Ben Davis

TS

I’d like to begin by asking about the relationship between museums and education. In your review of the 2024 Venice Biennale, you highlight a recurring pattern of institutions and curators using their curatorial framework to educate the audience on historically marginalized art. However, you also note the contradiction in how they both critique and actively shape a new language of institutional authority. In your view, how do art and educational institutions shape our understanding of art, and how has their relationship evolved over time?

BD

There’s a general sense of a crisis among museums and there are lots of different pieces to that puzzle. There are funding and political pressures, and questions of equity and diversity, pay and power—but I think a piece of this that is a little upstream is the question of the museum's relationship to education and the changing place of education in our culture.

You have to start with understanding that one of the distinctive things about museum culture is that it’s tied to education, and has been for as long as we know. Education is also the biggest determiner of whether you like art—each level of further education increases your likelihood of becoming attached to art in the museum context. It’s more correlated than almost any other factor: more correlated than race, more correlated than economic class.

So when you’re talking about the future of the museum audience—including both patrons and the general audience—it’s going to be affected by the different ways the public is exposed to education, how the symbols of art become legible and valuable for them. For a long time, whether people knew it or not, one of the primary functions of museum and art culture was to give people a language of prestige: either to give those with high status a language to signal it to each other, or to give people who aspired to high status a way to signal that they wanted to be part of a certain social set. Going to the museum was a symbol of class status or classiness.

TS

There’s often an assumption that art holds inherent cultural importance, an inherent ‘classiness.’Given the shifting landscape of prestige and public engagement, do you think this assumed self-importance of ‘capital A art’ is sustainable?

BD

If you read the very famous essay from the ’50s by English writer and chemist C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” Snow talks about the “two cultures:” the humanities and the sciences. His intervention is to say that the two cultures don’t really communicate and that one of the great challenges of modernity was that we had become specialized and these ways of thinking became separated. What’s very striking now when you read that text is Snow’s assumption about who is on top. His assumption is that the humanities have higher status: the humanities were the arena of those who would govern. You had to have some understanding of history so you could command the language of the nation and command the respect of the other people who had power. For Snow, the technical people were the engineers and the scientists, and they were kind of the worker bees. They were doing their own important work in their own space, but it was invisible culturally. Obviously that has completely reversed over time, and particularly recently. Technology has become more and more symbolically dominant, while the humanities are having a harder time at the higher education level.

In part that’s a consequence of economic uncertainty, because post-2008—with the expanding cost of higher education and economic uncertainty, as well as expanding public conversation about student debt— there's much more pressure on young people to have some kind of instrumental outcome for their studies. Our culture in general is much more instrumental.

But the language of cultural prestige also changed, as technological platforms became celebrated for opening up communication. The new digital space synthesizes popular cultural production with the language of data and information and measurement in a way that creates a new language of prestige—I called this “quantitative aesthetics” last year—and technological fields value the future much more than symbols of the past, which just seems like worse stuff.

So there is a large-scale erosion of the basis for the public to be engaged with this field. I think it’s important to start the conversation there, because although people are aware of a sense of insecurity in the arts, in its way, art has been pretty lucky. It’s been able to reinvent itself, continuously capturing the cultural zeitgeist over a long period of time.

Although people are aware of these kinds of problems, sometimes the conversation still assumes there’s a sense of natural self-importance. It’s like our Art with a capital A is inherently important. But where does that sense of self-importance come from? What was the basis of the audience in the first place, not as a counterculture but as a mainstream object of support? What needs to be reinvented?

TS

With the rise of social media and the internet, it seems like the way people learn about and interact with art has changed dramatically. In many ways, when we think about how we learn what art is important, the traditional, text-based approach seems to be giving way to image-based, algorithm-driven encounters. How would you describe the disconnect between older educational models and newer modes of engagement with art?

BD

I have a chapter about this in my book called “From the Art World to the Culture Network,” and I reference a really important essay by Lawrence Alloway from 1973 called “Network: The Art World Described as a System.” Alloway makes this point that when we say “art world,” we don’t mean the production of art. We’re not talking about where art is produced. That concept of the art world is defined by the institutions of circulation: how images and texts circulate, how representations of art circulate, and the fact that there’s a conversation around the art that has its own separate institutions of discourse, production, and exhibition. When you say “art world” casually, all that is implied.

Conceptual art was about, above all, finding new modes of circulation of art in a society with a lot of new media tools at its disposal, about how you could distribute art in new ways. To a certain extent, those hopes had very 60s, countercultural aspirations in them—to create alternative modes of circulation. I interviewed Lucy Lippard not that long ago, and one of the things she talks about is that, before Conceptual art, there was this very clear model of how an artist’s career was supposed to work: you went from a little show, to being discovered by a dealer, then being valued by a critic, then being discovered by a curator, who then would give you a museum show, etc. The aspirations of Conceptual art were that maybe you could skip some of these gatekeepers and choke points—in this new paradigm, maybe you could represent yourself; maybe art that circulated as media allowed you to represent yourself somehow, to become your own media coverage, or provide an alternative way to be seen, a more direct connection to the audience. Of course, Lippard says that the hopes for that were very quickly disabused by the mid-1970s. My argument is that social media realized some of those hopes, just without any of the radical politics.

TS

What do you believe is the current status of the so-called “art world?

BD

The idea of a special “art world”—even though people don’t necessarily cognize it—did really break down in the last ten years. Your sense of the art world, of there even being an art world that is special, is inseparable from having separate art institutions and the dense way information circulates within and between them. But dedicated institutions of art education are not really how the largest number of people are finding art. People are consuming a lot of images of art in spaces that no longer have a relationship to any kind of traditional art-world context, through social media and the internet. The production of value there isn’t informed by critics or art historians—it’s informed by algorithms or aggregated “likes,” and that means different kinds of values dominate, even when the material is the same. The conversation about art as it emerges in these networks is sometimes uninformed or differently informed. It also means that the sense of a geographically specific cultural community isn’t as clearly defined as it used to be. These platforms select for a certain kind of aesthetic and discourse, different than museums or art magazines on their own. I think that’s a very important basic point: the institutions of circulation shape what values dominate; they’re not just a vehicle. And that’s the other half of the evolution of the art world: as people have started consuming art and images of art in these new, dispersed ways, that has also undermined and thinned out the old ways of talking about art. And without a critical mass of art criticism and debate, you may have something that looks like art but it won’t feel like art.

TS

That brings up another interesting issue. Many people argue that the old, traditional art world is elitist, while the new networked art world is more populist. In your opinion, does this dichotomy capture the full picture?

BD

Well, I don't think it’s necessarily wrong. People like Lucy Lippard had great populist hopes for art connected and articulated with political beliefs. And social media has fulfilled some of this organically, without anybody connecting it to that old conversation about the politics of Conceptual art. You have access to a lot more diversity in terms of race, in terms of sexual identity, and in terms of geography in the internet age.

But—and I smile when I say this, because it’s a very Marxist cliché—you have to have a dialectical approach in which things have a complex identity and truth is found passing through contradiction. What the populist and elitist opposition doesn’t capture is that there might be good and bad forms of both. And then, if you’re a dialectical materialist, that means that the determinant factor is not just a conflict of ideas; the material reality of who has power is going to determine how these values play out and resolve themselves.

I would say that both what you call the old elitist art world and the new networked art world have good things and bad things about them. You can, to a certain extent, try and take the good parts of them and put them together. And that’s maybe what we’re trying to do—to identify and save the best from the past that’s good, and combine it with the best of the present. I mean, a lot of what is bad about the new situation has to do with the material structure of the attention economy as it enters into our lives. You can frame it as stodgy gatekeepers having to open up what they’re doing to this new wave of democratization of culture, though “democratization” is such an abused term. There’s no democracy and there’s no government that people are voting for here; it’s just likes and attention. And these companies are optimizing for their own profit, their own business lines, which have very little to do with the health of culture.

That said, plenty of extremely wealthy people still have veto power over what happens in art. You just have, added to them, a lot of new invisible gatekeeping in the form of the technological power that controls and regulates our attention. And those have synthesized and changed ideas of cultural prestige in ways that are the opposite of democratic. In some ways, you have a new cultural system whose values are a combination of the worst of the past and present.

And you do have the possibility to actually lose what we call art itself. I do actually believe that. I think there have been various points in our history when people have said, “Oh, this is the end of art,” and art went on. But that doesn’t mean the statement will always by definition be untrue or impossible. There are absolutely certain things that art stands for—as a way of thinking, a form of life—that we can lose if the institutions that support it erode, if society ultimately does not find a place for it that isn't just one form of content among another.

TS

What role do you think museum educators play today, and do you think museums should be investing more in these kinds of roles?

BD

To a certain extent, I think it’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of whether art survives: what are the popular educational entry points for the public? I always talk about my time when I was a tour guide for kids and elderly folks at the Walker Art Center. It was really significant in terms of making me realize how art communicates in different ways to different people.

I would just say that the question of how art is interpreted and taught isn’t a secondary consideration; it’s the central creative problem to solve. We’re in a moment when maybe some of that can and possibly should be rethought. Art only lives in terms of it being revisited, with people constantly returning to it, doing new things with it, making new conversations about it—with new artists being inspired by it. When you talk about Art with a capital A, that is what you mean: the objects that perpetually circulate in the discourse.

There’s all this writing about cultural decline and how all the art now is bad and so on. I actually don’ t really believe that. I think that that’s a little bit of a lazy conversation. I mean, phenomenal art is being made in galleries. There are great movies, there are great TV shows—mainstream cultural objects that in some ways are indistinguishable from conceptual artworks. If a museum staged something like Peter Jackson’s film about the Beatles recording Let It Be, no one would have any question that it worked as art. It’s this immersive depiction of this important cultural moment, where you watch the creative process unfolding like a durational piece—a Ragnar Kjartansson-esque installation. We live in a time when, potentially, the high-brow/low-brow distinction truly does not make sense anymore.

What is difficult is that there is such an immense quantity of culture, and the extremely commodified nature of our environment means there’s always an incentive for the conversation to move on to the next thing. Experience becomes very disconnected and tends to break any continuous conversation with the recent past in particular—which is the real reason people complain that “recent art feels like it doesn’t matter.” Because the deep past is already set. The Mona Lisa is a rock star. It will always be good for a story. But it’s really the art of the last thirty years or so—the stuff that hasn’t yet taken its fixed place in history— that starts to feel thinner and thinner. That lack of enduring conversation about new touchstones—the things that people keep returning to, the artworks that inspire new responses in a continuous dialogue—is one of the big near-term artistic problems. And you can’t really count on traditional institutions of information circulation to do that work for you anymore; they default either to what is relevant right now or things whose popularity is settled, leaving the recent past to fade out. That’s a problem for museums but an opportunity if you can identify that as the problem, and solve the problem.