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My assumptions about how the art world will change in the next decade similarly reflect what I am already hearing and seeing now, at the end of 2019. Drawing on the news and opinions that have recently pervaded galleries, museums and my conversations with artists and academics, I foresee big and small changes that will spread throughout the industry. These informed speculations reflect some widely shared desires and fears for where the art world is heading and prove more likely than extraterrestrial takeovers.
Illustrations by Liana Finck for Artsy.
Museum administrators will have to go through a more thorough scrutiny
The fact that many museum employees are underpaid only exacerbates staff resentment over money at the top of the pipeline. While unions sweep industry (the Guggenheim, New Museum, Frye Art Museum, is MOCA Los Angeles all unionized this year), donors and senior management may increasingly worry about the well-being of those working at the lowest institutional rungs or will lose the talent of non-trust funds in favor of fairer workplaces, mostly likely outside the art world.
Art history departments will become increasingly diversified
University art history departments are gradually replacing their Western art faculty with experts in other fields. As Bryn Mawr professor Steven J. Levine recently shared with me, institutions that once relied on scholars specializing in a single artist (white, male) -
—Now they assign to their non-Western art historians departments experts in specific regions of the world. They prioritize a broader vision, with less emphasis on individual artists.
What the departments will lack in depth regarding, for example, 19th and early 20th century French art, they will make up for in an international perspective.
I predict it will continue into the 1920s. Our global, tech-savvy, attention-distracted, and interconnected era is not set up for intensive study on a single artist. The era of the lone genius is over and I don't think it's coming back.
The pendulum will return to abstraction
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Artists will continue to embrace Instagram
Mega galleries will only have more mega
Meantime, Gagosian opened an office in Basel during the summer, expanding its portfolio to 17 exhibition spaces in 10 cities.
David Zwirner, whose galleries grace four relatively lean cities, nevertheless has established its dominance as a media organization, having launched a partnership with the big five publishers Simon & Schuster this year and a podcast in 2018. The gallery has also expanded into Paris in October and will open a file
Renzo Piano - gallery designed in Chelsea in 2021.
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