At a time of extreme tension in the United States, where fear and anger are on the rise and false narratives are seeping into the collective consciousness, culture and the arts have a key role to play in changing these narratives. That was a powerful message delivered by the opening speaker at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice last week.
American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson opened the annual Forum for Cultural Debate, which has been held since 2015. The forum is organized by the Democracy & Culture Foundation and brings together a panel of experts in key fields in dialogue with reporters from The New York Times. This year’s event kicked off on June 5 at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, before moving on to the 18th-century Palazzo Diedo, headquarters of Berggruen Arts & Culture, the non-profit foundation founded by billionaire collector and philanthropist Nicholas Berggruen. The theme was “Imperfect Beauty.”
Other topics of discussion included the slump in the art market and the potential threat that artificial intelligence poses to creativity.
Opening speaker Stevenson sounded the alarm about the state of democracy just five months before the US presidential election.
“I don’t think we’re free in the United States,” he said.
Stevenson said the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. He also argued that US courts no longer deliver justice. This is because the false narrative that “black people are not as good as white people” and that “black people are inferior, inferior, inferior to white people” that was introduced to justify the “great evil of slavery” has created a white supremacist ideology that “rolls back the rule of law,” he said.
In these volatile times, arts and culture can help achieve social justice and raise the “peace quotient,” he said. “Art has the power to be big and bold.”
Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Montgomery, Alabama-based civil rights group Equal Justice Initiative and author of the best-selling book “Justice, Marcy,” said the group opened its Legacy Museum, a museum focused on racial injustice, in 2018. One exhibit features 800 jars of soil taken from lynching sites across the U.S., inscribed with the victims’ names and hanging dates.
“I don’t think we should be defined by how terrible we are,” he said, “I believe the greatest arts institutions are arts institutions that promote a degree of justice.”
While Stevenson held the art world responsible for curing injustice and social ills, the artists in attendance disagreed with the idea that art can change the world, but the speakers acknowledged that museums can better serve as platforms and forums for public and political debate, reflecting and embracing a rapidly evolving society.
That view was expressed by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, founded by “Star Wars” director George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson. The museum, which is still under construction, is dedicated to the art of storytelling and has collections that include paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Norman Rockwell, comic books, political posters and “Star Wars” memorabilia.
Jackson-Dumont made it clear that in the current climate, “we cannot be a museum and be partisan. In fact, we do not have that privilege.”
At the same time, “the act of building a museum is itself a political act,” she said, noting that every museum she has worked for has had a “point of view” that doesn’t necessarily coincide with hers or that of the general public. And, she added, museums today can no longer be just “providers of information.”
“We can actually be a place where debate happens and conversations about these issues come to the surface,” she said, adding that museums are “safer places to do that” than other places in the world where such discussions can be “extremely dangerous.”
“If we can elevate museums as places for these conversations, I think we have a great future,” she said, “but if we remain just purveyors of information, I think we’re doomed.”
One artist whose work consistently explores social and political themes such as race, slavery, migration and human destruction of animals and the environment is John Akomfrah, who represented the UK at the Venice Biennale this year with a series of film installations.
During a panel later, Akomfrah rejected the romantic notion that art and culture have revolutionary power. “Art does a lot of things,” he said. “What art can’t do is change the world. At its best, art can change people and potentially ‘change the narrative.'”
He said that in the rapidly evolving world of contemporary art, artists no longer just produce paintings or sculptures, but rather works that are destined not to be housed in museum collections but to “exist in the space of a museum without walls.”
They are producing writings, performances and interventions that are forms of protest, and museums need to make space for these works, he said.
“Not everything is tangible and collectable,” he says, “not everything can be commodified. Museums need to be open enough to let in things that don’t necessarily want to belong there.”
These works are “one-time partnerships or contracts and then they’re gone. They’re temporary. We don’t want them to be collected.”
The meeting came against the backdrop of upheaval in the international auction world. High-profile big-ticket auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips in New York in May were down 22% compared to May 2023. Christie’s canceled a planned June overnight auction of 20th- and 21st-century art in London after being hacked just before the auction. Sotheby’s confirmed it was cutting dozens of jobs in London.
Speaking on a panel on the topic, Magnus Loesch, an art-market economist at the Yale School of Management, said the fundamental problem with the market is that the number of buyers has remained “fairly stable” over the past decade, even as the number of billionaires around the world has doubled. The challenge is turning the “nouveau riche” into active buyers.
Co-star Thaddeus Ropac, founder of one of the world’s leading international galleries, downplayed the recent developments.
“The art market is only a small part of the art world,” he said, adding that it had been overvalued in the media and in the public eye, and “it’s our job to put it back where it belongs.”
“I feel very relieved about where we are right now because this is pretty much what we wanted,” he said. “It feels like a soft landing.”
Another hotly debated topic in Venice was artificial intelligence, with speakers asked whether they welcomed or feared a key role for artificial intelligence in creativity.
“I’m very much in between,” said Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the digital platform Acute Art, who previously ran Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and was a curator at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Artists are “interested in things beyond themselves,” he explained, and AI now contributes to “hybrid forms of creativity.”
Panelist Freya Salway, who heads the Google Arts and Culture Lab, said Google worked with choreographer Wayne McGregor over the course of two years to develop an AI tool for him, who fed 20 years of his work into the tool to have a more active dialogue with it and is still using it today, Salway said.
A choreographer inputs movements into the machine, and the machine then augments those movements, rather than replicating McGregor’s previous movements, she explained. In other words, the dance is a co-creation between human and machine.
It all depends on “how we as humans use the tools,” she said. “We can create really meaningful and inspiring forms of expression.”
Marcello Dantas, artistic director of the SFER IK Museion in Tulum, Mexico, said the museum had called for artists to develop an AI piece that would be a platform for dialogue with other species. The winning artist would receive $100,000, and four others would receive artist residencies.
One of his projects over the past six months has been to observe and record bats with the aim of deciphering and understanding their language. “We now know the words bats use to say yes and no,” he says. “This is groundbreaking.”
“If you could talk to bats, this is an essential question for us: what would they say? What doors would that open?” Dantas asked.
One of the final speakers at the three-day conference was the Irish-born painter Sean Scully, who was asked to define art and the role of the artist.
“An artist is someone who offers possibilities,” he said. “Can art change traffic in a big city? No. Can art fix a car? No. Can art cure cancer? No. But art offers possibilities. The role of art is to improve the human condition.”
“This is what it means to be an artist,” he said. “You’re a dreamer.”