[INTERVIEW]
After the Art Fair
We sat down with curator and director of Acute Art Daniel Birnbaum to reflect on the evolving role of museums and the shifting infrastructures of contemporary art in a globalized, post-pandemic world. With decades of experience shaping exhibitions and platforms across institutions, Birnbaum shares his views on decentralization, digital art, climate-conscious curation, and the paradoxes of access and ownership in a time of technological acceleration. Whether discussing the rise of AR art installations, the fall of NFTs, or the enduring power of physical encounters with art, Birnbaum offers a critical yet imaginative vision for what the museum—and the art world—might become next.
As someone who's been very involved in curation over the last few decades, how have you seen museums evolve?
Big question. On the one hand, contemporary art has become incredibly popular. It used to be a more specialized world, and I remember when I was a student in New York in the mid 90’s, I used to go to MoMA or the Metropolitan and be almost alone in my favorite galleries. Of course this is just anecdotal, but it really isn’t like that anymore. It’s also a globalized world now, and there are many museums all over the world and contemporary art has become a kind of visual industry. I recently turned 60 and the field has radically changed during my lifetime.
Peter Schjeldahl wrote an article about festivalism and the world of biennales, art fairs and similar events all over the world that he was fascinated but frustrated with because, as he said, they were beyond criticism. It’s not possible to go to one of those events and review them. They’re beyond all this, but they have started to spread all over the world.
It also used to be a smaller world. There used to be the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, the Carnegie International, and maybe a handful more. And suddenly biennales opened everywhere. I mention this because it's a different context for art when all these things happen, and only in some parts of the world. Of course, there isn't this infrastructure that we know in big cities like London or New York, or even in Germany. Every medium-sized German city has a constant museum and an Art Academy. But for instance, in Asia, that's not the case.
The art world that I'm referring to when I talk about the 80’s and 90’s used to be a very western affair. It was New York and LA, of course, but then there used to be Cologne that almost disappeared because everything moved to Berlin. People felt that it was a German-American affair with a few French people, a few Brits, perhaps one person from Scandinavia, and a few Italians involved, which led to a much richer art world.
As we know, art has always been produced in every part of the world. But suddenly it became a given that the big biennials and the big platforms should emphasize Latin, American, African, and Asian art and one could see the effects of that in the Venice Biennale. There were always pavilions from different parts of the world, and they kept growing. So what started as a western show became a global affair.
It took a while for the museums to catch up, but now the big museums in the West, like the Tate or MoMA, are all aware of the fact that there's art from different parts of the world. It was a significantly different starting point to try and mirror the global scene rather than to mimic what happens in a few Western capitals. So those have been some very big changes in the last decades.
Koo Jeong A, density, 2019, from the series Prerequisites 7. Courtesy of Acute Art
One of the interesting things you mentioned is this idea of discovering new geographies through the lens of art. There is an increasing amount of talk of sending works back to their places of origin, and simultaneously, we're speaking of contemporary artists from different countries circulating through these big metropolitan museums. We’re curious to get your thoughts on how these museums are embassies for different cultures? And is it the place of museums to be holding on to their own culture, or to be, in a way, airports to other cultures as well?
It's interesting that you mentioned these two tendencies as simultaneous or synchronized somehow, because it's true. I haven't thought so much about it because I never worked for a museum that has more classical collections and works from other countries. I don't know if the metaphor of the airport is what everyone would agree with. Most museums want to be international, or even global. It’s clear that one cannot collect everything, and every museum has its weaknesses and its strengths. Since one cannot collect everything or show everything, it's interesting to find works that somehow relate and make visible the strengths of the museum. But larger museums, such as the Tate and the MoMA, have committees for each continent and really try to be global.
During the last couple decades, new movements around food have been about re-anchoring the experience of traveling, and having restaurants that are very grounded in local culture and terroir, such as the new Nordic cuisine, for instance. But ironically one finds these restaurants all over the world. Just like in museums, we still travel around, but keep encountering things from everywhere, which creates a bit of a dissonance.
I actually think that you're onto something quite interesting, because maybe museums are not the fastest to adjust to the zeitgeist. If you look at what younger artists are interested in, there is probably more of that local cuisine approach to things, which was a change that partly happened during COVID, when things were localized in a new way. There are a lot of people who would insist that everything should be homemade and more local, and numerous such developments. For instance, the museum where I used to work said they would only show local artists, so long as everything was locally produced. They didn't keep the promise forever, but it was in sync with what you asked about.
I think the whole conversation around the climate crisis will lead to such changes, and people will insist on it, actually. I have been thinking that the international conversation should be able to continue without having to fly to another continent to participate in a conference at the museum around climate issues and then fly home again (a paradoxical approach that many of us have been a part of). The whole art fair and Biennale model seems incompatible with a new climate awareness, and that's where I think that maybe new technologies will play a role.
“Contemporary art has become a kind of visual industry… What started as a western show became a global affair.”
— Daniel Birnbaum
In our Hospitality 3.0 Framework, we speak about the big world fairs in London and Paris as being early forms of tourism, where for the first time, a lot of people had the feeling of encountering cultures that they would never be able to dream of traveling to in the late 19th century. And we're seeing the metaverse going full circle as a way of creating a space where we could travel virtually and through art and different communities. I know you've worked with Acute Art for a few years with this idea of virtual artwork, and I’m wondering how you see it having an importance over the next decades?
During COVID, when all museums were shut down, I did these experiments with VR and of course, no one wanted to wear headsets at the time. So we started to do things that incorporated AR, things that you could see using a phone or an iPad, without having to rely on a headset. We did a number of events in different cities, and even though we couldn’t travel, we could send AR pieces to Buenos Aires, Beijing, Singapore and to New York. That’s when I started to understand that there will be other art forms in the near future. When we started working with VR, we were a bit overwhelmed and weren’t sure how it would develop, but that was 10 years ago and I feel it's still pretty much the same. AR is different. You weave it into the real world, you have to go somewhere.
To go back to your question, I think there will be new formations. Let’s take the world of art fairs and festivals: Everyone thought it was a given that one would have to travel to Shanghai to see a biennial. That will not necessarily be the case. Maybe these new technologies will actually give rise to other kinds of institutional possibilities and international conversations and collaborations that no longer involve creating art, shipping it, and traveling across the globe to view it. And it's already happening; one can go anywhere without traveling. You can be in the jungle, or you can go see the pyramids, and this can be considered digital tourism. I don’t see what we’re trying to do as tourism, but more so as experiments that give us a glimpse of things to come.
How do you see these new technologies as a means of helping decenter some of these existing cultural narratives into a new form of activism, which connects back to climate conversations, and the idea of living in a more hospitable world?
I mean, now I should be my own worst critic, otherwise I will just sound naive. Nothing that happens using the internet is environmentally totally harmless. But compared to shipping a Richard Serra sculpture to the desert, I think we still have possibilities that haven’t really been explored here. For instance, there's a Korean artist called Koo Jeong A, who had the Korean Pavilion this summer, and just before COVID, we collaborated on an AR cube, which was an intelligent object. It didn’t involve advanced AI or anything, but it had some tricks built into it. Most AR works can only be seen through telephones, iPads or mixed reality glasses, but we didn't have any of those. Instead, people walked around in Regent’s Park, and that little cube that looked like a minimal art object turned and reflected its environment, so it looked very different if we placed it in the park or in the city and or in the evening. Later, the object started to travel and was shown in many places like Germany, in South Korea, Canada, and I think in New York, among others.
The reason why everyone was engaged with these works was that there was nothing else to compare around the time of COVID; we had no competition. When we did an installation along the river, there were hundreds of people at the opening and I think thousands of people saw it. All they had to do was walk along the Thames between Waterloo Bridge and Tate Modern and they could see the works of art, take photos and share them with their friends.
I tell you about this also to emphasize that when COVID was more or less over and everything reopened, not even video art was so popular anymore. People really enjoy physical works and getting together in real life. The concept of traveling the world to view works of art seems to be livelier than ever, despite everyone's awareness on climate issues, but I don't think these trends will go away anytime soon.
What we did wasn't technically fantastic, it was what was possible. And I think we were among the first to do it with very well known artists and with some sense of commitment to doing big shows. But that had its moment, and I don't really know what the next step is at the moment. When it came to the topic of owning these works, we always thought that they could maybe be collected or perhaps even streamed. But then came the whole world of artificially produced scarcity, where you insist that these things can be anchored in the blockchain, and one can decide that there are only five of them or one of them, at which point it becomes something one can own and sell. We never went down this route and we watched the whole trend of NFTs rise and then collapse. I don't know if it will make a comeback, but we thought we were producing art that would not be about unique objects that should be collected by a few rich people. We thought what we were doing was the opposite of that, a sort of democratizing moment. There are many things to think about here: Could art actually be an experience rather than an asset? Could it be similar to what has happened to music and film that’s streamed, rather than screened-only? Will such things happen in the art world? I'm not quite sure at the moment.
Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish curator, art critic, and philosopher. He currently serves as Artistic Director of Acute Art in London, a studio pioneering virtual and augmented reality collaborations with artists. Previously, he directed Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and curated major international exhibitions, including the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. A contributing editor at Artforum, Birnbaum has written extensively on art and philosophy, exploring the evolving relationship between contemporary art and emerging technologies.