Why We Need New Art Institutions

0:00Instead of creating a better platform or using tech to get us out of this, we should go back and look at what was replaced, right? type of institutions we had. And so my call really is to think about how we reform our institutions rather than essentially use technology to completely replace them in front of them.

0:21I'm Kate Brown, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast by Artnet News.

0:31Most of us can agree we are living through a cultural crisis, And it doesn't come from a single source. It isn't just algorithms, aesthetics, politics, or the economy. It's the convergence of all of these forces, and beneath them, the erosion of institutions that once anchored collective life. Over the past decades, digital platforms like social media promised to be a new kind of connective tissue, a democratizing force to replace more slow-moving institutions. But while platforms have transformed our economies and society, they've also hollowed out the very structures that once gave us a shared ground.

1:06Mike Pepe has long been a sharp voice in this particular debate. Straddling both the tech industry and the worlds of our criticism and cultural theory, he brings a rare perspective. His writing, which has appeared in Freeze, E-Flux, Artform, and The Brooklyn Rail, also takes the form of a compelling new book called Against Platforms, Surviving Digital Utopia, that was published earlier this year. In it, Pepe dismantles some of Silicon Valley's most enduring myths. It's a bracing argument about what we've lost and what's at stake as we hand over so much power, diminishing along the way some of our core institutions.

1:42But he also looks at how we might begin to rebuild them. And for the art world in particular, the implications of Pepe's ideas are profound. Hey Mike, it's great to have you on the show. It's great to be here. So as I've mentioned in the intro, you work in tech and you're also an art critic And you've worked in the tech industry for, from my understanding, like nearly a decade and a half. And throughout that time, you've also been refining a theory on how platforms have come up and what they're doing to culture and society, to put it in really broad strokes, which we'll get into. I really enjoyed your book Against Platforms, and there was a lot of entry points there.

2:15Some of it pertains to art more than others. So we'll try to keep it anchored in the art world and take pauses to maybe establish some of the glossary along the way for our listeners. In the lead up to this podcast, we were talking about this sense of cultural malaise and ennui in recent years in the art world. And you had a really compelling take in your book, Diagnosing the Root Cause of This. And we'll get more into it later, but maybe this is just a good place to start because it forms a central thesis of the book. Yeah, no, I agree. That sounds like a plan. So I would say there's been a few different pieces of discourse about this large topic.

2:49And as you mentioned, I think what I started to see when I began writing art criticism and kind of slowly moved into the criticism of the intersection of art and technology was this kind of bind that cultural institutions were in. At this time, you had a number of players in Silicon Valley kind of coming into the art world or arts institutions and trying to do various things to digitize them to make them into platforms. At the same time, you had cultural institutions kind of very anxiously wondering, like, what do we do about this new tech wave, right? What do we do about all the things that are being marketed to us?

3:23And around that time, I think we largely saw, again, painting with a broad brush at the beginning, but I think we'll get into it, right? You sort of saw a kind of exhaustion with some of the contemporary narratives in art. What that led to was people kind of creating their own communities, kind of DIY online kind of movement. So, you know, largely, I think that is a good place to begin. But what I think has happened here is it's now come to a point where I think folks are really starting to say, what is next, right? What is the future of cultural institutions? How can they either rise to this moment?

3:51And in some cases, how do they basically make a way for themselves as some of these digital utopian waves kind of come crashing down? When you say platform, and I know you've had to define this in other forums, but I think it's really important. What do you mean when you say institution? Could you concretize both of those terms within the art world system? Yeah, I mean, the art world actually provides a really nice kind of petri dish to explain this. I think everyone kind of despises the term art world, but we all weirdly use it. I think it's probably a collection of different institutions in a kind of market economy, and they all kind of play a different role.

4:24You have everything from galleries, museums, the idea of an art school, the idea of an artist, right? There's both an idea of an institution with the sort of official thing that has an edifice, that has a board. And then there's also just more social institutions, right? The idea of going to see a group show, the idea of a major retrospective, or even the idea of an artist's career is in a way kind of has this interplay amongst this kind of ecosystem, right? But then you think about something like a platform, right? And so the example I use for the art world is pretty directly gets to the heart of it is a company like Artsy or any of the other various kind of arts tech groups, anyone trying to use kind of blockchain to bring these transactions and centralize them, control their means, and essentially use algorithms, different forms of digital media, and this drive to sort of optimize everything.

5:13That is really, for me, the core philosophy of a platform. Now, what these things look like in real life is we all know the obvious examples, right? Social media platforms, things like Uber, Airbnb. It's almost more of a behavior that manifests itself in a tech stack or a tech product or an app. But basically, the idea is that you're going to centralize the transaction of a formerly market or a former institution, and you're going to essentially own the rails of that interaction, right? And what's done with that obviously varies based on the different kind of parts of the economy you're in. But, you know, what we're seeing over the past 10 years now was this wave of everything kind of trying to act like a platform and there being some winners and losers in that.

5:55So what is the interplay between these two things? Like, can you get into what really like made you want to write this book and what the thesis of it is? Yeah, absolutely. So as I think some of our listeners will recall, there has been kind of a tech lash or a backlash to tech that probably started around 10 years ago. It started out as a trickle and then all of a sudden kind of became a flood. And in the process of that, there was a lot of good, I guess, critiques of Silicon Valley, critiques of social media platforms and its impact on society, politics, etc. But what I saw in this was kind of a strange reversion to replaying the same digital utopian themes, even though we were trying to critique the role of Silicon Valley and the role of technology.

6:34And one obvious example here is that, oh, you know, the root out of our problems is just better tech or a better platform or some type of new technology. Maybe it's blockchain, etc. My take is a little bit different. The goal of the book is to get people thinking about this. And first of all, the first task is to say, there is an ideology behind all of this. What are the tenets of that ideology? It's hard sometimes to see in plain sight, but I hope the book kind of breaks it down for folks to kind of see how this thinking works and how we arrived at where we are. And then looking forward, it's about instead of surviving this current moment of digital utopianism we're in or this digital moment of essentially rule by platform, instead of creating a better platform or using tech to get us out of this, we should go back and look at sort of what was replaced, right?

7:18The type of institutions we had. And so my call really is to think about how we reform our institutions rather than essentially use technology to completely replace them and throw them out. Right. I want to talk more about that in a bit, but maybe just to drill down a little bit more into these terms, you shared with me before we went on air this analogy of the cathedral and the bazaar, which I think also really helps understand these two terms that you mean. How does this help us understand institutions? And also, how does it help us understand what Silicon Valley thinks of art and culture and how it's kind of creeping into it?

7:52That's a great kind of foundational text, I believe, in this larger ideology. The Cathedral of the Bazaar refers to a paper and eventually a book by this guy named Eric Raymond, who was an early programmer. And it's basically about how to create good software. And it's actually, funny enough, it's sort of against this sort of big Microsoft old world Silicon Valley idea where you build a large project in isolation. You build in the sort of waterfall style. The bazaar, he proposes, is a way for a distributed network of many people doing light work, finding bugs, this collaborative kind of dream.

8:27And he says it's more like a babbling bazaar or a marketplace than it is like erecting a cathedral in the classical or medieval sense, where it takes many, many years, every piece has to go one by one, and at the end you have this sort of grand edifice. The bizarre, on the other hand, and really most of modern software is constantly being replaced, constantly being modularized and constantly being updated. It is in that way more flexible and more adaptable of a model. So while he was talking about building software or building any kind of big project, to me, this is a good example of the attitude that I think engineering and the Silicon Valley mindset has when they think about the role of institutions or the role of any kind of organization.

9:11That's kind of the jumping off point I see. I find that as an early text in really getting to the heart of how once Silicon Valley really came to power and started to get involved in the quote-unquote cathedrals, government, the arts, etc., you start to see that ideology really kind of playing out. Yeah, it made me think about the cathedral and the museum. Like, for example, there's a museum in Berlin that's being built right now, the Museum of 20th Century Art, and they've been planning it for, you know, six years. And by the time it's finished, they cannot really predict what kind of art system or culture they're going to open up into.

9:42So there's so much like inefficiency in that kind of setup. And I guess this sort of segues into my question, which is why is inefficiency, stasis, bureaucracy, you know, these very like unsexy qualities that I think a lot of people think of when they think of institutional bodies that are not lean like startups and for profit models. Why are you defending them? Why mustn't everything be optimized, actually? Basically, when you think about the platform and digital media and sort of engineering mindset, there are some things it's really good for, right? It's good for optimizing something that should be done quickly, efficiently, and done in a way that kind of creates a lot more opportunity for folks.

10:22I think when you think about a cultural institution, the reason why that kind of approach doesn't make as much sense is because it kind of collapses and optimizes something that obviously an institution will make a lot more time for. An institution will create that stasis. So when you think about an institution and the example you gave, the problem is they're feeling pressure. Everything is moving so quickly. Society is shifting. And it's causing us to question why we should have any kind of stasis or kind of through line, like shared narrative in culture. And so I think that's really the problem that we have today is we are thinking more about how do we be contemporary and ultra contemporary, right?

10:57And we're forgetting essentially the underlying mission of cultural institutions, which for me, in a basic sense, I think it's about creating this shared narrative, this shared plane. It's about creating an archive. It's about holding up the underlying subject of an institution for its own sake. You mentioned like a bit of a timeline earlier, and I wanted to maybe line it up with something that I've been seeing in the news cycle a lot, which is these falling metrics being shared by museums. You know, you mentioned like museums are an institutions, which for our kind of purposes, we're talking about museums and cultural institutions implicitly, that there's been these falling metrics of footfall after the pandemic.

11:35And as you kind of mentioned, like there's a profound shift in attention spans and care for these institutions. And it's not just vibes, it's like real numbers. And I guess institutions have, you know, fought against this fading relevance, you know, with scare quotes with different ways. Like they've been trying to use these platforms as you've defined them. You know, the Uffizi Gallery got on TikTok in 2020, which there was like a lot of discussion about whether how this was a good idea or whether it wasn't. And then, you know, there's, of course, like watered down blockbuster shows trying to really appeal to this broad audience.

12:08So I guess if I'm just pushing back a bit, I've sort of asked the question already, but like, why is that not a good strategy for institutions in a time like this when they are facing these declines? I think every institution has to come at the question with a little bit of a different spectrum, right? You know, obviously, I think there's an important area where we should be sort of techno determinists, right? If a new platform comes along, or let's use a more basic example, right? I believe every institution should have their collection in some way listed online or viewable online. Then there's the other side of the spectrum.

12:41Should a museum be doing an NFT drop with a meme coin? Not so much, right? There was this period starting in the 2010s where we had this fever pitch where they were trying to adopt everything under the sun. So when you think about TikTok, it's about being measured about the digital adoption. It's about always going back to this first principle of does this serve our mission or does this serve the platform's mission? One, you know, somewhat potentially skeptical or I guess you could say pessimistic way of viewing this is I think a lot of the digitization that happened over the past even 20 years, we now kind of see what the endgame was, right?

13:16It was basically training artificial intelligence. It does a very kind of doomer way to view this. But for me, when you look at sort of all the prognostications that are happening in the world of AI, all of the kind of replacement rhetoric that's happening around art, culture, institutions, when you think about the role of AI and what AI is trying to do, it does make you go back and have pause with thinking about how quickly and uncritically you adopt some of these digital networks, digital media and apps. You've been forming this theory for a while, and I don't think that large language models were such a pertinent issue when you first started thinking about this.

13:49But obviously, they are now the number one concern on the tip of everyone's tongue. I'm curious, since you've mentioned AI now, how does it fit into platform logic? How does it sit within it? First of all, they've been working on AI since the 1940s. It's only recently become something that is real and tangible and consumer ready. One of the reasons that is, is because we've been giving it so much data very freely, right? We've been digitizing our lives for a very long time now. And all we had to do was switch on the right amount of compute and we will stumble into something that allows it to train it to become essentially close to a human level AI.

14:25So that's the first way it's connected. We've been giving it the training data. You can obviously say, was that part of the plan? No, but it certainly was part of the eventuality of how we got to a point where, you know, we were able to create AI at this level. When I think of the role of the platform, what you start to see now with sort of AI slop or any kind of these sort of automated entities that you're able to talk to online, we're starting to see the emergence of kind of this gray web or this, you know, internet for bots, right? For me, that is the logical conclusion of platform. They don't quite really care if it's a real human or if it's a human that's kind of half there.

15:01They don't care if it's this kind of brain rot content. They just want content. And for me, this moment we're at with this inflection of AI is a great point to look back and use that to counteract with what the goal of an institution is, right? Any kind of cultural institution, whether it's a literary magazine or an art museum, cares deeply about the work that it supports and the world that it creates. While we may have used social media platforms to supplant those in the past 10 years, I think we're now seeing when the chips are down and when we are inundated by this obvious AI slop, where their priorities are is actually very telling.

15:39You brought up these AI evangelists with this Hopper painting. Could you speak a bit more about that? You shared it with me before we went on the air, and I thought it was really compelling. Once again, I think it all exists on a spectrum, right? There's lots of AI boosters now who will try to compare AI to any tool that artists use, such as the camera. That's probably a whole other discussion of why it's not like the camera. Very clearly, it's claiming to do different things. I won't go down that rabbit hole just yet. But I think what you have is fundamentally the people working on AI who are not artists, who are sort of from the industry, they fundamentally view what we call art as an image file.

16:19They think of it as media. They think of it as something that they can manipulate. Or they view the art world as kind of a playground and a training ground where they can show you what this AI can do. And the reason why you hear so much about art in the world of AI is because for them it's like the final boss, right? It's the one thing that is the most human thing that we share and create. And we're talking about all of the arts. It's because they desire to jump in and prove the AI in the world of art because it's very enticing. It's very interesting. But I think the fundamental difference is they are really more interested in the end result.

16:54What they do there is they kind of forget about all the things that really make art interesting and valuable, which is the life of the artist, the craft that they took to get there. All of these things kind of create the kind of discursive clay of why we care about these things. You know, and I fundamentally think there's obviously another side of the spectrum where a lot of the folks in the AI world are just kind of anti-humanist, right? They don't quite really care about the human in the loop as much as they do proving that a computer can do something just for the fact to show that a computer can do something.

17:23So that's really where we are kind of are in the AI world. I think there's obviously a larger discussion, as I alluded to earlier, of where artists kind of fit into the spectrum of using AI art as a tool or kind of taking it to its full logical conclusion. Yeah, I mean, it's like a podcast and a book unto itself, of course. But to keep it kind of grounded in institutions, there's been some motion towards bringing AI into institutions. And of course, there's this whole question of AI streamlining management, which is problematic and a separate issue. But I was thinking in terms of aesthetics and in terms of how you curate and work with this form, does an institution need to be AI native?

18:01Should there be new institutions made that deal with this content specifically with a host of experts? Is that kind of what you would argue within your matrix? I absolutely think that's the case. I think that's part of what the call is for, right? It's to take these new tools and to create a kind of set of organizations or set of standards that allows us to, one might say, institutionalize them. I think the way we adopt AI now is, both in the private sector and in the art world, is we just sort of take the venture capitalist Silicon Valley hype fuel at their word. And I think it's really dangerous to do.

18:35And we start to see the flailing around that and how there's a backlash. I think just like any kind of new invention, it's something like AI that at the one hand, I want to be very clear, AI widely overstates its claims. And I think we're starting to see that now. But at the other hand, it is fundamentally already kind of reconfiguring how we interact with culture, how we interact with media. There's a core reality there that I think cultural institutions are wildly unfit to kind of make sense of. Now, of course, they need a little bit of time. All this is brand new. But what I worry about is instead of creating some sort of container for thinking about AI in a responsible way, we're going to do what we've done for the past 15 years, which is you can follow the hype very, very blindly.

19:20There's a lot of artists that I think are working somewhat unwittingly, some very specifically, are sorting through this now. When you think about the alternative, there's not really a space for any type of cultural institution when you think about artificial intelligence, because its ultimate goal in its private sector industry manifestation is really to replicate and replace human labor and human cognition. That's why it's called artificial intelligence. So I think there's a real risk there. I'm somewhat optimistic that we will shake out with some sort of better balance, but I really just think there's a lot of work to be done there.

19:56That's super interesting. Switching gears slightly, because it's really important to talk about, you know, you defend institutions and yet you sit outside of them. So I would love to talk about your position as a culture critic and an art critic. And, you know, the fact that by and large you work on and you publish on some of these platforms that, you know, you are critiquing. So do many of the most relevant thinkers right now. Some of who have been on this podcast, like the artist Joshua Citarella and Sean Monaghan. And from your perspective, was this a deliberate position for you? And how did that come about?

20:29How did you end up becoming outside of the institution looking in? The people you mentioned are part of this kind of transitional, I don't want to call it a generation, but essentially it's this group that's trying to deal with the new contradictions. And one of the fastest ways to do that is essentially use the platforms, use social media. And yeah, I think we're all kind of complicit in dealing with the world that Silicon Valley has made. There's almost no way to escape it. And nor do I really feel like people should sort of drop out and get rid of their phones and move to a shack in the woods.

20:58I think the future is some sort of hybrid of it. My relationship with the sort of institutions of the art world is interesting. I've sort of never fully worked inside of one. However, when I think about writing criticism, when I think about all of the different things that are afforded by, say, an arts magazine and the kind of worlds they create. and the level of discourse that sustains what I think really is the larger lifeblood of the art system. Without good art criticism, without a sort of good public sphere of exchange, the rest of the system either gets very much just to be about sort of the market or be about sort of the less interesting things or just kind of withers away.

21:35I'm on Substack. I use social media. I think that their goal is to come into a media ecosystem that is obviously under a lot of pressure. And it is to try to create an alternative model that they believe will sort of save media or save this ecosystem, pay writers and kind of return us to this, you know, imagined discourse of the past. The problem with that, though, is that they're essentially recreating a platform. And my underlying theory is this is coming out of the same sort of venture capital playbook that we've seen over and over again. So it's just kind of like, you know, will we get fooled again?

22:11dance that's happening with places like Substack. That being said, the reality of it is that if you have an important piece of writing that has to get out quickly, unfortunately, that is probably the quickest way to get it out to a large number of people. But I think the important thing is, who does that work for? It largely just benefits, A, the platform itself, but also benefits voices that already kind of have a larger audience. And so what I'm saying is the future is not a sort of a better platform that addresses the rot of Silicon Valley by essentially redoing the playbook with slightly rejiggered knobs, but thinking about what it would mean to create institution from the ground up amidst all of this, the digital ecosystem we live in today.

22:55I think some of the appeal of these platforms was that they had this sort of grassroots sensibility. And that's always been this appeal of leaving the institution is like starting something from the grassroots and then it gets sucked up into an institution and that's what ruins it ultimately. I'm curious, as platforms institutionalize, I guess people are going to leave them again. And so are you saying that they might go back to institutions? Because what did they leave them for in the first place? That's been a thing we've seen now for the past 10 years. I mean, how often does someone create a kind of following or create a world and then one day they wake up and the platform shifts the algorithm or bans them or whatever, and they have to leave and they're upset with it.