed by the art world and then it's kind of stranded it's stranded in an awkward place that It never created for itself.

26:54I think a lot about how a canon isn't just a list. You know, it's a digested form of history. And that I don't know how this happens with the rebooted, with the rediscovered artist, because I think really becoming canonical involves other artists taking up, metabolizing the artwork so that you produce a tradition out of it and something really becomes part of a tradition, not just a name in the list.

27:22Kate Brown:And other artists, but also critics and scholars and curators. And I think that was maybe the most valid critique, in my view, of Adriano Perdosa's Venice Bienalda, is that it felt like a list, like when you'd go into these historical sections and you'd see one painting by an artist you've never heard of before, and it was a game of memory. And that didn't feel like a deep look at any of these positions. Yeah. we were going to do possibly a section where we I mean we were going to how much trouble do you want to get into? Are there any rediscovered artists that you think are overvalued? I was thinking like what is the thing that I could say that would be the most trouble if I'm like Frida Kahlo sucks.

28:10She's no one.

28:14but do you have anything to say? I mean, because I did have that reaction to the Pedrosa Biennial in the moment and then for the purpose of this conversation I was looking at my photos of it and thinking well, do I really think any of these artists doesn't deserve to be talked about? No, I don't.

28:30Kate Brown:But you wouldn't know them well enough because you saw one painting of them anyway. Exactly, that's really, I think the show lent itself to like, it felt like, yeah, I guess what you were just saying, it felt like a list Whereas when I dig into the stories of the artists in it, I'm like, yeah, that's a very interesting story. I wish I knew more about it. Well, not to answer your question, but just as they've rewritten the rules for the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, maybe they could just rewrite the rules for the main exhibition in Venice, the no deceased artist. Yeah, but do you want that? Why not?

29:01I think all of a sudden it's like an interesting problem. It's like, how do you make a contemporary art exhibition in the present tense without including a historical? because I used to do it all the time.

29:11Kate Brown:I like your idea. I think that's a good idea. And I also think that the Biennial should have like 12 artists so we could really get to know them. Oh, well, my idea for, I think that that, my idea for Biennial, if anybody wants to... We're really going off topic. Yeah, we're going off topic. But is, I think that you should pick the five artists or five artworks you think are absolutely the artworks of the moment and they should be spotlighted, spot lit in their own galleries and then they should just have all the supporting material that explains why. Like all the artists that lead you to that thought.

29:46Yeah, in any case. Wait, no, no.

29:49Kate Brown:Who's an overrated artist? Do you have one in mind? You brought it up. I brought it up. No, I mean, I was looking for an acceptable answer to that. You know, I was reading an article you did, Kate, about this institution in Italy that looks at forgotten female old masters. And I was trying to find, because I do think even in that article, the director of that organization says, not all of them were great. And there is a thing where, what drives me a little bit crazy is people are always citing Linda Nocklin's great essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? And the point of that essay is not that there were great women artists.

30:39The point of her essay is actually people were doing a lot of the kind of scholarship people are doing now, like recuperating female artists from the past. And she's literally saying that in that essay, it might be the case that no matter what you do in terms of recuperation, you may never get to parody because women didn't have the same kind of material opportunities. They couldn't literally do things like life drawing classes because women weren't allowed to do that at that time. People always use that essay to say the opposite of what it means, which is kind of what the director of this organization was telling him.

31:14Kate Brown:That's a great point. You avoided naming anyone as well. Well, I mean, I was thinking, okay, you're daring me to... No, it's fine if you don't want to. No, no, well, no, but I can't, usually I think that, like we were talking before this about that Roberta Smith article, which is actually a review that some clever editor renamed as a reflection on the rediscovered artist theme. And I can't remember the name of the artist that she's taking down in that article. So I think one of the things is that people who are rediscovered and who, you know, maybe are overrated in the rediscovery, they're kind of not going to stick around that long, I don't think.

31:58It's hard to think of one that has stuck around that I think is truly overrated. I don't think about it all like that, so I can ask the question. Okay, well, let's move on then to a question that is connected to that, but will take us firmly back into the contemporary. Because the question that we wanted to wrap up with is the question of popularity. and basically on the back of a lot of stories about either you pointed us to this story about declining football footfall at the Tate Museum which was you know big news in the British press two weeks ago three weeks ago over the summer and it's been hotly debated what that means or a lot of articles about you know contemporary art losing its edge or people just the perennial gripes about about the contemporary art industry the question we wanted to answer to ask to pose to ourselves to you matthew and to our audience is do we think contemporary art should be popular is this a good thing kate what's your side of this well maybe we should give a little bit of

33:10Kate Brown:context i feel like we just ran through a lot there um i the tate is having declining footfall but it's quite dramatic um and especially amongst younger people which i think was what a lot of people were debating about um that it's it hasn't reached it's like down by like a third i think since 2019 and then the guggenheims numbers are down i mean it's just there's some number it's there's all sorts of regional issues that i think contribute to that but this is obviously just to paint the stakes a bit this is obviously like a crisis for museum revenue um and yeah i think that to answer your question, should contemporary art be popular?

33:52Kate Brown:I don't really, I kind of reject the question, actually. Because... Now you're the one not answering the controversial question. I was reading this Oscar Wilde quote that was to say, I'm going to just abbreviate, but it was saying that art shouldn't be popular, but the public should be more artistic. And I liked that a lot, because I think it brings up the question of curating and fluency. And I think that's a big issue with museums, right? It's like how to speak to people, how to engage them properly. And I think that with the impatience that the online world has brought us, there's been a dwindling attention span to maybe walk through a museum and stand in front of a, most of the time, immobile piece of work.

34:38Kate Brown:So I thought it would be interesting to talk about what we mean by popularity, actually. I think when we had an informal conversation a week or two ago before this afternoon's event. Yeah, this is our stage. I brought up a really fantastic quote by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. It was in a questionnaire he answered for Freeze magazine a few years ago. I can't remember the exact details of the issue of it. But he was asked roughly, like, what is art? I think his answer, and I hope I'm getting it right, was that art is for anyone, but it's not for everybody. and I thought it was the most perfect idea about any cultural form so like experimental dance it's for anyone it's not for everybody including me or like experimental poetry it's for anyone but it's not for everybody including me and I don't see why that should you know I don't see why contemporary art should be exempt from that idea because my experience of with contemporary art as a young person I grew up in the north of England in the working class community was that art was really difficult.

35:44It was almost impenetrable. And that was part of its appeal, its impenetrability or its complexity. And in struggling towards an understanding of it in order to be able to read it or whatever word you might want to apply, that was part of the narrative, the journey. And it never occurred to me that art, contemporary art, should be popular. So the museum, the civic museum existed to represent culture within a context, civic context. But I think in the last, let's say the last 30 years again, in the drift into this century, I think there's been this strange pressure on art and institutions and museums for art to somehow be popular.

36:27And for museums to grow their audiences. And when that narrative changes, they're immediately in trouble. and I think you know there are all kinds of interesting examples again it's a much bigger conversation than we could wrestle with this afternoon but no let's solve it I think a good but I think a good manifestation of it's like a literal manifestation of it would be in Los Angeles that if you spend an hour in the Broad Museum it's packed with people you joined a line to get in you get inside it's kind of buzzy there are a lot of young people seem to be looking at interesting, difficult, contemporary art.

37:03And then you go across the street to mocha, and it's empty. There's no buzz. The art's still excellent. But the whole narrative's completely different. Yeah, Carolina Miranda, who's an art writer from L.A., compares it to, it's like from North Korea to South Korea is the vibe. Why do you think that is, though? What has the Broad figured out, or what does the L.A. mocha preserve? Well, I'm not familiar with the internal narratives at each institution, but clearly the Broad had a different idea about the threshold between the collection and the people, the public. And the MoCA model is probably modeled on an established European civic museum model, where they're essentially doing different things with similar material.

37:55And the Broad found a way to animate its audience by probably being more tech savvy, by probably having better PR, better marketing, being a little sassier about things in a way that contemporary art museums tend to shy away from and other things. But it seems to me that another museum which I think probably the model for museums going forward would be Crystal Bridges, which is also trying to think about why don't people want to come into the museum? Why are people reluctant to engage with contemporary art? how can we think about some of those things? And it seems to me they're thinking about it in some interesting ways.

38:31Kate Brown:How have they solved that? How have they solved it? Well, you open a museum in a place where there's no museums. You give people access to art where previously it didn't exist. And then you encourage an idea that it's somehow part of the community. And it's difficult to say, read community in a place like New York. Of course, there are communities within New York and there are institutions that serve those communities. So I think Crystal Bridges is a unique example.

39:03But like the forthcoming Museum of Narrative Art, which none of us have been to yet because it doesn't exist. George Lucas Museum, yeah. Yeah. It seems to me, again, it seems to me the art world already has an opinion about it, and it's not good. But again, it seems to me it's an opportunity or an attempt to think about how do we put things in front of people in ways that we haven't quite thought about. It's interesting, Matt. I feel like you started out with that answer with like an indie guy and you ended it as a populist. I'm a populist indie guy. Oh, well, my kind of person, yeah. An introvert, extrovert, whatever that is.

39:41Yeah, I mean, I guess I do tend to think, I mean, people are constantly complaining about contemporary art. And I guess it is very similar to what I just said about rediscovered artists. I mean, I think people are constantly complaining that contemporary art is flavorless and is kind of boring in its themes and stuff. And a lot of that, I think, has to do with corporate pressures that manifest in a variety of different ways. Because it's not just the art market. It's also this stuff about counting attendance. and there's a great book called In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde where this anthropologist embedded at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and talks about how excited the marketing team was when they did a Jeff Koons show.

40:26And they're talking like, it's like, look, think of, we can have like, you know, baby days here. We can have like baby Jeff Koons balloon dog baby teas that we can sell. And then they had to do, I believe it was either Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger a show was the next thing there and he talks about how the marketing team was just like this is not a gateway show this is not good like they're walking around with their heads in their hands because like they're really they're really fixated on the question of like will the most general public uh come to this and i think that one of the effects of that is that art uh like when that's the kind of pressure you're answering to it it does tend to lend itself to a feeling that defaults to stuff that's the most, you know, Jeff Koonsian.

41:14It's the most broad appeal stuff. And I think that you, I think generally good art is a slow burn, you know? Like, I think you, and people talk about this across a whole number of cultures now.

41:26Kate Brown:But you needed to be all of those things at once. Like, I think a strong museum has a sort of gateway artist like Jeff Koons that maybe brings people in, brings the masses in, and then they end up in like a side gallery, maybe encountering something a little more challenging. This is the Kate. We talked about her doing the pro-popular side beforehand. She abandoned me. But why do you think that art shouldn't be popular, Ben? No, I mean, I am with Matthew. I would be an indie populist. But I just think that not everything has to be for everybody. I think that we're the end of a cycle of culture.

42:12I've said this on the podcast before, where I think social media in particular made it so that everybody was visible to everybody else and could measure their popularity against each other. And we're now deep into the backlash of this. Mike Pepe is here in the back, who you just talked about the tech clash with on our last podcast. And part of that backlash manifests of people being very suspicious of the stuff that's of the broadest appeal. The Observer has, I think, an article that came out yesterday about this idea of frictional art, that we're moving beyond the idea of frictionless art, what we call red chip art on the podcast sometimes, kind of stuff that everybody can understand and get immediately, but also feels a little bit like there's no real culture around it, and people don't think about it very long.

43:02There's this kind of idea of smooth culture, culture has become too smooth, too processed.

43:06Kate Brown:Yeah. I mean, it's important to feel alienated. Some art does alienate you. Art should be alienating and horrible. No, but that's something isn't translatable that you can't understand it. And I think that that's why I come back to that Oscar Wilde quote is that the public needs to be more artistic. Is that you can be uncomfortable with not understanding something, with disliking it and having no language for it. And that's where it kind of comes back to this. Really a theme of the year for it. I mean, also my podcast with Nadia Asparova about antimemetics, a podcast no one got. Everyone's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

43:39But I'm interested in this idea because I'm interested in the idea of trying to recreate ideas of counterculture or subculture in a strange moment for that. I think this focus on audience numbers has sort of now become fully embedded in museum culture. It's changed what we see in museums. Yeah. So like you said, with the marketing team getting excited about Jeff Koons, that it's just a fact that, you know, in London, for example, you can go to Tate Modern Free, you can wander around the galleries. But if you want to see any of the temporary exhibitions, you have to pay quite a lot of money to go and see them.

44:19They're about 20 pounds each. It's about 80 pounds to see the four that we'd have on any time. And that's clearly a barrier for nearly everyone to think about seeing those shows. So those shows are immediately ring-fenced. but those shows have also gone through the process of somebody team in the museum saying can we get people to pay to see this and if the answer is no there's probably a chance that show won't happen and it seems to me it's only a museum that's perhaps as privileged by its you know presence as MoMA they can literally show anything they want because thousands of people show up every day to go to MoMA so I the most exciting arts experiences I've had this summer of being to go in a moment like four or five times there's always so many extraordinary things on there and it's not all for me and it's not all for everybody but they're enabled they can do monographic shows on an artist like thomas schutter that the general public might have a zero interest in which cover costs a gigantic amount of money to do it but they can do it because it doesn't depend on someone buying a ticket to see that thing specifically and you know most museums just on in that position.

45:24Kate Brown:I was, you know, when I was going to argue that art should be popular, I was thinking about the fact that it's, you know, given tax, it's seen as, you know, tax deductible and something the government should support. And part of that reason is that it's deemed a public good. But it just makes me think about what you just said, that I know that from museum directors in Germany, anywhere where most museums are fully subsidized by the government, that they also have to turn in their visitor numbers and the directors are under a huge amount of pressure so i was kind of planning to come here and argue that it's like a a model a model issue but i think like whether it's state funded or not it's just this like quantitative pressure needs to be alleviated because art might not appeal to everyone some shows nobody's going to come to but it might really impact a few people we have to get away from this like um appeal of the masses yeah and Yeah, I mean, you know, Klaus Biesenbach, who's now at the Neue National Gallery in Berlin.

46:18I mean, his program, regardless of what one thinks of it, he's sort of leading with story-driven, news-driven programming, which obviously creates a huge amount of attention and probably creates a larger audience for an exhibition that's ostensibly free.

46:33Kate Brown:Exactly, and that was a big reason why they chose him, you know, to bring people into the museum. I guess now that we're talking about it, and I should say, we're going to move into a Q &A section right now. So if you have any burning disagreements or angry comments, get them ready. Or if you're willing to name an overrated rediscovered artist in public and say your name. Go through a public humiliation ritual. But now that we're talking about it, I mean, I do think, you know, I'm big into ecosystem thinking. And I do think that there's something where every kind of institution has to serve every purpose now.

47:14And I just think, I do actually believe in the process of popularizing things. I mean, I think clear language is important. I also think ideas are important and weird ideas are important. And like weaving those things together, I think, is important. But I just think, yeah, the art world as an ecosystem needs different regions. The regions where things have been processed and now you're presenting them. And then the regions where people are comfortable doing just stuff that almost nobody is going to get it. And when you can yoke those two things together, you have a successful, a healthy ecosystem.

47:53And it's felt a little bit out of whack for quite a while now.

47:57Kate Brown:Yeah, I agree. Have we convinced you? Let's get a show of hands. Who thinks art should be popular? wow who thinks art shouldn't be popular for our radio list for our radio listeners that's zero hands yeah and wait do people think art should not be popular good art should be popular and then who's like just completely down the middle wow a totally chaotic answer no i think i think that's that's the wrong question though because it's not that art should be unpopular it's that there's a pressure on art to be popular. The alternative is that it's unpopular. So experimental poetry isn't necessarily unpopular, it just has a small audience.

48:44And I think that's one of the things that interests me is that I run a small non-for-profit, and one of the interesting things about running a small non-for-profit is I know exactly who comes to the gallery, and I know exactly who doesn't come to the gallery. so I could name the people that don't come. And we have a very focused audience. We have a very focused audience. It's very specific. And White Colum's audience has always been specific for the 40-odd years it's been. Who doesn't come? Another podcast. But I think this pressure for art to be popular in our current climate doesn't work. And we just need whoever's in charge.

49:27Someone must be in charge. well and that's what I one of the things about the rediscovery stuff is I think that those people were unpopular they were so unpopular they were refugees you know you look at the female surrealists they were refugees they went and they painted for themselves and like they're a very small group of friends and then here we are 50 years later looking at it and being like wow they created such an amazing intimate universe that the intimacy and concentrated nature of it is what we connect with now because apparently we feel that's something missing

49:57Kate Brown:For sure. I mean, the whole idea of the definition of an avant-garde is it's ahead and no one can understand it quite yet. So there's a slow uptake. So we have room for some questions and I already see a hand right there. Thank you. I wonder if maybe this is a segue from the question, but I wonder if you can also kind of speak to can art spaces themselves be inviting? because I think when you're talking about the Tate modern or for sure and the projects there they're really brought in tons of people it's that those spaces became spaces that people wanted to be at and experience and spend huge amounts of time in and you know I come from Detroit and there we're certainly rethinking art spaces and kind of art districts as places that people want to kind of come to and spend time in and through that then experience other art and kind of go to the galleries or go to the museum spaces fantastic question do you have thoughts is it different in berlin are art spaces more inviting i mean i think this is sort of an aside topic i guess but i do think like the german public is maybe more they have art more baked into their everyday life like they go to the theater and this kind of thing so but it is a really important question like why don't these spaces feel invite inviting as well like why what is it was it a communication issue or i don't know you know i i'm so so interested in this idea of subculture like that's what i think that art feels good when it connects you to other people and that requires some barriers entry but then i do always stumble with art because my question is what is it it's not a subculture because it's not sub anything it's a luxury good you know so and and And it either loves you good or it's a good that tend to, because of the intellectual discourse around it, appeal to college-educated people, frankly.

51:50And these are, you know, barriers are entry to be solved. And I just think, what is it? It's not a subculture. Is it an over-culture? Is it a side culture? I mean, because I like the kind of weirdness and specificity of art. But yeah, I am sympathetic to people who there are these stories about, you know, students going into art galleries and feeling like they didn't even know that it's free. You know, they just assume they're not welcome.

52:19Kate Brown:People don't know that private contemporary galleries are free to go to in Chelsea. Like it's not. But I also I just have to push back. Art is not necessarily luxury good. I mean, there was like Documenta 15, an Indonesian collective came in and they have a completely different relationship in how they define the contemporary art. And it was actually quite shocking to see how much people rejected it. I know there's a scandal there too, but we don't have time for that. So I think, yeah, I think it can be many different things. But this question that I think that the presiding idea that it is luxury good is what maybe it feels unwelcoming to people.

52:55Kate Brown:So I think, again, it's a communication issue because it is many things. Yeah, I mean, I'm from England, but like in Europe, most museums are free or ostensibly free, and they're paid for by the people through their taxes. And not so much as in mainland Europe, but there's a vague idea that its culture is valuable and meaningful for all of us, but not everyone participates in it, to go back to the Jeff Wall quote. So I think there's a kind of discrepancy there. But I think the civic museum model, which we still have, is still run on the threshold of paid admission, which eliminates 99 % of the potential audience.

53:35And then once you're inside, it's on the guards, don't touch, and it's on quite intense atmospheres. Well, I'm very interested in ways to make museums more hospitable. it's interesting I was just in Santa Fe for site Santa Fe and they're the guards um they they aren't there aren't guards they're they're trained to like talk to people like they know the art they're there to watch the art but they're also there to you know they when you walk in the gallery they literally say if you have any questions let me know and they'll explain the whole thing to you in a conversational way it was interesting experience because I have to ask myself do I really want to talk to a person about about art but I thought that was very interesting I think I've been thinking a lot about I mean I don't know if I advocate this but I think something people are trying is is video I mean I think people are losing their art history because it's not being taught in college or people aren't getting those requirements so like how you as an art institution, give people the booster shot as they come in in a really concentrated way that doesn't require reading 7 ,500 words of text.

54:49And some places I've seen do, you know, just little, like, short video room where you can just, here's the story of this artist, here are the facts you need to just walk through the show and feel a little more comfortable. I don't know, it's an interesting question. But the museum's in a losing battle with our phones. So, I mean, at some point, it's going to have to address it. Well, is no phones your answer then? No museums. yes in the back this is more of a comment than a question but I think this is a point where like the real issue is it's just a drag to bring your body to this place with this expectations even if it's going to be entertaining and I think there was a simultaneous the museum or this podcast no that's the point that is exactly the point this is easy to come to you're like there'll be drinks Ben will be there that'll be fine same way like you know openings on like opening weekends are easy to go to a fair is easy to go to but like I'm going to go to the museum and look at art it's gotten like become more of a mental heave in the past like 15-20 years as smartphones have you know taken over simultaneous with not necessarily caused by you know museum pressure to create blockbusters so that you wind up with this weird situation where it's like we're going to make it worthwhile while to drag your body to this place by giving you like you know um i don't know like anyone remember the bjork show or something like like something like that or like a good marketing campaign for home so but i think and i'm not saying this in advocacy of digital of like watching art on your phone but it's just no one's worked out it's not a question of making institutions more inviting because first you have to drag somebody to the entire mental concept of going to an institution has become exhausting.

56:37And yet you do need to encounter these works in person. And I'm not exactly, I'm not sure how you beat that. I don't know. The institutions can't catch up by making themselves more open. Something is really more profound. Matthew, it's a good question. I'll turn it into a question. The question is, are you doomed? Is running a physical space in a digital world losing proposition? No, I mean, of course not. But I think we find ourselves an interesting inflection point. I think a reasonable question would be, are the expectations on contemporary art too high or just unrealistic? Does the contemporary art world need to be this big?

57:18Do we need to have this many museums? If so, who pays for them? And then if so, who goes to them? and I feel like in the sort of you know I think one story that's been in the news in a lot this year I think is a lot of private museums open very quickly in China and if you read in the news a lot of private museums are closing very quickly in China and I think that's a reasonable question is does the art world need to be this big and you know if we did a show of hands my guess is half the room would say no it doesn't need to be this big and there's probably some people in the room would like it to go back to how it used to be in the 1970s and you know i think one of the interesting things about working in new york is such a privilege to work in new york as this extraordinary access to audience but if you look in the 1970s they say at a gallery show at leo costelli the show was on for three weeks literally three weeks and it was understood that everybody that was interested in seeing it would see it during those three weeks.

58:20Now exhibitions are off two months, or in the case of the current show, the Guggenheim, 10 months. And a paradox is that the art world seems to have slowed down, or the institutional culture of art seems to have slowed down, whilst the world is just racing ahead at warp speed. So my feeling is that the art world's the size it currently is. We know from previous conversations that there are too many art fairs. There are too many biennials. Whatever purpose they served has been mission accomplished. Let's move on. And scaling down, I think, would be useful for everybody.

58:59Kate Brown:Yeah, like getting back to some sort of grassroots scrappiness again. Well, it doesn't have to be scrappy or grassroots. It could just be smaller. But I guess because the reason that this museum slid on that you mentioned happens because these shows cost so much to put on. There has to be a payoff. No, the shows only cost so much to put on because they're putting on shows that they believe people pay to see. They could put on other kinds of shows. And I think there's a kind of sort of institutional conservatism that's creeped in to programming. No one would admit to it, of course, but you see in every institution's programming that there's a conservatism crept in, which is entirely to do with ticket sales.

59:40Oh, yeah. I mean, I wrote about that when the Whitney opened this new building. It was like, beautiful building, but the art is going to suffer because, you know, you are sustaining a much bigger apparatus. And when you go to their shows now, there's too much gallery, not enough new art. I mean, it is genuinely like everything could be like... To your point about Europe, I mean, if you look at the careers of every great American artist of the last 40, 50 years, they all had half a dozen museum shows in Europe. before an American museum deigned to give them a show here.

1:00:14Kate Brown:At Kunstvereins, which are these small art associations, essentially grassroots institutions that live in little cities. To your point, they're in small towns. And that's often where a lot of these big artists have their first shows. So again, I think it's about institutions getting smaller. I feel a lot of angst about this question because there's a lot of digital angst right now. And this is, of course, not just an art problem. It's like movies have this problem. Like it's harder to get people to go to a movie. So when you look at some of the footfall questions about museums now, as opposed to the pre-pandemic times, they're the exact same problems that literally the paradigm culture industry, industry, Hollywood is dealing with.

1:01:03so and unfortunately art is just too small i don't think that you can necessarily solve that problem like people will either become jaded and disillusioned with digit with the digital and search for something else or find new ways to engage with culture that causes some kind of reflux to um the physical cultures that people are still sustaining um there is a potential world in which we all live in pods and have our own little virtual reality thing. The only thing I would say is that I'm very into physical experiences, like managed fun, like collective thinking. Like I think it's a time of reading groups and a time of thinking about how you experience things together because I think there are good and bad things about the digital, but one of the bad things about the corporate version of the digital is it's constantly calling you into just more and more individual, tailor-made consumption.

1:02:09And I think even for me personally, just to read a difficult thing, it really helps me to just proactively be like, I'm reading this with four other people I really respect. We're going to meet up and talk about it. And I think I need that more than ever now with all kinds of culture. And I think that one of the most proactive things for museums or arts institutions to do would be like, think about it that way. We can't take for granted that for all kinds of reasons the audience replicates itself around these objects in the same way. We need to be really proactive about organizing moments of togetherness and community talk about this.

1:02:44I think Kate's point at the beginning of this conversation was the missing demographic in Tate Modern's audience are those people, the 16 to 25-year-olds or whatever the range was, who don't think of the museum as a place to socialize.

1:02:59Kate Brown:Who are needing something different, yeah. And perhaps they want, like, and that's what I meant also about, like, scrappiness and grassroots is exactly this, these smaller interactions. I mean, to use your film analogy, it's like the film industry realized that they can't just make more Spider-Mans and get more people to come into the theater. Spider-men, Kate. Spider-men. Spider-people. But they realized that they had to change the model of how they're getting to their audiences, and often it's like in a more bespoke way. But we should wrap up. I wanted to also thank our executive producer, Sonia Manalili, for this event.

1:03:34A big round of applause for Sonia.

1:03:37Kate Brown:Who makes all of the art angles happen. Fantastic. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for listening. Link, subscribe, and review.

1:04:11and see you next week.