What if we reimagined everything in culture, from painting to patronage? Tune in to The Art World: What If…?! to hear leading thinkers, creators and innovators in art rethink the system, exploring the consequences with wit, wisdom and humor. Join art journalist Charlotte Burns and world-renowned art advisor Allan Schwartzman as they exclusively interview museum leaders, collectors and artists including MoMA director Glenn Lowry, Guggenheim deputy director Naomi Beckwith, non-profit leader Kemi…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
