The Art World: What If...?! Transforming Museums with Mia Locks, Fatoş Üstek and Laura Raicovich
Release Date: 05/23/2024
The Art World: What If...?! with Allan Schwartzman
The Art World: What If...?!
As this season of The Art World: What If?! takes a break, Charlotte and Allan reflect on the conversations that have shaped it — from artists reimagining knowledge, time, and truth, to institutional leaders grappling with the frameworks that hold culture. Agnes Denes, Glenn Ligon, Sin Wai Kin, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Glenn Lowry, Thelma Golden, and Kemi Ilesanmi offered perspectives that span generations, geographies, and roles in the cultural ecosystem. Together, they reveal a field in flux. Charlotte and Allan look back at what they’ve heard — and ahead to where the art world...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Thelma Golden
The Art World: What If...?!
In this episode, Allan Schwartzman sits down with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, ahead of the November opening of the museum’s first purpose-built home. Rising seven stories and spanning 82,000 square feet on 125th Street, the new building is rooted in the aspirations and vision of the artists, activists, philanthropists, and Harlem residents who founded the institution in 1968. One of the most transformative museum leaders of any era, Golden reflects on her career—from groundbreaking exhibitions at the Whitney straight out of college, to...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Glenn Lowry
The Art World: What If...?!
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....
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The Art World: What If...?! with Sin Wai Kin
The Art World: What If...?!
Artist Sin Wai Kin constructs fantasy worlds to show how storytelling doesn't just reflect reality—it creates it. Through characters like ‘The Storyteller’, and works that present us with newsreaders in parallel universes or boy band members embodying the marketed self, their practice threads the line between frightening and funny, stretching language to places where it becomes both meaningless and profound. In this conversation with host Charlotte Burns, Sin Wai Kin talks about their creative process, their hopes of transforming the personal into the universal and the power of art and...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Allan Schwartzman
The Art World: What If...?!
After a long, news-filled summer, host Charlotte Burns reconvenes with founder Allan Schwartzman to take stock of an art market that feels… different. From major shifts at the auction houses and slowing sales at international fairs to a mounting list of gallery closures, this episode digs into the forces reshaping today’s market. What does contraction mean for artists—especially those losing representation—and for collectors trying to buy wisely without feeding speculation? And why is keeping artists at the center of the conversation more urgent than ever? What if this reset...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Nana Oforiatta-Ayim
The Art World: What If...?!
There is never just one way of seeing. And Nana Oforiatta-Ayim—writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder—has spent her career proving exactly that. For Nana, who founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s critically acclaimed first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, art is not sealed off in white cubes but alive, porous, and connective. In this episode, she opens up about the journey from proving worth to claiming inherent value in conversation with host Charlotte Burns. She speaks about the victories and...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Glenn Ligon
The Art World: What If...?!
Glenn Ligon makes art that asks us to look again. An artist, writer, and curator, his practice moves between the studio and the gallery, the page and the public sphere, spanning painting, neon, print, installation, and beyond. From text-based canvases grounded in the words of James Baldwin to glowing neons that play with the idea of America, and from intimate drawings to monumental works, Glenn explores disappearance, distance, and what happens when language is obscured or transformed. In this conversation, he reflects on the through-lines in his work: from artistic heroes to navigating...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Kemi Ilesanmi
The Art World: What If...?!
Kemi Ilesanmi is planting seeds for the future. Three years ago, she stepped back from running The Laundromat Project, took a gap year in which she visited 13 countries, and came back full of ideas and possibilities. Now she's an independent arts worker. A diaspora weaver. A connector of people and worlds. She says that five core values drive her work: Assume abundance. Foster connections. Multiply knowledge. Center joy. Manifest dreams. In this third conversation with host Charlotte Burns, Kemi reflects on building sustainable institutions, the women who shaped contemporary art...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Allan Schwartzman
The Art World: What If...?!
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 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...
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The Art World: What If...?! with Agnes Denes
The Art World: What If...?!
The artist Agnes Denes saw it coming. Machines taking over. Technology converging with consciousness. History on a pendulum swinging perilously back and forth. In this intimate conversation recorded with host Charlotte Burns in Denes' downtown Manhattan loft apartment and studio space, they talk about her work. When Denes wrote about these things more than 50 years ago, it was prescient, unsettling, and brilliant. Now the artist is in her mid-90s and is still writing and making art every day. And she’s still asking the questions that matter: What is humanity's purpose? What is love? How do...
info_outlineWhat if you were embroiled in a public workplace controversy? And what happens on the other side of the headlines—would you walk away from your field, or would you reengage with it to try and improve upon it? This very special episode is a break from the norm. In it, we discuss museums and change—and what it takes to get to that change. We’re joined by three curators—Mia Locks, director and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward; Fatoş Üstek, curator and former director of the Liverpool Biennial; and Laura Raicovich, writer, curator, and former president and executive director of the Queens Museum. Each of them has been through a public furor. In those moments, they have found a lack of institutional support and, afterwards, each has shifted from their previous career paths. But each has reengaged with the field in more ambitious and ultimately hopeful ways. Museums can't be taken for granted. But what does it take to create change? Tune in now for more.