The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 2 with Allan Schwartzman
Longtime podcast collaborators Allan Schwartzman and Charlotte Burns sit down for a conversation about an art industry in profound flux. After almost a decade of podcasts tracking how everything has changed, the duo is now looking ahead—and the view is complex.
In this frank conversation, they discuss everything from the art market to museum models to artists that history has overlooked. This is a reckoning with the art world at a crossroads.
Schwartzman reflects on challenging times but also opportunities. What new possibilities emerge when old systems transform?
What if we could reimagine how art is supported?
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Welcome back to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast all about imagining new and better futures.
[Audio of guests saying ‘what if?’]
I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and what a season we’ve got in store. More artists, more voices, and more stories you haven’t heard before. For this second episode, I’m talking to Allan Schwartzman. We’ve been making podcasts together since 2016, which is almost a decade of conversations with art dealers, museum directors, curators, collectors, philanthropists, a futurist, an astrologer, and lots of artists, building an archive that tracks how everything has changed. Now, we’re looking ahead.
First up, Allan and I dig into everything from the state of museums and the art market to the artists that history has overlooked.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Hi Allan, it’s good to be back.
Allan Schwartzman: Hi Charlotte. It is.
Charlotte Burns: So, to begin, I guess my ‘what if’ for you is: what if you look back, what threads would you pull forward into this season, and what would you like this season to do and cover?
Allan Schwartzman: When I think about what threads tie forward from the past, I think more on the dread side than on the hope side, even though up until recently, I was always thinking the opposite—more along the lines of hope than of dread. But we live in very troubled and troubling times, societally, politically, in terms of dissolution of the family, and in terms of the self and a sense of detachment of the self. And so I think we're heading in a direction that is alienated from itself and disconnected from its times at a moment when I think we should be having greater clarity about our times. But it's a very troubling and confusing time.
I think in terms of art, it's harder today to identify artists of great promise, at least ones that one has confidence will be lasting, than ever before. A lot of that has to do with the amount of hyper-speculation that takes place in the market, and the desire on the part of seasoned collectors who were never pursuing art collecting for investment purposes to see a likely future to value for an artist. And so data has become increasingly important. And if an artwork doesn't sell for a good amount of money at auction, then a lot of seasoned collectors are saying, “Why would I buy another work if it has no value? What am I gonna do with it? I can't sell it at some point. My family can't sell it when I'm gone. Museums aren't going to want to take it.”
And so we seem to be at a moment where this thrilling many-decades that began in the early 1960s, of taking a very “avant-garde” and small calling, making art, yet we've created a market that can't keep up with it. We've created an overpopulation of artists.
I mean, I've been working a lot on legacy planning for artists and their estates and there are many, many artists who turn to us, who are wonderful artists who have needs that I believe I understand how to fulfill or begin to address their concerns, but at the same time, I just don't think that there's enough of a market both in money and in institutions to absorb them.
Charlotte Burns: Is a lot of that about, if you're talking about that post-war moment, it was a moment of optimism. So, when you begin thinking about that decades-long period that you're describing, beginning post-war, it was a moment in which the future was something people felt very invested in, very hopeful about. And you've used the word “future” just now when you were talking, saying it's hard to see the future. Collectors are saying if there isn't a dollar value attached, they don't see a future in the artist or the point in supporting that artist. It’s hard to think of how to support sustainable legacy planning.
So, a lot of this is about doubts in the future. How much of that is to do with the moment we are in right now? By which I mean two separate things: One, this is a moment that's frightening for a lot of people, but also this is a moment of profound change, and has been. I think one of the first newsletters we did was called the Tectonic Shifts In The Art World, and how the structures underpinning the art world have gone through enormous change, as have the broader institutions. What we are experiencing every day is that the institutions that seemed durable are not.
So is it a broader crisis of faith in the future, or is it specific to art?
Allan Schwartzman: Hmm. I don't know if I can speak to faith in the future outside of art. Well, I guess I can because friends of mine with children who are under the age of, let's say 35, they have no faith in the future. Many of them see no reason to get married or have children because they don't see a positive future for the children that they would bring into the world.
In terms of art…well, in terms of art, I think there are fewer and fewer artists that the market will be able to support, but there's also fewer institutions that will survive. I think that we're likely to see institutions closing or merging, or being absorbed into other kinds of entities, non-profits becoming, in a sense, for-profits. So, I think the institutions are as threatened as the individuals.
Charlotte Burns: What you say about institutions is where we ended the last season. We had a podcast episode with the editorial advisors who have so brilliantly worked with us through the past couple of seasons—Deana Haggag, Mia Locks, and Jay Sanders. And in that show, Deana said something that I've been thinking about a lot over the past several months, about where we go from here and how we build.
I asked Deana about whether she thought there was viable future funding, and here's her answer:
Deana Haggag: I don't. Not in our lifetime. And I actually, maybe, I'm going through this sort of evolution in real-time. So it's with like deep regret and shame that I think things are going to get a lot worse, not better. And so what does that mean for how we make and participate in art together? And so I don't feel hopeful about any kind of government intervention.
I'm actually arriving at a place where I don't know that we want that, even if it was possible. Because when we say that there is government intervention, we talk about it like it's objective, and it's not. And I think we're watching that all over the country right now. I think this is the system we have. And so I am thinking a lot more about what I'm willing to give up to divest from the system. I think all organizations and all artists and all institutions might just want to shrink, for good reason, not because their arm was forced, but because it's not just the money flowing in, it's also the money flowing out that's not sustainable.
We're doing too much on too little resources, and it's burning a lot of people out. I do think, over time, that we really will dislodge New York and LA and a small subset of European cities as the centers of the art world, if just by force. People can't afford to be there anymore. I don't think that there is anything to work towards.
I think we are making art in an increasingly fraught and dangerous context. And rather than try to cooperate with them, rather than beg—and that's what it's increasingly feeling, that we are begging for this kind of resource and attention—I think we have to build away from it.
So yeah, and I don't know, I also want to be clear because I sound so dreadful right now. I don't think that's all going to get gobbled up in even the next couple of decades. I am really thinking about the art world my child will live in, and that will have even less government intervention, even less public support, even more censorship, even more rules. Things in this country and increasingly globally are moving at a 50- to 100-year timeline.
And a lot of the stuff that came up in Bryan Stevenson's episode, a lot of the folks that have organized, the folks that have helped us hold up against the system, they've known this is coming for a long time. So I think it's going to get a lot worse, and I don't think we're going to run back from it.
Charlotte Burns: Do you remember that recording, Allan? What do you think of that now?
Allan Schwartzman: I think Deana’s very wise and was very spot on. It's very imaginable that there will be challenges to the tax deductibility of donations to museums and other kinds of arts organizations, and that can have a huge impact on private support for them. We've already spoken about great limitations on public support for the arts, so I think we are where Deana said we are.
Charlotte Burns: What do you think building away looks like? We've talked so much through these podcasts about growth having become a main driver of the art world; we've talked about the growth of museums not only in the number of museums, but in the size and scale of the museums, and how that size and scale has created a distance within the institutions of what their mission is, of who they're for, a distance between leadership and staff and artists and audiences. If we're at a moment where growth itself is not the possibility for most institutions going forward, that in itself is a fundamental shift from where we've been.
Do you think that more can be done with less, from your vantage point of having advised so many institutions and built so many institutions? How would you advise institutions to think about that in this moment, or nonprofits, or artists?
Allan Schwartzman: I think the notion of always growing was flawed, particularly once you get outside the largest museums in most major cities in this country. An institution needs to understand who their audience is, what their resources are, and they need to live and work within that. And that often means not growing. And in some cases, it means shrinking or reducing, maybe having fewer shows and having them up for longer periods of time. Maybe it means doing more temporary projects in order to bring in additional programming at the same time that there are permanent displays or long-term exhibitions on view. So, I think one needs to understand one’s audience and what that audience wants, and what the institution's capacity is to fund that.
Charlotte Burns: Right now, obviously, it’s a moment of crisis for a lot of institutions. The IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is the largest federal funder of museums and libraries, staff were placed on leave following cuts from the Department of Justice at the beginning of April, after an executive order called for the agency to be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law. A lot of NEA grants have been rescinded as the National Endowment for the Arts has aimed to comply with President Trump's executive orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The New York Post has referred to these developments as part of the museum wars. Do you feel in this moment in time that that kind of cultural war is something the art world is equipped to withstand?
Allan Schwartzman: I think it will be stunned by it. I’m sorry, could you go back and repeat some of the things you just said, because there are a few specific topics I wanted to pick up on.
Charlotte Burns: For instance, the IMLS, it's a relatively small federal agency, around 70 employees. It awards grants to museums and libraries across the US. It's an independent federal agency. It awarded $266 million in funding to cultural institutions last year. So its budget is more than the National Endowment for the Arts; the projected 2025 budget for the NEA was $210 million. And so it's the largest federal funder of museums and libraries in America. And it was expected that there would be cuts as part of the Doge budget slashing after a 14th March executive order that called for various agencies, including the IMLS to be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.
Allan Schwartzman: Well, that certainly fulfills the meaning of the word “drastic.”
Charlotte Burns: It certainly does.
Artists I'm talking to are saying that NEA grants that they had received notice that they should expect, and that they'd budgeted for have since been withdrawn. The National Endowment for the Arts has rescinded grants and instructed grantees not to use federal funds to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion or gender ideology. For a lot of cultural institutions, that's an existential problem. And for a lot of artists running residency programs or convenings, that's enormous gaps in budgets, effective immediately. And meanwhile, certain words are being purged from government websites, which means that organizations, particularly organizations affiliated with universities and colleges, are very fearful of the language they can use: words like “women”, “gender”, “non-binary”, “race”, and “sex” are words that are being purged from government websites.
Allan Schwartzman:
The word “women” has been purged?
Charlotte Burns:
It's one of the words on the list.
Allan Schwartzman:
There's a museum of women’s art [National Museum of Women in the Arts]. Does that now become, if they receive federal money, the “Museum of Art”?
Charlotte Burns: Well, it's interesting you mentioned that museum because a recent executive order on the 27th of March, which was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” specifically targets the Smithsonian. And the Women's Museum, that's part of that Smithsonian complex, is one of two museums that was specifically singled out.
Allan Schwartzman: That's a way of saying we don't believe in funding culture. We'd like to see culture die, which in a way is not surprising because culture's never been central to this country, unlike in Europe. In fact, it's often been seen as a threat to American identity.
Charlotte Burns: The order singled out an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” saying that it was a part of a “widespread effort to rewrite history, [and deepening] societal divides, and [fostering] a sense of national shame.” And then also singled out the Women's Museum for allegedly including men in a women's exhibition. The order is to be implemented by the Vice President, and it calls for the restoration of the Smithsonian as a “symbol of American [greatness].”
Over half of the Smithsonian's budget comes from the federal government. The complex is the largest museum complex in the world, of its kind. So when we talk about drastic cuts and existential threats for many museums, they're experiencing exactly that right now.
The secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Lonnie [G.] Bunch [III], has confirmed that the organization is committed to research and scholarship. He sent a message to staff following the order saying, “We'll continue to employ our internal review processes which keep us accountable to the public. When we err, we adjust, pivot, and learn as needed,” and the Smithsonian would “remain committed to telling the multi-faceted stor[ies] of this country's extraordinary heritage.”
But the institution was in the news recently after artist Amy Sherald withdrew her solo show American Sublime from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery after being told the museum was considering the display of her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty in order to avoid provoking President Trump. The exhibition would have been the first by a Black contemporary artist at the Portrait Gallery. Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama's presidential portrait in 2018, cited "institutional fear shaped by political hostility toward trans lives" after the museum proposed adding a video discussing transgender issues alongside the work. The Smithsonian expressed disappointment that audiences won't experience the exhibition.
When I speak to other museums, they're having lots of different reactions to this moment in time. Some cannot change their mission. They would be the nothing of nowhere if they removed all of the language out of their mission statements that is being focused upon. Other institutions are going to lengths to avoid being singled out further.
Allan, based on your experience of American culture, do you think that this is something the cultural sector is equipped to deal with?
Allan Schwartzman: No, the cultural sector is like a big boat. It takes a lot to turn it around. So I don't think so. I think that outside of, let's say, museums, I don't think there's a lot of understanding of politics and how that functions within American society in the art sector. So, I think we're in for some rocky times.
I guess what I would add to that is a kind of ‘what if.’ What if in three-and-a-half years the politics change? Does that reverse things, or are there certain kinds of cuts that remain forever in place? And then what impact does that have on institutions?
Charlotte Burns: Well, technically yes, anything can be reversed.
Allan Schwartzman: But is there an appetite to reverse them?
Charlotte Burns: Well, there's a flurry of executive orders is the number one thing. So there'd be a lot to deal with, and it would be difficult to bring back that institutional memory.
Allan Schwartzman: Mm-hmm.
Charlotte Burns: What kind of conversations you can have in institutions, we've talked about that so much on these shows—who museums are for—and that seems to be being rewritten.
Part of the executive order aims at monuments. For instance, our first show of Hope & Dread focused on the confederacy monuments and the executive order about restoring truth and sanity to American history called for the restoration of monuments that had been removed. So it's very much about the reins of history, about shaping narratives of America. Like we asked in one of our very early podcasts who gets to be an American? That's still the question driving this.
I spoke to a major artist yesterday who's lost their entire income, and this artist was a subject of one of the most significant museums in America, a monographic exhibition there last year, but has lost all income because they have been disinvited from university campuses at which they were meant to speak. They've been disinvited from private events at which they were meant to speak. And the official explanation has been that their work is in a DEI pot, and as this artist said to me, “But if I'm in a DEI pot, then who's in the main pot?” They just were in a contemporary art pot, and now they are being taken out, and they have no source of income this year. So if you've lost your income, how do you get through the year? Do you wait?
So I think it's a bit of a wish and a prayer to think about that timescale when things are changing so fast now and having such a drastic impact.
Allan Schwartzman: So what does such an artist do?
Charlotte Burns: They're carrying on making their work, they're carrying on making their work. They are an artist. They will keep making art. And actually the body of work they're creating right now sounds fantastic. So they'll still keep doing that.
There's several artists I've spoken to in the last couple of weeks who are in these positions of imminent threat, and that's a financial threat but for a lot of them, it's also an existential one because it's the work they make, the income they have, the lives they have, the people they support, and what rights they have, and they feel that the art world is immediately not available. The resources of the art world have withdrawn.
Do you see anything countering that? Do you see that there are patrons and museum groups or museum directors who are out there looking for alternative ways to support artists?
Allan Schwartzman: No. In short, no. However, we are starting to advise the collectors we work with, who are also patrons—which most of the collectors we work with are—to be funding artists, to be doing some direct funding, so that artists can receive support.
Charlotte Burns: I guess that links back up to what you were saying at the beginning about what collectors and philanthropists see as the value of art. Like if there is all of a sudden a drastic fall-off in market value or in institutional support for artists, then it's a faith project.
What proportion of the art world, as we describe it, do you think would be on board with that kind of faith project at this point? How many people will drop away if there is a period of retrenchment?
Allan Schwartzman: We've always advised the collectors we work with, even those not interested in new art, to be spending a certain percentage of their budget, even if it's a very small one, on collecting young artists. I always felt it was important for a collector to see art as being produced by somebody and not just being a product that’s the result of a process. And similarly, I think it's, we're now at a time where collector/patrons should be giving money to artists who need money. I don't know if too many organizations that do, and so collectors have to pick up the slack.
I do think that we have placed too much of an emphasis on tax deductibility, as though one needs a tax deduction in order to give away money. I mean, one's still giving away money even with a tax deduction. So I think one needs to break loose from that notion that a tax deduction is necessary in order to be a patron.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: A lot of dealers I'm talking to at the moment are saying that this is a cliffhanger moment for the market as well. One dealer last week described it to me as not being like any other previous dip in which the market actually comes out stronger, but being more like the 1990s when there was fundamentally a new chapter written after a rupture. You've been talking for a long time about cycles. Do you think we're in a cycle, or is it a new chapter in terms of the market?
Allan Schwartzman: I think we're at an unprecedented moment, at least unprecedented since this market began in the late 1970s, and that is that there's very little appetite to be buying art right now. I hear a number of dealers say to me that it's never been this difficult to sell. I think it's because people have become overloaded with art. And so what's going to cause somebody to buy another work of art?
Well, if it's a collector of masterworks, it would be the availability of a masterwork that's greater than the masterworks they already own. People who are very rich tend to not be motivated to sell when someone comes forward with an extraordinary sum because what are they gonna do with the money except put it back into more art. And if they can't find art better than the art that they'd be selling, then why would they sell anything? And so it's like the wheels of the market come to a grinding halt.
Of course, that changes, that'll change as art changes. That'll change as one sees opportunity in places where they didn't see it before. And that's been a mechanism that's always been an operation. It’s certainly an area we've focused on. We seem to have had great success in identifying great talent and work that is undervalued ahead of the market.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: And so I think that will continue.
Charlotte Burns: You're not gonna say where you’re looking now, are you?
Allan Schwartzman: Of course not.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: So, something else that stayed with me from last season was the artist Alvaro Barrington.
Allan Schwartzman: Can I just say before you get into it…
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Allan Schwartzman: I should say Alvaro is an extraordinary artist. This is an artist of such a great generosity of spirit that…He's the only artist I know who has a huge number of shows and produces a huge amount of work and doesn't seem to, in any way, diminish the quality of what it is that they produce.
Charlotte Burns: I agree, and when I've been thinking about people who stood out to me from the last season, there are certain quotes that percolate through time. Deana’s was one of them for me, and Alvaro’s was another where he had said something to me about Abstract Expressionism. This would've been, I think, late ‘23, early ‘24, so a completely different moment than the one we’re in, through a period in which the art world had been saying it was recognizing the massive amounts of artists that had overlooked and what the canon had prioritized. And I guess we're in a moment now of reaction to that.
Alvaro was talking about the Abstract Expressionist movement. It always struck him that that was an identity movement. I'm just gonna play you the clip.
Alvaro Barrington: I think everything is identity-led, but I think one of the stories that sort of gets misread about Abstract Expressionism or action painting is what was happening politically at the time and this is something that my professors like Carrie Moyer, Katy Siegel—I went to Hunter [College] and the school of abstraction was deep in the DNA. It basically presented itself as this sort of non-identity kind of Americana art, but almost all of the artists involved were Jews. Even though [Jackson] Pollock became the face of it, his wife Lee Krasner was Jewish, his best friend Philip Guston was Jewish, Helen Frankenthaler, the people who wrote about it, [Clement] Greenberg, [Harold] Rosenberg. It's interesting how it got written in history because what that would mean is that a movement that started in 1946, 1947, meant that they had no concept of what was happening in Germany or throughout the rest of the world. That they were somehow protected from the knowledge that them, as Jewish folks, were deeply hated. In fact, I think we kind of live in an era now where maybe some of us forget that, but it would, it just is an impossible ask. It's an impossible ask to imagine that somehow [Mark] Rothko and these guys weren't understanding something about how the rest of their community was being treated. And I just think that's an impossible ask.
One of the solutions that they came up with in terms of dealing with this was, how do you make art that acknowledges that your existence is real, when so many of the world was ready to kill you, including America? These artists were struggling with how to figure out how to move forward after what they had experienced, and action painting was one of the cleanest ways of saying “I'm alive.” I mean, a Rothko painting can be read as just a sunset that anybody could appreciate; it's a landscape that, whether you're Jewish or non-Jewish or whatever, you were able to meet at this commonality.
Starting the conversation from where we all agree, and then maybe we could get into the nuances of where we disagree, and I think that was their sort of way of, their strategy of how they wanted to move forward, the art strategy of how they wanted to move forward.
And I think, obviously, that came from them going to any of the jazz clubs and realizing how Black Americans had, through this music genre, created this thing of how people can be in the same room together. And then, from there, maybe have conversations.
Charlotte Burns: That was an excerpted clip of Alvaro speaking on the last season of the podcast. I've been thinking a lot about what he said about this idea of an art born of grief and confusion, the person behind it striving to say, “I'm alive,” and process the world around them, which, I've been thinking so much about it because if the way Abstract Expressionism is put out into the world is often how much a painting cost, the most valuable, the biggest museum collections, and I'm not sure we focus on what Alvaro is talking about, which is what the people making it were experiencing and seeking and trying to get towards.
You and I have spoken a little bit about specific Jewish customs of grieving and absence, which seemed another powerful way to read that work.
Allan Schwartzman: What stood out for me as Alvaro was talking is that nearly half the artists of Abstract Expressionism were Jewish: Rothko, [Barnett] Newman, [Ad] Reinhardt, Krasner. These were all Jewish people, and underlying the work of an artist like Newman and Rothko, was a sense of…was an existential sense that I think of as being very linked to Judaism. And I also think about Barnett Newman. Didn't he do a series on the Stations of the Cross? So, religion was always a part of the work in some way or another, whether directly or indirectly. And Reinhardt creating “the last paintings”, and then spending the last six or more years of his life remaking that same last painting, so never making it, that kind of existential joke, I also think of as a very kind of Jewish way of thinking.
I'm curious to how that work is viewed by people who are not Jewish or brought up in a different kind of faith. But I think it's really interesting the way Alvaro has connected to that aspect of those artists’ work.
Charlotte Burns: You also talked a little bit about mourning customs after a death, and the idea of covering up mirrors, covering up reflections, acknowledging the absence of the life with a blankness, with gaps. And that also seems to speak so much to the work.
Allan Schwartzman: Well, in Judaism, you’re supposed to mourn for seven days, and then you go on with life. And so I always thought it was a very kind of humane, and practical way of looking at time and life and death that was very different from life in a Jewish family at times not of death, which can be very neurotic and deeply engaged and overly suffocating.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: Do you think that the way that we, in the art world, have been defining value and thinking about art and artists has become too narrow? Do you think the frameworks we've inherited are too constrained?
Allan Schwartzman: Absolutely. Money has become a primary, the primary way in which we're looking at art, and not in terms of content. And the money's never been the interesting part. That's maybe the headline, maybe that's the reason why we have more stories and newspapers and magazines about art, but it's not what makes art interesting.
Charlotte Burns: Julia Halperin and I recently published a report based on a survey of women artists that was commissioned by Anonymous Was A Woman in partnership with SMU Data Arts and Loring Randolph. What the response told us, which was an overwhelming response from women artists, was that the art world, as we know it and talk about it, has already ceased to be important for many of those professional artists, which was about 85% of the survey-takers. And in its place, they forged new paths, finding different ways to sustain themselves.
Almost two-thirds of the respondents, 63%, said that a lack of museum or institutional backing hindered their careers, and 59% felt the same way about galleries, and 55% were selling work totally independently.
But in contrast, when asked their most valuable resource, the overwhelming response, 79%, was each other—artistic community and networks were key to their careers. And this experience was shared across ages, locations, and races.
That idea of community and connection is something that artists have always known as important. But it's interesting, because a dealer was telling me the other day that they felt we needed more community in the art world. And I was thinking about that.
Do you think there is a community within the art world that you move through, compared to other periods in your career and life?
Allan Schwartzman: Well, collectors I know exist within a community of collectors, and often within a community of museums and institutions that they support.
I mean, I'm on the board of Artists Space, and that's always been a kind of community-based organization. So many so-called alternative spaces that came into formation in the 1970s became more and more focused on their perpetuation as institutions and not on the programs that they funded, and Artists Space—since I've been on the board for at least the last 20 years—has been very community-based. And the programs, especially under Jay Sanders, the current director, have been very much about having a gathering place for community. I think that's essential.
I don’t know where else that's happening with institutions. I'm hopeful, and assuming that that's happening throughout the country, but I don't know for sure.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: What are your hopes for this season of the podcast? Is there something you hope we can get to?
Allan Schwartzman: I'd like to be speaking to more artists. I think that we're in a period where there's a lot of very great artists that have not gotten their due, that have not been recorded, and there are great stories to tell. There are artists in their 70s and 80s who are still with us, still cogent, and I think it's time for that to be put to tape.
I was thinking about when you were talking about women and women artists, feminism has had a greater impact on the art of our time than I think virtually anything before it, and yet we still don't give women and feminism the credit that they deserve. And maybe it's because feminism was a collective movement. So many of the women involved in the feminist movement in the early years sought to support the collective more than to develop their own careers and identities. And I think also the fact that it was a content-based movement, and not a style-based movement, made it something that the market doesn't know how to hold onto. The market knows how to support a Jasper Johns or a Brice Marden, because it's work that's very consistent. It doesn't know how to deal with inconsistency.
It’s never known how to deal with someone like Sigmar Polke, who's one of the truly greatest artists of the Post-War period. But his work is so sloppy in terms of understanding a chronology and a style of an artist that we haven't known how to deal with it. I think the retrospective that Kathy Halbreich curated for the Museum of Modern Art did deal with it. I think that she understood all of that and how that operated within Sigmar's work. But it's hard for an audience to see. And so how to make that visible, whether it's an iconoclast like Sigmar or a content-driven artist, such as women artists of the early phases of feminism.
Like in our advisory work, we're working with the estate of Hannah Wilke, and I think about how Hannah was reviled by so many of her American peers for flaunting her body and her sexuality because that was seen as a kind of ‘50s notion of a woman; the idea that she would objectify her own body and use it as a subject of sexual titillation was taboo. But I think that she did it in an empowered way.
And so I've been spending a lot of time looking at Hannah's work, and looking at the impact of feminism, and her own experience, and not feeling like she needed to be liberated, like she was somehow already liberated. I think that's made her a pioneer. And I also think that of her generation of artists, she's definitely not gotten her due. She has not had a major retrospective in a major museum, and yet I think we'd understand the work very differently if we got a chance to see that, so.
I think there are not that many retrospectives of art by artists of our time that I can visualize how most of them would look because I know the range of what they did and where the market supported their work, and therefore how such exhibitions are likely to be organized. But there aren't that many artists where they're likely to be presented in a way that defies our understanding of the work, where it's telling a new story. So I'd love to see that with Hannah.
We've seen it with Yoko Ono, who was one of the most reviled artists of the Post-War period of her time, and yet one of the most significant, and I think it was precisely because she spanned from the last days of the avant-garde to the most empowered moments of living in a world of pop culture when pop culture defined the new generation.
So, I look to museum exhibitions to tell us stories of these artists.
Charlotte Burns: I wonder if they will. I was thinking, you know, you and I had a brief conversation the other day about that moment in the late ‘80s and ‘90s where there was a surge of focus and research, and museum exhibitions, and acquisitions looking at artists who were not the market darlings of the 1980s.
Allan Schwartzman: Mm-hmm.
Charlotte Burns: One of the exhibitions that the artist Sam Durant mentioned to me the other day as being really meaningful for him was a show I'd never heard of called “The Decade Show,” which took place in the late ‘80s across three different venues in New York, including the New Museum and the Studio Museum [in Harlem].
And when I looked up the exhibition and the artist list, it was so many artists who you know, the market darlings, but they were mixed with artists who we also know, but largely because several of those artists have been “rediscovered” in the past decade or so. And I thought it was really sad in a way that those artists briefly had a prominence, were positioned as being just as important as these other artists for a moment, and then largely disappeared, for some of them, for the rest of their lifetimes; they were rediscovered after death or at the very, very end of their life. They’d struggled financially to make the work they really wanted to make, some of them, and then were heralded with big museum shows in the teens and 2020s. And I wondered whether it was a similar moment now in the art world.
We've seen this a little bit with the data study that we do, the Burns Halperin Report, where in 2018, when we started gathering data, it was a moment of open conversation around how there needed to be more diversity in collections. And then already by 2020, we noticed that there was backlash to the idea of what that was, and this idea that things had maybe gone too far. Whereas when we looked at the numbers, the numbers had not shifted yet. The change hadn't yet begun. And so even within the art world—which thinks of itself as progressive—what people were reacting to was a conversation that seemed to have gone too far, rather than action. There had been change, and there were more exhibitions, but actually statistically on balance, it wasn't a fundamental repositioning. And there was a backlash pretty quickly.
So, it's not even been a decade since we've been doing those reports, but when we look back and we mark the years in which we've done the studies and the different ways we've approached people and talked to them and the language that we've used, it's really had radical shifts every couple of years.
And the conversations I've been having with artists this week about how many of them are losing their income, their livelihoods, they are having an immediate drop in support. I was thinking about how much it is we lose in these moments, and maybe in 30 years, there'll be a market rediscovery of a handful of those artists who were part of one of the best group shows of this recent period of time.
But what happens right now? They're artists in their prime, making work full throttle with ambitions, and if they're not getting supported, then it's a loss. And those losses aren't press-released. Museums aren't sending out press releases, the [National Endowment for the Arts] NEA's not sending out press releases, the curatorial positions, the research positions that are being withdrawn, that's not getting press-released. It's not being mapped or marked. So we don't know the landscape as it's being redrawn.
So I wonder which museums are doing those shows. I hope you're right. That we'll see that. But I wonder.
Allan Schwartzman: Who are committed to doing shows like “The Decade Show”?
Charlotte Burns: Well, no, you were saying you wanna see, you were talking about Hannah Wilke and saying you'd like to see artists being presented more fully, and overlooked artists who haven't been given their dues. But it just made me think of that cycle of when that happens and how quickly.
Allan Schwartzman: Well, there is great interest in a Hannah Wilke retrospective amongst certain curators, so, I think it is likely to take place in the next few years.
Charlotte Burns: Well, that's good. That's good news.
Allan Schwartzman: Yeah.
And the Tate’s [Modern] retrospective of Yoko Ono, which is traveling, I think it's going to, it's currently in Berlin. It's going to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It will perhaps travel to Asia. That was a show that really began to get at the fullness of Yoko and her importance, and that's getting out into the world.
So, it's happening somewhat.
Charlotte Burns: So, reasons to hope.
Allan Schwartzman: Yeah.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Allan, what's the ‘what if’ driving you right now?
Allan Schwartzman: Hmm. It's what if all that's being lost today due to funding cuts is forever lost? What if it kills an appetite for discovery and rediscovery, and to supporting the arts outside of those few major institutions that seem to always have a base of support?
Charlotte Burns: Allan, thanks so much. It's been, it's been great being back in the, well, I don’t know if you call it the saddle, but the seat.
Allan Schwartzman: Yeah. It's getting the rust out.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, exactly.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Allan, as always.
Join us next time when we’ll be talking to Kemi Ilesanmi, returning for her third appearance on the show.
Kemi Ilesanmi: We need to be looking for what the opportunity moments are, to think differently, to do differently, to be connected more deeply, differently. And I think we're all still searching for that, but that's my big take. The thing I'm trying to lean into is that new sun. What's the new sun that we get to create in this moment that we couldn't create six months ago? Even though it's hard.
Charlotte Burns: I love talking to Kemi, and I think this might be our best conversation yet.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art.