The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 12: Allan Schwartzman

Time to take stock this episode with hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman. We look back at some of the big ideas that have emerged throughout the series so far. From change and creativity to finance and futures, we discuss what’s amazed, delighted, and even filled us with hope. “I was the person who came up with this idea of what if,” says Allan. “At the time, I thought I had a lot of ‘what ifs’, which were really not as much about utopian thinking as they were about bringing an audience to consider another possibility, to throw out assumptions. Having now gone through a number of interviews, I realize that I don't have a ‘what if’ within me!” Tune in for this very special episode.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! the podcast all about imagining different futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this time we’re back from LA and we’re taking a different approach to our exploration of the ‘what ifs’ of the art world.

[Audio of guests]

Throughout the series, we’ve spoken to some brilliant people—all change-makers in their own way. It felt like a good moment to take stock and talk about some of the big ideas that have come up together with my co-host Allan Schwartzman. From change and creativity to finance and futures, we discuss what amazed, delighted, and even filled us with hope. 

So, Allan, this is a just after-midway show in which we wanted to kind of talk amongst ourselves about the episode so far and our guests. What to you has really stood out or surprised you about listening to these shows?

 Allan Schwartzman:

Well, I don't know about surprise because I expect each of these people to say something interesting and informative. Paul Chan, I found to be such a both rigorous and expansive thinker. What impressed me so much about Paul was his willingness to say I’m going to stop doing this. That's a very powerful position to be coming from and I dare say, given the way in which the art market has so driven what it is that we look about, think about, what gets supported and seen, to be an artist who is supported, even when he works in less material ways such as video, to then be willing to walk away from it, that shows a kind of bigger picture sense of himself and of art that I found really impressive. 

Paul Chan:

We are shaped as much by what we say no to as what we say yes to. I’m a big fan of people who say no. I’m a big fan of quitters. What do you lose and what do you gain? One becomes more comfortable with uncertainty and unpredictability, and to not see those things as only threatening, that perhaps we can think of them in ways other than merely threatening.

Allan Schwartzman:

That was echoed with Rashida Bumbray, by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, by Kemi Ilesanmi. These are all people who are rising leaders within various parts of the arts, and they're finding their own ways and they're not taking the value system that's been here—and that is in many ways troubled and embattled—as the given. They're working with it but sometimes turning their backs on it. Each of these people had an optimism, which I think is not so common right now in the art world in particular, and that suggests a clarity of vision and hope for the future.

Rashida Bumbray:

What if we were able to actually lead? What if all of the power structures were to move out of the way? 

Sandra Jackson-Dumont:

I’m constantly trying to figure out how one—me, anyone—crafts a space that feels humane. How does one do it is not alone.

Kemi Ilesanmi:

You have to name dreams so that the universe can figure out how to help you make them happen. So if we don’t invite people to even name the dream, they can’t get to where they need to go.

Charlotte Burns:

I've really enjoyed doing these interviews because we're talking to people who have clarity of vision but this idea of turning your back on things. Paul talked about, he really likes people who quit. He likes quitters, and it's not something we really hear, this idea of being unproductive, of turning your back on your career on the things that have been successful for you, but it's something that keeps coming up in the show. We hear American Artist talking about this too, how to navigate the job of being an artist.

American Artist:

My own process has been this gradual introduction of these terrifying realities that like, you need to do this in order to make certain amount of money in order to sustain going on. This gradual introduction of shitty realities about what it means to be an artist. But you have to sort of like stomach those in order to keep doing it. 

Charlotte Burns:

We're talking about value systems really, and it keeps coming up over and over what we value, how art is valued, who by, who for. There's a rejection within a lot of the guests of the current value system, but not just a critique. There's something new being created, and I think that's what's so inspiring, for me, about these interviews. They're pointing a way to different futures. They're creating them. It's not just they're there in the future and they're possibly attainable. They're happening right now, and they could happen at scale, but whether or not the broader art world changes its value system is sort of irrelevant. These things are happening anyway, and it's nice to be immersed in them.

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, one repeatedly gets the sense that most of these speakers are people who have had a lot of time to think about change and what change can look like and about the voices that aren't present. In reality, the market became this brutal leveling device over the last, let's say, 50 years. As financial value grew for art, it began to organize everything about our support systems. It formed the boards of directors who then defined the way the growth happens and the way the growth happened for these boards of directors has been primarily the way they grew their corporations. Thought was sort of pushed to the edges of that level of governance and leadership. There were so many artists who maybe didn't enter this as a profession but who nonetheless seized upon the opportunities and the power of the art market as the art market started to develop and so often felt that they could control what it was that they made and how it was perceived while benefiting from the market. So many of those artists, it was kind of like having your cake and eating it too. They felt they could control it and they couldn't control it. They were defined by and rose and fell by the market.

Although I hadn't thought about it until just last night when I was reviewing my notes on these various interviews, that the majority of the people who you've interviewed are people of color. They're women, they're mostly Black. They're thinking about a future and of creating new ways of experiencing and telling stories through art. And so it made me aware that that hope for the future suggests to me that what I've been thinking for a number of years now is that it's time for this country and perhaps the world to be run by Black women.

Charlotte Burns:

I totally agree. One word that keeps coming up in this show is abundance. This idea of imagination and abundance in opposition, I guess, to the scarcity and crisis that we so often discuss. Kemi talked about this, she said very infrequently are we asked to dream. And just recently in Los Angeles, the artist Cauleen Smith focuses her entire work and existence on the feasibility of utopia. This idea that it’s possible. Do you think about that abundance? Is that a kind of way of thinking that you have ever embodied yourself? Did that strike a chord with you personally or in your practice?

Allan Schwartzman:

I think a lot more about excess than abundance. And there is a generosity of with which the word abundance has been used by a number of the people who you've interviewed. And I think that sense of generosity and of abundance comes from an awareness of what the opposite is. Each of these people, in their own way, is either being given power or seizing power, and doing so to create a better world. And that sense of hope in the future is not what we've been seeing in society in general or in the troubles of the world, of the environment, and of a sense of the world getting smaller and more occupied and of seeking to close its borders. So I think that space, not only of dreaming, but of turning the dreams into shared experience is massive. It does suggest that culture can have huge impact in people's lives and in ways that perhaps our institutions and ourselves have not tapped into nearly as much as we could. It kind of reminds me of Paul talking about, well, there are more than five senses. It's about tapping into what power you have without having that power bestowed upon you.

Charlotte Burns:

You mentioned Paul Chan there, and it's an interview that lots of people have brought up to me. This is an artist who was finding enormous success and chose a moment to step back from it and reconsider his definition of success or his values in life and the sense that for him, above all else, time is more important than any other metric of success. He talked a lot about art as a survival skill. He says the art prepares you for filling out forms better, for understanding if you're being conned in a car dealership, really being able to walk down the street and figure out how to get through the day. The art can create a space where you can think differently. It'll help you explore the world in that way. I hadn't really thought of art that way, although what he said made sense to me. It's as if I kind of thought about art that way but had never put words on it. What do you think about that idea of art functioning in that way?

Allan Schwartzman:

The beauty of what Paul's saying is he's talking about empowerment and he's truly placing the artist in the center of things. And I don't think our system, at least over the last half a century, if not longer, has put the artist at the center of things. Even the artists themselves, as they've achieved success, put the market at the center of things or objects or the collector or value. And so repositioning it within the artist is a way of saying that artists are a kind of membrane between what is and what can be and I found that really powerful. 

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, this kind of connectivity is something that comes up as well. Rashida, who's obviously herself, also an artist, as well as being a curator and someone who's worked in philanthropy, she talks about this idea of building a platform to allow us to speak to each other, and that that is as important as speaking to power. 

Rashida Bumbray:

The dream of Loophole of Retreat was that it would be a truly global program of Black women and femmes from the depth and breadth of the African diaspora. We built this sort of global platform for a dialogue that would really allow us to speak to each other, which I think is just as important as speaking to power or dismantling power.

Charlotte Burns:

That's something that seemed to come up in these interviews. This idea of, well, again, empowerment of communication, collaboration, and sharing these ideas, creating new ways of doing things.

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, isn't the suffocation of communication, of connection, of community organizing, and of not only coalition building, but just of finding common spirits with whom to do what one does, that's what our world has been suppressing very intentionally and actively, well, for centuries but particularly in particular ways in the post-war period. So, we've seen how thinkers and leaders and communicators from communities that fall outside of those that are driven by white male tradition have been pushed away from being able to fully develop. You have a lot of people here who were raised by people that the system not only didn't find ways to bring into the mainstream of life and its opportunities but actually worked hard to keep them away from them. So now you have a bunch of people who've been thinking a lot about, well, how can we change that? What can be lasting? And that's what's really exciting about this moment, is that you have a meaningful number of people who are recently in positions of potentially great power and influence, leading the charge and being supported within it. That's unprecedented, so on the one hand, while you have a kind of chaos and destruction of systems of power that by which our worlds have been governed for centuries, you have a lot of people who are on the opposite side of things, and it makes for a very hopeful future. 

Charlotte Burns:

What you're saying, I think, finds form in these podcast interviews in the way in which the market, which isn't intentionally the focus of any interviews other than the show that you and Joeonna [Bellorado-Samuels] did, becomes a thread in every single interview because the market's become so dominant. And so you have everybody from Glenn Lowry, Naomi Beckwith, to the artists talking about this. 

Naomi Beckwith:

The market is dominant because it’s glitzy and it has things that people understand like numbers. I mean, let’s also understand it’s graspable. My job and the job of my colleagues is to do something that gets people to grasp the ineffable. 

Charlotte Burns:

You know, this idea of controlling or co-opting, it's become clear that you can't control the market, it's running through everything. You also then have this idea of this being a moment because the market's become so dominant and because it's therefore become so conservative in terms of what it values. I remember a curator once describing an art fair to me as cash and carry art essentially, you know, rows and rows and rows and rows of painting that you can pay for and carry out is this idea of art that is graspable. There's this sort of moment or feeling amongst our guests of there not being a lot of love for objects. Connie [Butler] talks about this within museums. The younger generation is more into the archive, the idea, the writing, the artist, then the object. The artist talk about this, American talks about this, Paul talks about this. Can you talk about that within the art that you are seeing at the moment and also how you advise your clients to think about that?

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, the art market became an increasingly narrowed path. Markets tend to become very efficient and when they become efficient, they become narrow and safe. And that's what's happened to the whole enterprise. For several decades, it wasn't possible for museums to centralize or primarily support work that wasn't what its patrons were valuing, and what patrons were valuing was what they could collect, which was painting—painting more than sculpture because sculpture takes up space. It's very practical it's almost dumb when you think about it, but I think that became an increasingly narrowed path. And so the other side of a period of abundance is that there are a lot of people who are not getting the abundance. And so their values go in other ways and they're exploring other things because those other things give them a way to communicate.

I just recently was in Sharjah, where I saw the Sharjah Biennial—and I'm making this up, but it's probably not inaccurate—there were maybe four painters in that exhibition. The vast majority of the artists were working in media and primarily in video because those artists, most of whom were not American, not Western, it gave them ways to communicate that were meaningful and spoke to them. Similarly, as the market has basically narrowed painting down to things that can be bought and sold and that they're less and less places of the ineffable. That’s what’s always kept me looking at painting, is the ineffable. It's not that it hasn't been present, it's that painting has become less and less in our current moment, a place where the ineffable tends to reside. It's much more materialistic than that. It's much more specific in terms of narrative or surface. There's a lot of painting that I love that's being made today. So much of that is about the end of something and not the beginning of something, kind of in the way that abstract expressionism was the end of something. This is maybe a golden age of a lot of painting, most of which is inconsequential, but some of which can be beautiful, but it's limited in how it can communicate in part because I think what's called for today more often than not is narrative. 

I have some clients who are really focusing on younger artists, and that's truly interesting. It's like there's so many artists that have emerged in the last few years, I mean, dozens upon dozens who are truly interesting and compelling. At a certain point, what I say is, well, let's really focus on individuals. Let's not focus on the whole story of which there can be hundreds of meaningful voices. But let's start to focus on individual artists that you, I, we believe are the voices that resonate the most and that have potential staying power. But also it naturally suggests, okay, you have to look at other mediums and if you're not prepared to collect other mediums, then you need to find other ways to put the money that you would've put into those things, into action. So in some instances, that means supporting new initiatives in museums that individual collectors support or other kinds of activities within society that nurture the development of other ways of communicating through art than painting. And in other instances, it means going back in time and collecting in areas that have been underexplored, whether by the market in general or by those collectors in specific.

Charlotte Burns:

You talked then about the end of something and the beginning of something. I think that's really interesting because it feels that way in the interviews as well. That came up a lot, this idea of profound shift essentially. Obviously, we always live in change and obviously, every era thinks its era is the most profoundly shifting, but it does seem that a lot of the change right now is turbocharged or happening at a pace that we haven't probably experienced in the past few decades.

You know, we began the show really in New York, talking to Glenn and Naomi about the shifts happening in New York. Our most recent episodes were in LA, talking to people about change in LA. 

Charlotte Burns:

What do you think, is LA the future? 

Max Hollein:

Then the future will be multi-centric. I think it’s invigorating, it’s interesting, it’s energizing, but it’s not the only one. 

Charlotte Burns: 

Thank you very much. That’s Max Hollein, the [Marina Kellen French] director of The Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Jarl Mohn:

I’m Jarl Mohn. It is the cultural center of the planet. There’s more creativity, more innovation, more adventuresome art here than any other city on the planet.

Diedrick Brackens:

My name is Diedrick Brackens. Oh my God, if Los Angeles is the future, there’s not going to be any water. 

[Laughs]

I should say something more hopeful. 

Charlotte Burns: 

No, you can say whatever you want. 

What if Los Angeles is the future, Tim Blum?

Tim Blum:

My first instinct is to say we're in deep shit [laughs] because LA is still so tricky. It’s so fantastic on so many levels, and it’s so fucking horrible on so many others.

Charlotte Burns: 

Do you think that the kind of geography of the art world is profoundly shifting moreso than usual?

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, I found that very emphatically and distinctly in Sharjah. That wasn't about the world of the market, that was about the world of makers. So that's not about a shift to a city. It's about a focus of awareness to voices and cultures that may not have been central to a mainstream discussion. But when you step back, you realize, oh, well, so many of these voices that weren't part of that history of modern art are the majority of the people in the world. So, I don't think the place, the specific place, be it a city or a country, is so meaningful except insofar as it may dominate through a kind of myopia.

Charlotte Burns:

You could say that's the case, in certain centers. I guess the question then is, is that shifting?

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, the thing about Los Angeles is that it's a city much more than New York that feels like an more an artist city than an institution city, even while you have extremely thoughtful growth and development happening in its core museums. But it's a city where art schools still remain a center of the fiber of the artistic life, where you continue to have most significant artists from Los Angeles teaching at art schools in Los Angeles. That has a certain kind of power, it centralizes the artist in a way that New York maybe more centralizes the market. 

I think these are pockets of moments. You find there are naturally places that younger artists gravitate to because they're less expensive and there's something going on. So then you have these mini new worlds happening. But I think what's been developing in those different environments, while in many instances, having certain kinds of characteristics that may be specific to those environments, the work itself is not cut off from the rest of the world. In that sense the world is quite small. People have access to a computer who are looking for other voices very quickly learn about what's going on elsewhere. So I think place has more to do with a kind of local texture and character and community. 

I think that's what's been interesting in so many of these interviews is that community and what community can mean and how one builds up and develops a kind of momentum of energy through community. That's the part that feels like it's chipping away at meaningful and potentially lasting change.

Charlotte Burns:

We’ve heard a lot through these shows about changes within the institution, the peril, I guess that the institution is in. Glenn Lowry talked about democracy itself being in threat and that these changes, he said, of course, impact our civic institutions in deep and profound ways. 

Glenn Lowry:

What worries me is whether democracy itself will survive the next decade. Because it seems to me, among all the different forces at play, the intolerance of other people’s opinions—the sense that if I lose, it was stolen from me—presages a condition in which we lose all ability to negotiate difference and democracies after all, survive in their ability to do just that; to take opposing points of view and find common ground.

Charlotte Burns:

I think through those institutional interviews, there's this very keen sense that the leaders of those institutions and senior curators are trying to grapple with this moment, trying to grapple the better forces around them with the worst ones around them, and that it's a really acute moment. 

We've talked about this before.Did anything new come up for you within these interviews?

Allan Schwartzman:

It made that much more vivid and succinct for me that the institutions are the battleground and that new institutions such as the Lucas Museum, on the one hand, or what one senses as an increasing reempowerment of the curator, who had basically been neutered and silenced or subjugated by the market. I mean, the museum is the place that has the greatest challenge. It is the battlefield, so it's the individual voices and those that find alignment and empowerment and validation in other similar voices, that's the power of growth.

It's a hard time. We said it many times, you and I, Charlotte. It's a hard time to be a museum director. We're at a point where a generation of directors is coming to a kind of, we're about to have a turnover both in age and thought, and some of that's already begun to take place.

Charlotte Burns:

I think you're totally right about this generational turnover that we're seeing in institutions. I think we're seeing it especially in institutions, and I think a lot of it is this idea of values clashing. It's something that we talked a little bit about with Connie Butler on in our recent interview.

Connie Butler:

It’s clear that what we’re learning from a younger generation of people who choose to work in museums or then choose to leave them is that feelings are facts. That we have to think more about the care of our colleagues and our employees and one another and that is just as important in the work that we’re doing as what we put on our walls.

Charlotte Burns:

One of the examples that seems to have been really successful was the Loophole of Retreat. Kemi talked about this as an intergenerational space, of that being so hopeful.

Kemi Ilesanmi:

One of the things that really drove me in putting HueArts together was a dream of what it might look like for a young person of color, let’s say, a young Black woman who is starting an art career, she wants to make a life working with culturally specific, as in people of color-run arts organizations. Someone is like, this is what I want to do for 50 years. This is where I want to invest and be a part of and dream and grow. That, in this moment, would feel like an incredibly bold statement. And it shouldn’t. 

Charlotte Burns:

In that room, on that island in Venice was the closest that she came to feeling like it might be possible, feeling like it might be within a grasp because of that intergenerational space. And I thought, again, that was this other moment where there was hope expressed. 

Allan Schwartzman: 

Well, sometimes the museum maybe isn't the most effective place for ideas to be percolating. In many cases they do better independently of the institutions. I think that was the message I got from the interview with Rashida and of other voices I've heard of people who were present for that convening. That this event taking place in Venice, having that financial support, however, that financial support came around, brought a kind of, I hate to overuse the phrase, but a kind of critical mass to voices from all different parts of the world and different generations that have things to share and things to gain through the sharing.

Maybe most museums are not connected enough to such discussions to be the centers of such discussions. Hopefully, they learn from them and develop other ways of bringing those dialogues into their larger audiences. But I thought it was powerful. I think it was Rashida who said that now that you're here, it doesn't mean that the world's gonna slow down for you because we've been doing this all along. And so to create one's own streams is truly compelling and empowering. And maybe that's a more effective way at chipping away at a kind of colossus of power and control. 

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, I was thinking about this too. There was a conversation that kept coming up in Los Angeles, was this idea of this tension in the conversations between people saying, well, you know, yep, there are problems with this, and the structure doesn't totally work but if we're trying to shift it, it takes time. Change takes time. It has to be incremental. Look, we are making little bits of progress here and there, and these are the best systems we have, so we have to work within them. And there was something really liberating about talking to Cauleen Smith who was sort of saying, well, these aren't the best systems, and we've had other systems. These are just the most recent systems that we've had, and that there are other ways of living. There are better ways. The idea of incremental change, which is something that the art world has clung to—it's a narrative that the art world's told itself for a long time—feels like a path of many paths that you can choose. And I think that's something that comes up in these interviews, that incremental change is an option to pursue and some people are pursuing it vigorously and rigorously and others less so. For other people, there are just totally different systems and it feels like a moment in which it is sort of a multitude of options.

Cauleen Smith:

It’s really weird the stuff we fight about on this tiny little planet in the scope of this universe. It’s bizarre that not only we are fighting about that, but then also planning to go to other planets and do the same thing there and fight over that. Maybe it might be time to rethink that.

[Laughs]

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, it’s not working so well.

Cauleen Smith:

It’s not working. [Laughs] So why do it? Like, I don’t know, like usually when something doesn’t work, you stop. 

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns:

Do we though? Is that what we’ve seen in history?

Cauleen Smith:

No! Actually, that’s the past 600 years. No, it’s doubled down on stupid.

[Laughter]

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, incremental change is what's available to establish institutions. You have a support base on the one side of things and you have creative ambitions on the other side of it. These are the institutions that, without realizing it, were building an increasingly narrowed notion of what's meaningful and important. They were creating hierarchy and it's not surprising. Hierarchy is where authority comes from and authority brings clarity and clarity is what most people had sought for the longest time in museums. We're in a different moment now, so for the museum to then all of a sudden, shift to say that, oh, the ways we grew enabled us to grow, but they didn't prepare us for change. That's a hard thing to step back 40, 50 years later and see and say, oh, then we're just gonna reverse it. It can't happen like that which is why oftentimes, starting something afresh is much more empowering and productive even while it may stay relatively localized in terms of its reach when compared to that of a major institution. But that's what I found so exciting about these interviews, is that sense of hope and abundance as you refer to it, even in the midst of a moment that is very embattled and self-conflicted and defensive and self-protective.

Charlotte Burns:

And what’s interesting too is how open people are about that. It struck me interviewing Glenn, who it seems that I interviewed roughly every four years, I don't know that the Glenn of the 20-teens when I interviewed him then would've talked about democracy being in peril, would've talked about the violence within our society that can and will erupt. And this slightly darker reality, I guess. You have Connie saying, unless we loosen up, we're gonna go extinct as museums. You know, you have American Artist suggesting these sort of boutique museums. Kibum [Kim] suggesting ephemeral museums. Sandra proposing a different model of museums.

Connie Butler:

We gotta loosen up a little bit and experiment with some of these models and do it with care for the artists, but we will go extinct unless we are open to other revenue streams and other ways of generating interest in the public also.

Charlotte Burns:

I was struck by how frank and open our guests were in the interviews about the moment that they find themselves in and the challenges as well as the opportunities and their visions for leadership that they're bringing to it and trying to bring people along with them, how they're doing that. It's kind of fascinating.

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, we're at like big, big collision points and the beauty of these interviews to me is that during these collisions, you have a lot of people who are being thoughtful, who are being insistent on doing things in the way that are meaningful to them and the people who are meaningful to them. And so I think we're at a moment where, what I'm hearing again and again through these interviews, is that positive change is going to happen from the ground up rather than from the top down. And occasionally, somebody who is ground up in their thinking is put into a from the top down position. And those are powerful moments, and that's what I think we have to really look forward to focusing on in the future. But what I take away from these interviews is that it's really important to be able to recognize those voices and those places and those moments where powerful change can happen. I think in general, we're resistant to change. Often it's linked to power and people not wanting to give up power, but very often, particularly when it comes to creative fields, it's more just a natural reaction to change, which is scary and the beauty of so many of the people you've interviewed is that they see in a very comforting way, how change can be empowering.

Charlotte Burns:

Allan, I think I'm gonna round us out as ever with a ‘what if’, but a different one for you because you've already done some of the others. What if you could have any guest in the world come on the show to talk about their ‘what ifs’? Who would you like to hear from? 

Allan Schwartzman:

Oh Lord. 

Charlotte Burns:

Is that the answer? [Laughs]

Allan Schwartzman:

No, no, no. [Laughs] Charlotte, before we began this, I was the person who came up with this idea of ‘what if’ and at the time, I thought I had a lot of ‘what ifs’, which were really not as much about utopic thinking as they were about bringing an audience to consider another possibility, to throw out assumptions. And having now gone through a number of interviews that focus on ‘what if’ and that have directed the conversations, I realized that I don't have a ‘what if’ within me. [Laughs] This is where the interview with Paul Chan really resonated in many ways for me but it resonated specifically here from the perspective that I think I'm both very idealistic and very pragmatic. And so the pragmatic part focuses much more not on the ‘what if’ but the ‘what is’. So the who of the ‘what if’ I leave more to those who are envisioning the future than to those of us who are trying to help track a path to it.

Charlotte Burns:

I like that. The ‘who’ of the ‘what if’. It sounds like we're starting a Dr. Seuss for the art world. 

[Laughter]

Okay.

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, we had that, the how of the what.

Charlotte Burns:

The how of the what and the why of the who. Maybe they're seasons four and five. 

[Laughter]

Thanks, Allan. I've really enjoyed it as always.

Allan Schwartzman:

Thank you, me too. 

Charlotte Burns:

Thanks so much to my co-host Allan Schwartzman. Join us next episode when we’ll be talking to Kathy Halbreich, the outgoing director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Kathy Halbreich:

If I were being totally honest, I would tell you there are very few people I wouldn't take money from in order to do what I believed in, in order to help artists create new ideas and new things.

Charlotte Burns:

That’s 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. 

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The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 11: LA Special with Cauleen Smith and Kibum Kim