The Art World: What If...?! with Allan Schwartzman

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 is heading next. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.  Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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 the mentors who shaped her, to her 25 years at the Studio Museum. She speaks about leading an institution that is at once hyperlocal and hyperglobal, and about building the structures and spaces that nurture generations of artists, curators, and thinkers. This new Studio Museum stands a testament to possibility, asking: What if we imagined and created the spaces necessary for art and ideas to truly flourish? Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.  Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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?  Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.  Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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 imagination to create spaces of freedom.  Through the universes they create, Sin Wai Kin explores time, identity, and consciousness— inviting us to question the binary of reality and fantasy, asking: what if multiple things can be true at once?  What if we could imagine different ways of being in the world?  Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.  Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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 isn’t just a slowdown, but the beginning of a new art economy? Listen in for clear signals amid the noise—and where the art world could go next. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.  Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! Dive in at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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 challenges of her groundbreaking projects, including the Mobile Museum—which brings art into kiosks on street corners and tours it through local communities—and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia, which reorders and re-presents knowledge, narratives, and representations from across the African continent, the first of which launches this year. Fifty years after critic John Berger cracked open the canon of art history with Ways of Seeing, Nana is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy of books. She speaks candidly about reimagining Berger’s radical gesture for our time, reckoning with the limits of Western paradigms, and building from indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself. What if the future of art looked more like a festival than a mausoleum? Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.  Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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 institutional blind spots, to thinking about the role of artists as citizens. He shares the advice he’d give his younger self and the doubts that continue to drive him forward. This is a conversation about art and history, about freedom and responsibility.  What if the real work of artists is to imagine the future we don’t yet know how to describe? Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com. Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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 across Africa, and why she believes in looking for "new suns" even in difficult times, sharing insights about the projects and people inspiring her now. The ecosystem needs tending, she says. The seeds need space to grow. What if we stopped trying to do it alone? Follow us: @schwartzman.art Website: www.schwartzmanand.com/

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 art is supported? Follow us: @schwartzman.art Website: www.schwartzmanand.com/

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 we survive? Denes planted wheat in downtown Manhattan on landfill that would become Battery Park City. She made ecological art before climate change was front page news. Her work spans conceptual art, poetry, drawings, installations, sculptures, writings and more. Twenty thousand pieces, mostly never seen. Today? She hands out wheat seeds like promises. Plant hope. Harvest peace. Become part of the art. The questions never change, she says. Only their importance shifts. What if we listened? Follow us: @schwartzman.art Website: www.schwartzmanand.com/