The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 8 with Glenn Lowry
In this episode, host Charlotte Burns sits down once more with Glenn Lowry during his final week as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Over three decades, Lowry transformed MoMA—expanding its collection, reshaping its galleries, and reimagining what a museum, and “modern” itself, can mean.
He has guided the museum through moments of crisis and transformation—from 9/11 and global financial shocks to a pandemic and the culture wars of recent years. Now, as Lowry steps down, he shares what it really takes to guide an institution through moments of upheaval and reinvention.
He looks back on the lessons learned, the challenges ahead for the cultural sector, and the art of leadership: how ideas are tested, institutions reshaped, and futures imagined.
Tune in as Lowry asks: What if museums had the courage to believe that the art that will come will be every bit as interesting and important as the art of the past?
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Photo credit: Marco Anelli 2022
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello, and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I'm your host, Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]
In this episode, we’re thrilled to speak again with Glenn Lowry, who I joined at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during his last week as director there in September.
Over the past three decades, Glenn has steered MoMA to unprecedented growth, reshaping the collection and reimagining what a museum—and what “modern” itself—can mean. He has also navigated the institution through intense upheaval, from the events of 9/11 to global financial crises, from a pandemic to the politics and culture wars of recent years.
Risk and renewal have been throughline topics in our interviews over the past decade, and seem more prescient today than ever. Now, as he passes on the torch at MoMA, Glenn reflects on what he has learned and what challenges still lie ahead. We talk about the culture sector today, and Glenn’s next chapters.
This is a conversation about what happens when vision meets reality. It’s about the art of leadership, about turning ideas into institutions. And Glenn asks, what if museums had the courage to believe that the art that will come will be every bit as interesting and important as the art of the past?
Let’s dive in.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Glenn, thank you so much for making the time to meet me. It's the final days here at MoMA, and I appreciate so much you making the time.
Glenn Lowry: My pleasure.
Charlotte Burns: I was looking into the very beginnings, and I found an article announcing your appointment in 1994. The then board chair, Agnes Gund, stated, “one factor that won him the directorship was that Lowry actually wanted the job. which I thought was really funny. None of the MoMA senior curators wanted the position,” she said, and she added a list of prominent museum directors at other institutions who had turned it down, some of them twice.What made you want the job so much? Not only then, but for so long.
Glenn Lowry: I think the reason I wanted the job, then and now, is simply because what an incredible challenge to think about the Museum of Modern Art at the end of the 20th century and imagine what it might be and the ability to imagine—the gift, even—to imagine what it might be in the 21st century. I mean, to me, that was the excitement.It wasn't the history and legacy of an extraordinary board, and an extraordinary staff, and generations of brilliant curators. It was to imagine what a museum fundamentally associated with the 20th century could be in the 21st century, and to be given license to imagine it in new and different ways.
That was a gift.
Charlotte Burns: You saw something that other people didn't see. And you had a lovely farewell event, your finissage. In your speech, you said you never thought you'd be at MoMA for more than a decade, but that it took you a lot longer than you thought to achieve the change that you wanted. And then you started having fun.What was the change that you wanted to make when you were first thinking about that job? When you were imagining, what was it that you imagined?
Glenn Lowry: So, for me, the Museum of Modern Art was an idea more than it was a fact. And the idea was this notion, founded, actually, in Alfred Barr's early thinking of a metabolic institution, an institution capable of self-renewal, of constantly reimagining itself.And, I had this sense, perhaps wrongly, that in its early years, the museum was without fear, without boundaries, was trying out so many new and different ideas—some of which worked and some of which failed—but was, in a sense, open to an endless array of new possibilities.
And then during the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, those possibilities started to get codified to become, if you wish, a myth about themselves, and that seemed to me premature. That, in a way, the idea of the modern, not as an era or even as a style, but as an idea of something open, constantly challenging itself, willing to take great risks and experiments, seemed like the museum that I wanted to run, and to engage with.
And was the animating idea, for me anyway, was that modern art was not an exclusively European or North American phenomenon, that one could imagine it differently to be far more open to what was happening elsewhere in the world, whether it was Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, or Africa, just to name some very obvious places that are central to any story about the idea of the modern. So, it doesn't negate the centrality or even the importance of what happened in Europe and North America, but it opens it up to other narratives.
And what I discovered when I started looking into the Museum of Modern Art is indeed the seeds of those other narratives were already here in the museum. That generations of collectors had in fact invested in works of art from different parts of the world, but hadn't found a way to include them in the various narratives of the museum.
Charlotte Burns: We spoke in one of our very early interviews about that founding idea of Barr’s, that sort of torpedo moving through time, eschewing off objects as it gained new ones. But your tenure has coincided with the rise of the market, and it's increasingly difficult for museums to think of their assets as something to torpedo.You've presided over the phenomenal growth of this institution.
Glenn Lowry: 168,000 square feet of gallery space, because it's etched in my mind.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: So, you know the numbers. You've grown the endowment from $200 million to $1.7 billion. The design stores welcome about three million people a year. The attendance is 2.8 million. There's 35 million people online following the museum across digital platforms, and there's 15 million followers on social media—more than any other institution in the world. These are huge numbers.You've grown this institution enormously: two huge expansions, MoMA PS1 becoming part of a twinned institution.
We are now in a moment where we are seeing institutions shrink. The SMU DataArts 2025 analysis of the nonprofit arts and culture sector showed the shrinkage of the field in terms of revenue and attendance. MoMA's own attendance is down from where it was pre-Covid, when it was 3.2 million. And that's a fieldwide phenomenon.
Coming to the end of your directorship and seeing these trends and having been such an innovator in terms of the growth, how do you feel watching the sector head into this moment of shrinkage rather than growth?
Glenn Lowry: Well, I think the issue is less shrinkage and more turbulence. The combination of the pandemic, the outpouring of empathy and reaction to the murder of George Floyd, and so many other people of color, combined with really dramatic changes in the political landscape—bot to mention uncertainty about the economic well-being of not just the United States, but other countries as well, and now wars in Ukraine and Gaza—creates an environment in which people are going to be cautious. They're going to be cautious about travel, they're going to be cautious about spending capital. They're going to be cautious about what they do. So, we are in this moment where the tectonic plates of our lives are realigning.Do I think there's opportunity there? Do I think things will ultimately settle down and continue in a robust way? I do, actually. I'm a long-term optimist, if I'm not a short-term pessimist.
And when I say a short-term pessimist, I mean I see the difficulties that everyone is having and recognize that they are not going to disappear quickly. But the reality of, at least our situation here, is that we are on extraordinarily stable financial ground, that our attendance has largely recovered. I mean, 3.2 million was our peak year. The average before that was around 2.7, 2.8 million, and that's pretty much where we're going to settle down at. We predicted that this current fiscal year will be a year of inflection just because of the uncertainty around tourism and a whole range of other issues, but long-term, I think we're going to see a recovery continue.
But it's going to be a struggle. The givens, the norms that allowed a place like MoMA to thrive in the 2010s, will not be the same givens that allow us to thrive for the rest of the 2020s. And I think the challenge for anyone directing a museum today is to have a theory about how to get through that, and then to live it and test it.
But it's a seriously interesting moment to be directing a museum because you have to figure this out. You have to have, I think, a really positive attitude. You can't simply look at this and say, “Oh, well, next year it's going to be even worse. And the year after that, it's going to be even worse.” Your responsibility is to look at all these problems, assess the ones that are impacting you, and then navigate your way through them.
And I still believe fundamentally that there is a public deeply interested in the programs we run, the art we show, and the experience we provide. And I think that public is as engaged as it ever was, even if it takes more to convince that public to come to the institution.
Charlotte Burns: I want to talk a little bit about risk. One thing I've been thinking a lot about looking at the financials of various museums, I'm not specifically talking about MoMA here, is that there's been a growth in the spending by institutions on a sort of preventative risk over the past decade or so, on legal counsel, on crisis comms, on the sort of defensive strategy costs that have grown since around 2017, since that Warren Kanders moment at the Whitney Biennial. And, some institutions have also reduced funding for exhibition costs.The question is, what if institutions have been incorrectly identifying the risk? Because we're in a moment now where some institutions are facing a loss of audience, a loss of relevance, and far larger political and legal threats than they were imagining in 2017 and 2018. Did museums analyze risk correctly? And what are the biggest risks now, looking ahead for the institutional landscape?
Glenn Lowry: Well, I think some museums and institutions have done an extremely good job in analyzing risk and taking appropriate actions. And obviously, other institutions may not have gotten it entirely right, and that's, in a way, the challenge of risk.I once asked a trustee this very question: “How do you deal with risk and disruption?” And, brilliant man, said, “Look, if you understood what disruption was, it would never disrupt you. Disruption comes from a direction you weren't expecting.”
And that's the same thing with risk assessment. The risks that actually upset you and force you to do things that you weren't intending to do are the risks that you didn't see coming, right?
So, the issue around spending capital on the areas that help you mitigate risk, like legal counsel, or communications, or indeed risk assessment and advocacy, are areas that actually one should spend capital on, regardless of the situation, because you never know where that risk is coming from.
And I'm actually generally more anxious when things are going really well, because I am dead certain something is going to come out of left field, than I am when we are in a moment of turbulence, when I can see what the risk is and when I can understand with my team how to navigate out of it.
So, yes, it's gotten more complicated perhaps, and certainly more expensive, to run institutions, particularly institutions of scale. But that's also just a reality of our times.
Where do I see the risks? I think right now, today, in this country, we are experiencing a sea change in expectations and attitudes around what we do, for whom we do it, and how we perform it, if you want to look at it that way.
And so, understanding what the risk is to anyone's specific program and taking the actions required to either avoid that risk, mitigate that risk, or meet it head on, understanding what the consequences are, are the critical issues that every institution has to face.
And I believe, in my bones, that institutions thrive by virtue of the programs they generate, and if you generate a program that is driven by conviction, delivered with thought, and embraced with care, you will have an audience that will stay with you. And so, you have to think that one through. And certainly, this is a moment where a lot of the givens, particularly at a kind of meta-level, are shifting around.
Charlotte Burns: It's interesting because we were talking to Susie Wilkening from Wilkening Consulting, who did a lot of visitor research and found that the visitor appetite for diverse programming was really, really high, whereas institutional appetite was lower. And, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that because in the first Trump administration, during the travel ban in January 2017, MoMA responded very, very quickly. It rehung its fifth floor permanent collection galleries over the weekend, replacing work by Picasso, Matisse, and other Western artists with pieces by artists from the affected Muslim-majority countries. It was a very quick reaction that we'd not seen before, and we haven't seen since.I wanted to ask why museums, including MoMA, have gone so quiet on politics. Is that just a pragmatic response? Is that a pressure from the board? Especially museums that don't receive federal funding.
There was a moment of intense vocal reaction in around 2017, and we don't see that now. And specifically, very few directors spoke up on behalf of Kim Sajet when the government called her anti-American for showing diverse artists. I think just Tom Campbell at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco did publicly.
So, what are the considerations a museum director needs to make now about what to say?
Glenn Lowry: Well, first of all, every museum in this country that is a not-for-profit is federally funded through its tax exemption. So, they may not receive a direct subsidy, but they operate through a federal program, right? So, that’s a consideration I'm sure that many make.I think a lot of institutions saw what happened to universities and made decisions about the degree to which issues were sufficiently central to their program, well-being, livelihood that required some form of statement.
We reacted in the first Trump administration in the way we did, for very simple reason: that travel ban specifically and directly affected this institution and the artists it shows, and we thought it was appropriate to let the artists, in a way, speak for themselves to highlight what wouldn't be here with a travel ban like that. The absence, if you wish, that we were able to create. And to the degree there are other issues that emerge that require a reaction that we feel is warranted by something we can do that is productive.
And maybe this is just a function of my own way of operating. I am not a believer in statements. They may make you feel good in the short term, but if they don't have a way of having an impact, changing the discourse, moving the needle, it's not so clear to me that they’re doing anything other than being self-satisfied.
We thought that by highlighting to people what was involved, what was at stake in those travel bans, which were in fact ultimately rescinded, it was worth the effort.
It was clear that the President did not have the authority to fire Kim Sajet, and he didn't. And, Lonnie [G.] Bunch [III] and the Smithsonian stood up, and, if you wish, protected her. She chose to resign, which is a different story, and now is happily a director again.
But, I think we're in a time where everybody's looking at the landscape and trying to assess what's the best way to navigate through this and still deliver the program that they believe in, and are determined to deliver.
I think certainly from my point, and I hope this will continue to be true, the artists we show and the exhibitions that we develop are not about diversity. They're about the most interesting artists of our time and of the immediate past. Some familiar and some overlooked for whatever reasons. And the more nuanced and complicated that program, the more thoughtful and intelligent it is. And I think a lot of the work that I tried to do with colleagues—this was not work I did on my own, this was work done with an incredible staff—was to open up the box again to reveal how rich and nuanced, complicated, and interesting artistic practices have been, not just in the recent past, but really over the course of this museum's history. And I still believe that, and that's worth defending.
Charlotte Burns: You mentioned there the nonprofit status of museums, and one thing you've spoken about publicly before is a concern over the kind of repeal of that 501(c)3 status. How concerned are you about that?
Glenn Lowry: Well, I'm very concerned. I think that is the magic wand, if you wish, that allowed this country to develop one of the most robust cultural programs in the world, and to shift the burden of supporting that from federal or state subsidies to individuals. It's a fundamentally American idea that it's not the community that matters, it's the individual that matters. And by giving individuals the opportunity to support the causes that they believed in, what we've seen is truly extraordinary over the last, barely century—really, it's from the 1930s forward that this country has developed a cultural infrastructure that is astounding.So, of course, I'm concerned about that, because if you repeal that, what do you replace it with? And what are the logics that would be applied if that started to happen? And I think we are looking at a federal government that is prepared to exert a great deal of power or authority in order to achieve a set of ambitions.
Charlotte Burns: Have you been scenario planning for that?
Glenn Lowry: I scenario plan for everything, including a sunny day.And I think, you know, it's been a hallmark of, I hope, the last 30 years. We take nothing for granted. And this is one of the lessons I learned early on from my trustees, is if you accept that you are going to encounter difficult situations, that there will be disruptions along the way, then part of what you have to do is have plan A and plan B and plan C ready, so that when something untoward happens that you have no control over—the attacks of September 11th, a pandemic, you name it, an economic downturn—you're not caught entirely off guard.
Of course, you're going to be caught off guard because there's no way you could have anticipated that particular event, but you thought about, well, what would you do if.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lowry: So, we spend a lot of time looking at risk assessment.
Charlotte Burns: Hoping for the best, and planning for the worst.
Glenn Lowry: Always.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: You mentioned their trustees and governance, and I wanted to touch on Leon Black, who we discussed in the last issue, but seems newly relevant in this political admin[istration] because [Jeffrey] Epstein's become such a political issue again.One of the most significant governance crises in MoMA's history was around the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Leon Black, MoMA's then board chair, stepped down but remains a trustee after the extent of his financial relationship with Epstein was revealed. All of this initially happened in 2021, but of course, Epstein's become one of the defining political issues of this year, collapsing that distance.
When I asked you about this last time, you said that “if we start to believe that trustees whose political positions are different than ours, or whose financial investments don't align with our values, are no longer welcome in our institution, I think of that as fascism.” And I want to ask you about how you navigate that when it comes back up.
But also, a kind of related question, is something that Deana Haggag said on a podcast last year was that she felt that this era of taking money from philanthropy and putting it into artists was coming to an end. That the kind of Elon Musk buyout of Twitter was maybe a portent for what might happen to culture. That there might be takeovers or more hostile takeovers of public space. And the idea that philanthropy would ultimately be benevolent and worth it might not be the case.
How do you navigate major political scandals coming into governance inside the institution, and how do you think of absorbing that through the philanthropy?
Glenn Lowry: Well, I think the answer to that is that's why you have a strong board that can talk difficult, contentious, contradictory, disturbing issues through and arrive at a thoughtful and measured response. And I think our board has been extremely good at that. And that's actually what governance is about, right? Being able to assess what should be done for the best interest of the institution at any one moment, given a challenge. And those challenges can come from any number of areas. They can come from financial scandal, they can come from political scandal, they can come from something heinous that happens in the world or onsite. And you just have to figure out, through a measured process, what the right decision is.And we have a board that is extraordinarily dedicated to this museum, and every single person that I've had the privilege of working with over 30 years has always made, as far as I'm concerned, the right decision, not for them personally, but for the museum. And I would include Leon in that conversation.
Charlotte Burns: You've dealt with a lot of criticism over the years, of course, as a longstanding director of a major institution, and in fact, my first ever pitch to interview you back in 2015 was during a period of backlash.It was your 20th year then. There were calls for you to step down. New York Magazine's Jerry Saltz wrote that long-term MoMA watchers found it mysterious you'd not been let go. Roberta Smith criticized the curatorial slackness of the museum, and an American essayist, Michael Wolff accused you of megalomania. Meanwhile, the filmmaker and artist John Waters said, “Are you kidding me? I love MoMA. There's certainly no backlash coming from me.”
I always thought it was to your credit that my pitch was, I want to ask everybody about why there is this backlash and put it to you and interview you, and you said, then what you said to me last week, “There are no issues off the table. Let's discuss it all.”
My question isn't about any of those issues. My question is that it seems that being a director is a lonely place to be sometimes, and you need a tough skin to get through it. How do you get through it, and what is your advice for other directors?
Glenn Lowry: So, one of the best bits of advice I got when I arrived at the museum was from one of the then chief curators, Peter Galassi, who said, “Just remember, you need a thick skin here,” which I took very seriously. And I hope I have one.I don't take any of these criticisms personally. I'm interested in hearing what people have to say about the institution. To the degree that there are barbs directed at me, they're only interesting, for me, to the extent that they actually open up something for me to think about. And the ones that, you know, are personal or mean-spirited, they really do just slip off the back.
The reality is, and I said this when I was saying farewell at my finissage, I've never found it lonely. I really haven't. I've always felt that I had a cohort of staff and trustees that supported me, cared for me. Colleagues that cared for me and sustained me.
Of course, there are moments when you have to make very difficult decisions, and that can feel very lonely, and it can certainly feel anxious-producing. But writ large, even in the worst moments after September 11th or when some very harsh criticism of the museum was leveled at us, I always felt there were trustees to talk to, that there were staff that was there, that there were colleagues who picked up the phone, and helped me. And I've always tried to reciprocate that. I know what that means to feel cared for.
So, you know, you run a big, complicated institution, you're going to be constantly involved with big, complicated problems, and some of those are going to be leveled at you. And if you start to take them personally, you're going to be miserable.
And if you believe in change, if you believe that you have an idea, that you have a vision, that you have a way of imagining a museum or an institution that is different, then you have to be willing to deal with the fact that not everybody's gonna agree with you, and that you're going to be subject to an intense critique, which, for me, is part of the exhilaration of being at the helm. That critique is animating.
And that's what we want to be, a place of debate and contention, as much as we want to be a place of joy and tranquility. And so, those potentially contradictory forces are what make museums unique because they can embrace them both, and all, and still produce something that is vibrant and exciting.
So, yes, there've been moments when I wish certain things hadn't been said about the institution or me, but not one of those critiques was taken askew, and I hope that the results—the galleries, the collection, the program, the exhibitions, and most importantly the staff and the public who are here and who use this museum and derive benefit from this museum, and enjoy it—are the answer.
Charlotte Burns: I understand that you are possibly going to be working with Art Bridges [Foundation] on a new leadership campaign for museum directors.
Glenn Lowry: So, I felt very strongly as I started to think about my tenure that I benefited so much from the advice and guidance I got from my mentors—the Philippe de Montebello’s of this world, the Neil MacGregor’s of this world, the Nick Serota’s of this world, the Alfred Pacquement’s of this world—that it would be interesting to see if we could develop a program to help other museum directors gain the knowledge and experience that was shared with me, and I saw the Center for Curatorial Leadership that Aggie [Agnes Gund] founded, and that Buffy Easton runs, as a model for what such a program might be like. And so, if Art Bridges moves forward with this, it would be fantastic.
Charlotte Burns: If you had to give one piece of advice, what would it be?
Glenn Lowry: So…
Charlotte Burns: Not to put you on the spot.
Glenn Lowry: No, no. Many people who work with me know that I live by certain refrains. And the one that I would give, if you reduced it down to everything, right, like to distill it to its most fundamental, is an adage that my father-in-law repeated over and over again to me, which was, “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted”.If you think about the issue, if you gain as much information as you possibly can, it will help you make a better decision. And so, when a difficult moment arises, don't react in the moment. Spend the time to think it through. When you are furious because something just happened and it irritates you, do not react. Think it through, understand the consequences. When you have an idea for how to change a program or evolve an exhibition or whatever it might be, spend the time to understand what the lay of the land looks like, so that you can make the best possible decision.
Charlotte Burns: Glenn, talking about next steps for you, I understand that you might also be working with Mariët Westermann in a consultancy role in the Middle East.
Glenn Lowry: Well, I'm very interested in the Middle East. It's a part of the world that I started my career in, and I'm fascinated by what's happening, particularly in the Gulf area, but not just in the Gulf area. And there are a number of conversations that are going on with a number of colleagues, both here and in the Middle East, that I hope to be very much part of.One of my first new projects is working as an advisor to the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah with an incredibly talented group of people. I've been so impressed by the leadership of the Islamic Biennial, and I've been given the opportunity to be one of their advisors, and I'm thrilled to pick up that mantle of an earlier part of my career, and one that I hope I was able to help this museum embrace as well in terms of artists and practices from that region.
I am also working with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi, where I'm deeply involved as an advisor, and where I'll be working on an exhibition of an artist that I've been interested in for a very long time with a colleague, formerly here at the Museum of Modern Art. So, there are lots of things that are keeping me engaged in the field.
Charlotte Burns: That's a lot of travel.Is the Guggenheim part of one of those projects?
Glenn Lowry: We'll see how it emerges. Mariët was nice enough to mention that she would love to get me involved, and we'll see what happens in the coming months.
Charlotte Burns: So, Glenn, you're going to be spending a lot of time out of New York. How does that feel?
Glenn Lowry: No different.
[Laughter]
I mean, you know, if you're a museum director, your second office is an airline.Part of what I've wanted to do as I leave the museum is to really think about the areas that I've enjoyed working in and find ways of continuing that kind of involvement, but obviously in a very different capacity. And so, research in the Middle East, working with artists from that region, has been deeply rewarding to me. Lecturing and writing has been deeply rewarding to me, and I was given an opportunity at the Louvre to do something that I haven't had a chance to do really since I gave the Humanitas lectures at Oxford, probably 15 years ago.
Charlotte Burns: Let's talk a little bit about the Paris lectures.
Glenn Lowry: So, Laurence des Cars, who's the president and director of the Louvre, a couple of years ago invited me to be the Chaire du Louvre, which is like the professor of the Louvre, and it involves basically giving five lectures over two and a half weeks—in my case, from the second half of November to early December of this year—on pretty much any topic that intrigues you.And so, I thought a lot about what I wanted to talk about, and in the interim, decided that it was time to step down from the museum. So, what emerged is a kind of deep dive into museums as I understand them, and a meditation on my 30 years at the Museum of Modern Art.
At the core of my thinking were two intersecting vectors: André Malraux and the idea of the musée imaginaire. And I use the word “musée imaginaire” instead of the “museum without walls”, because the English translation gives it a kind of topography and physicality, which the French does not. The musée imaginaire is about the museum as it can be imagined, as opposed to a museum without boundaries. Slightly different way of looking at it.
But Malraux, in 1947, started to think about the musée imaginaire and what it could mean. And it was one of the very first attempts, at least as I understand it, to think beyond the idea of the museum as an encyclopedia or as a universal institution, but to think of it first and foremost as an idea, as something that we construct in our mind.
And his vision was big. He looked at art from around the world—Asia, China, Latin America, as well as Europe, of course, North America—and tried to think about the different ways in which we could experience it in an almost ahistorical way, and to create new and different narratives.
And that vector intersects with a work by Andrea Geyer, a German artist living here in the United States, that she has been thinking about for a while called Manifest, which is really a way of talking about desire.
What does she want from a museum? I need from the museum, I want from the museum, I demand from the museum certain things. And they become an invitation to anyone, just as a musée imaginaire is an invitation to any of us to imagine the museum that we can. Her demand, her manifest is an invitation for us to talk about what we want from the museum.
So, the title of the series is, “I Want a Museum. I Need a Museum. I Imagine a Museum”. And it's really trying to link these different currents together.
Charlotte Burns: I love that, and also the basic part of me thinks that would be so great on the merch. It's a great t-shirt.
[Laughter]
Glenn Lowry: But it's been, for me, it's been a phenomenally interesting journey.I've had so many colleagues help me and critique what I'm doing. And now I'm in that state of, “I actually have to make this work”. Which is a different kind of anxiety than I've had for a while and…
Charlotte Burns: Deadline anxiety. [Laughs]
Glenn Lowry: But I feel like I was given a gift by Laurence to spend so much time thinking about really what I believe constitutes the core of what we do in the museum world.
Charlotte Burns: Are you distilling it around this idea of imagining? Is that what it's coming back to for you?
Glenn Lowry: The core thread through these lectures is the notion of the imaginary, not imagining, but the notion of the imaginary—the way in which we construct our relationship to the ideas embedded in the museum. And that the way in which that unfolds is to think about the different imaginaries that museums create or enable. So, there's the imaginary of the artist, of the visitor, of the public, but they're not singular imaginaries. We all bring different layered imaginaries.So, the first lecture is called “Le musée imaginaire: il imaginaire du musée”, really mirroring the imaginary museum with Malraux’s idea of the musée imaginaire, and it sets up the construct of how an imaginary works. The second lecture really dives deeply into the idea of the Museum of Modern Art and the imaginary of the modern, and tries to unpack that history. Because, in fact, the idea of the modern and the imaginary of the modern is centered in France in the early 19th century with the creation of the first museum dedicated to living artists, Le Musée des Artistes Vivants, and the relationship of that museum to the Louvre, which became a model for the way the founders of the Museum of Modern Art imagine the relationship between the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So there are a lot of linkages there that get unpacked.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: What if MoMA wasn't created in 1929, but was created now? What would it look like?
Glenn Lowry: Very different, I suspect.
Charlotte Burns: What if you were helping to create that now?
Glenn Lowry: Well, what I would say is the museum that is here today is very much the museum that I hope to have helped create. These are not solitary acts; they are collective exercises.I think the genius of our founders and the challenge of each generation at the museum has been the idea that the Museum of Modern Art could be metabolic and self-renewing. And, early on, that was easy to sustain because there was no history that you had to really let go.
You talked earlier about Barr’s torpedo moving through time: it was his way of trying to create a museum that was different in kind from previous museums, where its history would in fact always evolve, and its past would be shed. And I believe fundamentally in that. I think the challenge of this museum is to shed its past, to have the courage to believe that the art that will come will be every bit as interesting and important as the art of the past.
Now, if you have [Vincent] van Gogh's [The] Starry Night, or [Pablo] Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the idea that you would shed that for something yet unknown is possibly horrifying. It is certainly why it hasn't happened yet.
But I believe that the future of this museum, if it is to remain different in kind from a more traditionally historic museum, is to solve that problem. Because otherwise, what happens as part of one of my lectures, is the difference between looking through a telescope and looking through a microscope. When you look through a telescope, your field of vision is very broad. Hundreds of years, thousands of years. When you look through a microscope, your field of vision is very flat, but it's magnified enormously.
So, the Museum of Modern Art started out under enormous magnification. It had a very narrow field of vision, whereas the Louvre or the British Museum had a very deep field of vision.
Fast forward to today, our field of vision is no longer so narrow. It extends over almost a century and a half. And, by the time it gets to three centuries, it's not really that different from a place like the Met or the British Museum because eventually it's five centuries and then it's six centuries. And then, really, you are just a historic museum with a different starting date. And I don't think that's what we were meant to be. And so, I've tried to, perhaps successfully, perhaps unsuccessfully, instill the notion that this is a real problem that requires real answers. And to date, we have been able to solve those problems with some fairly dramatic expansions that allowed us more space and different kinds of space to work, but also a fundamentally different approach to the way in which we show the collection, explore the collection, ventilate the collection, and a real expansion in the field of vision of what constitutes artistic practices that we're interested in.
But I've said this before publicly, and I'll certainly say it again; it's not a sustainable position without some fundamental rethinking.
Charlotte Burns: Deaccessioning?
Glenn Lowry: Deaccessioning for me is certainly one part of a strategy, but it's not the only strategy. We have been, over the years, perhaps a more substantial deaccessioner than many institutions because it was foundational to who we were. Our very first major gift came with the encouragement to sell works of art that were not as important as they needed to be in order to acquire other works of art that were more important. So, that idea of metabolic self-renewal was built into our earliest major gift.But that's only one strategy. You have to have an intellectual position, a theory around what constitutes the idea of the museum in order to figure out what to do with all these different parts and how to keep alive the idea that the modern is different than the past or even the future, that we represent something that is foregrounded in an idea of the way in which artistic practices are exercised in the present.
Charlotte Burns: It's an act of hope as well. A sort of pragmatic hopefulness, which I think possibly describes you quite well.Glenn, we're in your final days here. Do you feel that it's going to be hard to leave all of this behind, or are you feeling mixed emotions about that? Are you looking forward to it?
You were meant to retire several times, and the board kept renewing your contract. What kept you going back, and what made you decide now was the time?
Glenn Lowry: Well, first, I was having so much fun. I mean, really, and I don't mean fun in the silly way. I really enjoy working with my colleagues, on staff, in other museums, and our board. I derived an enormous amount of pleasure from that, and that will be very hard to give up, because it's about the relationships and the conversations and the debates and the arguments that animate one's life.But I felt that I had a much longer run than I anticipated, that I was able to do pretty much everything that I thought I wanted to do when I first came to the museum, that I had an idea about what this museum could be back in 1995, that took roughly 25 years to really realize. And then the last five years have been working with that idea.
And again, I want to be really clear, it was never my idea alone. I had an idea of how one could develop an approach that would be very different from what had been the museum's past approach. And I also felt that if I really believed in this notion of metabolic self-renew, it was time to let the organism renew itself, that it takes a long time to realize ideas, and it was time to let someone else with a different idea move the institution in new and different ways. And I'll derive great satisfaction in seeing where that goes, even if it takes the museum to a place that I wouldn't have imagined or I'm uncomfortable with. That's what will make this place different is the courage to constantly revisit its own past, to be self-critical, and to doubt its own truths.
Charlotte Burns: How involved have you been with the appointment of Christophe [Cherix]? Were you involved at all in that?
Glenn Lowry: No. The appointment of the director, rightly, is the purview of the board of trustees. I was nice enough to be kept informed along the way, but I had no involvement whatsoever, nor should I have had an involvement. And, I'm thrilled that, having spent the time to have an international search to look literally around the world, the board felt confident that the answer was here in the museum. And that's a testament, really, to the extraordinary quality of the museum staff.
Charlotte Burns: What do you think people can expect knowing Christophe, having worked with him for so many years?
Glenn Lowry: Surprise. Christophe is a brilliant and gifted curator who's fearless and who will surprise people with the directions he moves the museum. And I think it's one of his great qualities that he can look at an artist we think we know—Marcel Broodthaers, Ed Ruscha, just to name two—and find something new and different in their work that is at once surprising and compelling. And my hope is that he will bring that same spirit to the way he looks at the museum.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So a couple of “what ifs”. You're leaving MoMA in a very strong position. We talked about the endowments, $1.7 billion, grown from around $200 million when you joined the museum. A lot of other museums aren't in such strong financial positions.What if museums aren't sustainable?
Glenn Lowry: Oh, I worry about that all the time. I mean, I think in this country, with our system, the issue really boils down to, for those who have substantial financial commitments in terms of expenses, the answer is endowments.And when I arrived at the museum, the board understood, and I certainly did, and the leadership on staff understood that our endowment, in relationship to our expenses and debt, put us in a very fragile position. And certainly one of the things that we worked on was to make sure that that was not going to be true in the future. And so, I think we have solved, at least for the foreseeable future, for that problem.
But I worry nonstop that museums writ large are very fragile institutions that require a lot of care and nurturing to sustain. They're not going to all go away. That's not going to happen, I hope. But of course, some will be more vulnerable to real seismic shifts that will inevitably happen and where they don't have the resources to sustain themselves.
Charlotte Burns: What if you look back at your long tenure here at MoMA, what will you miss the most?
Glenn Lowry: The conversations with my colleagues in the institution. I'll continue my conversations with colleagues outside the institution, and I'll continue to talk to many people in the museum, but they will be different conversations by definition.The art I'll get to see, and I will come back often to see it and be nourished by it. The relationship with artists will continue, I hope, because they are what animates me. I derive inspiration from the work they do.
But there's something about walking down the hall, and seeing a curator or an educator or somebody in finance, and just striking up a conversation around some interesting topic. I'll miss that enormously. And of course, I'll miss working with our board on a regular basis.
Charlotte Burns: And what if you had to pick a favorite work from MoMA's collection?
Glenn Lowry: Well, I have been obsessing for—you've asked a big question, and you may get an overly long answer.So, I have been thinking a lot about Édouard Glissant and so Édouard Glissant figures very prominently in the lectures that I give at the Louvre, and the incredible painting that Jack Whitten did for Édouard Glissant, which he called Atopolis for Édouard Glissant, which is this magisterial, sweeping painting that's made up of thousands of little tesserae that act like archipelagos in the sea. Each little tessera is its own independent space and then connected to every other tessera.
And this notion of the archipelago is very much how I am beginning to think about the spaces and galleries of a museum, that rather than trying to see them connected enfilade, like beads on a string or haphazardly, I'm beginning to think of them as really an archipelagic experience where there's connectivity across time and space through your relationship to the art, between each gallery as much as the art in each gallery. And so, I've been meditating on how that painting makes me think about the space of the museum differently.
Charlotte Burns: I really like the fact that after all these questions, the one that you found the hardest was the favorite work of art.
But can I ask you, is that an architectural proposition for you? Are you thinking about the construction of a museum there, or is that an imaginaire?
Glenn Lowry: It's an imagined space. There are realities of experiencing art in space, which is, you have to make that work.But I think, actually, that there are new museums that are being created, and I would say the way Peter Zumthor has imagined the new LACMA, it's very much, from my perspective, what I'm thinking about when I talk about archipelagic spaces—clusters of spaces that are connected to each other by the interstice, by the distances between them. And so maybe he's given architectural form to this notion.
But, for me, the part that interests me the most is the imaginary of an archipelagic museum. One in which these spaces don't have to connect to each other in a purely chronological form or be unconnected to each other in an absolute form, but can form clusters and relationships, the way islands and archipelagos are linked to each other, sometimes directly; I move from this island to the next island, straight line. Sometimes indirectly; I move to this island, to that island around another island. Right? So, there are different ways of imagining that experience within a museum and thinking about how that's realized in space.
Charlotte Burns: It is really interesting. And also you're talking about travel, you're talking about Los Angeles, you're talking about new museums and in the episode we've talked about other places that you'll be working, and also your background as an Islamic art scholar. We talked about the founding of MoMA in the early part of the last century, and we've talked about American museums in this part of this century. What if the future of culture and cultural institutions is not in America? Where do you think it would be?
Glenn Lowry: First of all, I'm not American-centric. I am extraordinarily proud of what this country has achieved, and it's nothing short of astounding. But there are lots of other countries that have extraordinary pasts, and indeed presents, today, and new and emerging places that are generating incredible excitement.I spend a lot of time in the Gulf. It's amazing what's going on there. Population isn't as dense, but when you think about fascinating cultural activity, there's an enormous amount there. Very different system, patronized in a very different way, and realized in a very different way, but very ambitious in the same way that culture in this country was very ambitious 100 years ago.
The resurgence of Paris as a cultural center in the last decade is nothing short of extraordinary. Tremendous historic cultural links, but now an efflorescence of new and different cultural spaces and a revival of cultural energy, even in more historic spaces. The French use the word “mondial” instead of “global”, and I really prefer mondial, to me it's more international than global in its inflection.
I really believe that the real excitement that exists is the way in which culture is practiced and exercised across the world as opposed to in any one place.
Charlotte Burns: Together.Glenn, what is the “what if” that keeps you up at night, and what's the one that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Glenn Lowry: Well, they're changing, right? My “what ifs” have changed.The “what if” that keeps me up at night is thinking about how to take all of the knowledge that I have gained from decades of experience and share that with as broad a public as I possibly can.
And the “what if” that gets me up in the morning is, I'm still excited about learning. I am as interested in taking on new challenges and thinking about new ideas and reading new authors and looking at new art and meeting artists as I was 40 years ago.
Charlotte Burns: Okay. My final question for you: do you have any regrets?
Glenn Lowry: I have a lifetime of regrets.You know, I think one of the things that, you know, if you're a…
I mean, yes, the honest answer to that is, largely, no. I mean, I'm an anxious person by definition, so I worry about everything that I didn't do. But I tell my friends, you cannot regret the things you do, because you've done them, and whether you did them well or poorly is irrelevant. You can't regret it because you acted on it.
So, my regrets are the thousands of things that I didn't do. And, you know, that's just life.
Charlotte Burns: I think that's a great note to end on.Glenn, thank you so much for being my guest, our final interview at MoMA. But I'm sure there'll be more conversations to come.
Glenn Lowry: Thank you, Charlotte. Always a pleasure to talk.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much.[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Glenn, as always. We can’t wait to see what you do next.Join us next episode. Allan will be talking to Thelma Golden, the Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, ahead of the opening of the new building in November.
Thelma Golden: I often say if the Studio Museum didn't exist, I think I might have founded it. It would have been in both my head and my heart to create an institution like the Studio Museum, and what's kept me at the Studio Museum is the profound opportunity to have both my passion and my purpose enacted at scale in this institution that holds so much history, so much legacy, but also lives very much consistently looking towards the future.
It’s a great conversation between Allan and Thelma—can’t wait for you to hear it.
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.