Over several days last week in Florence, Italy, experts in the arts met at the Art for Tomorrow conference to talk about the challenges, demands and opportunities they face.
Following are remarks by experts from a few of the panels convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Florence, Italy. They have been edited and condensed.
Public Art, Digital Art and the Climate Crisis
More and more artists are creating and presenting works in very public places accessible to all — including the digital space — to raise awareness about the climate crisis. Some of these projects have garnered international attention, but to what extent have they led to action?
Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director, Serpentine Gallery; Ernesto Neto, artist; Giorgia Abeltino, senior director, Public Policy, Google Arts & Culture. Moderated by Matthew Anderson, European culture editor, The New York Times.
Matthew Anderson: Hans Ulrich, we’ve been talking a lot about how the climate affects the content of the art. But as someone who leads an institution, I think there’s a growing awareness that the way that art museums, institutions, run is also itself kind of quite polluting, carbon-intensive. It’s not good enough just to put on programs that talk about the climate, but we need to take action in terms of how we run our institutions and organize them. And I wondered if you could say a bit about how that is affecting your thinking at the Serpentine.
Hans Ulrich Obrist: I think there are many different steps we’re taking. First of all, of course, as always, it comes out of collaboration with artists. So at the moment, we’re working with Tomás Saraceno on a project where Tomás will switch off the air-conditioning for the summer. So this summer, from June to October, there won’t be air-conditioning during his exhibition. He’s also positioning a series of solar panels on the roof, and the videos will only work through that. So solar energy will empower the videos.
I would say another aspect is to keep exhibitions longer. I think there is no reason one would set up a complex exhibition and then keep it for six weeks. So there’s lots of possibilities.
Role of the Museum — Mirror or Megaphone?
As artists and the public at large become ever more engaged in tackling world problems, and social media pushes everything to new levels of amplification, what should the role of the museum be, in 2023? Is it an institution that simply reflects what’s happening in society, or does it have a responsibility to broadcast — or even join in — calls for change?
Aric Chen, general and artistic director, Nieuwe Instituut; Arturo Galansino, director general, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi; Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown director, Whitney Museum of American Art. Moderated by Farah Nayeri, culture writer, The New York Times.
Farah Nayeri: Is the museum a mirror of society, or is it a megaphone calling out to society? What is a museum, in your view, in the 21st century?
Adam D. Weinberg: At least at the Whitney, I think of it very much as a place of art in real time, which means we are swimming in the river, at the same pace of the river, and we can’t even feel the movement of the river, in a way. It’s the idea of being surrounded by conflicting, complex, subtle and diverse ideas and visions of artists. And for me, you know, the politics of a museum is not simply the most overt notion of politics, but it’s really the fundamental question of asking people to consider the realities of the day that we’re in, and really forcing us to look at ourselves in the sense that it is a mirror.
As a museum, we create the context for artists to be the megaphones. It is not our job to say: “This is what we are specifically going out there [to do].” We are doing that through the artists we select, the programs that we produce, the context that we create. That becomes kind of the megaphone.
When Arts Education is a Luxury: New Ecosystems
Studies have shown that the arts can impact young students’ cognitive development and that arts education can help students both academically and socially. But when times are lean, funding for classes in the arts is often the first to be siphoned off. What challenges do the new generation of artists face, and what forms of support have been created to mitigate them?
Amir Berbic, dean, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar; Alison Cole, art historian, author and editor, The Art Newspaper; Mariko Silver, president and chief executive, Henry Luce Foundation. Moderated by Jelena Trkulja, senior adviser for academic and cultural affairs, Qatar Museums.
Jelena Trkulja: If arts education is basically shaping the future of any society, how did you — when you were president [of Bennington College in Vermont] — promote the arts, and ensure that even those who did not have arts education before college could engage in the arts?
Mariko Silver: Well, I think ideally, you create any learning institution as a culture of imagination, a culture of creativity and a culture of making. Part of what I think too much higher education does is it pushes you only up into your head, only up into the mind — as though the realm of ideas lives only in the mind. But art is the way into our humanity, it’s the way into embodied experience, and without that, we’re impoverished, individually and collectively.
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