“We all thought it was a joke, until it wasn’t.”
The American visual artist Theaster Gates had stark words about the new U.S. administration’s cuts to culture funding.
Speaking on the opening night of the Art for Tomorrow conference last week in Milan, Gates noted that culture in the United States was being affected “in a way that I never could have imagined” by the “dismantling” of systems and organizations. The slashing of grants to arts groups nationwide had left several of his friends without jobs, he said.
His conclusion: citizens such as himself should mobilize to help the communities they believe in, rather than “expecting that work to happen only at the top,” because a disengagement from political life would have “tremendous consequence,” he said.
Gates was one of several prominent visual artists in the spotlight at this year’s Art for Tomorrow conference. The British sculptor Antony Gormley, the Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat and the American painter David Salle each gave presentations of their own. And on the event’s closing night, the American artist Jeff Koons appeared onstage at the Teatro Lirico, a jewel of Milanese architecture inaugurated in 1779, which long served as Milan’s second opera house.
Another jewel of Milanese architecture served as the conference’s main venue: the Triennale Milano, a vast 1930s building which hosts an international exhibition of the same name every three years, in which architects, designers and artists reflect on a theme.
This year’s exhibition, “Inequalities” (through Nov. 9), opened the same week as Art for Tomorrow, allowing the two events to share themes and talent. (Art for Tomorrow, which began in 2015 and takes place annually, is organized by the Democracy and Culture Foundation and features panels and presentations moderated by New York Times journalists and others.)
Gates, who had an art installation in the Triennale show, dedicates much of his art practice to taking over derelict spaces and turning them into centers of art and culture. He lives on the South Side of Chicago, not far from St. Mary of the Assumption Church, where Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — regularly attended services as a boy, and which has fallen into disrepair.
Asked about the pope’s longtime place of worship during his talk at the conference, Gates said it was on a list of properties that the Archdiocese of Chicago was currently looking to sell.
“The archdiocese can desacralize a church” and “essentially take the spirit of God” out of it, he explained. “The building is left to be a building.”
Architecture came up in a panel discussion on the conference’s opening night. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect Norman Foster, who curated a stand-alone section on emergency housing in the “Inequalities” exhibition, noted that some 14 percent of humanity — more than 1 billion people — lived in slums, and lacked adequate shelter, modern sanitation, clean water or electricity.
“The conventional solution is to bulldoze them, to relocate those communities, often away from their source of livelihood,” he said. And yet delivering suitable housing for humanity was the “very essence” of architecture, he added, noting that his practice had, at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, presented a prefabricated unit that could be produced at scale and serve as an emergency home.
Foster is not the only architect offering emergency housing solutions. In 2015, Zaha Hadid Architects designed modular tents that could be used as emergency shelters, schools and clinics for displaced communities.
Stefano Boeri, a fellow architect — who is the president of the Triennale Milano, and who commissioned the “Inequalities” exhibition — spoke out in the same panel against housing inequality closer to home. He said average rents in Milan had gone up by 22 percent in the last 10 years, and the average income by only 12 percent, with “the poorest parts of the city” particularly hard hit. He urged Italian policymakers to “rebalance this unacceptable contradiction.”
One policymaker present was Tommaso Sacchi, Milan’s deputy mayor for culture. He said during another panel that Milan was in the midst of a “transformation” and that “something has radically changed in the perception” of the city. While design and fashion are areas that the city is very much invested in and internationally recognized for, it was important, he said, not to “focus only on the big brands,” but also on other sectors, such as Milan’s broader culture and heritage.
While Milan is still best known as Italy’s capital of business and fashion, its profile as a contemporary-art hub has been raised considerably by two major private institutions that have opened since 2000: Pirelli HangarBicocca (established by the tire-maker Pirelli) and the Fondazione Prada headquarters (founded by the Prada fashion house).
Later this year, the arrival in Milan of the prominent international gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac — who is opening his first Italian outpost in Milan — will further boost the city’s art profile. Ropac and other dealers stand to benefit from the recent influx of high-net-worth individuals enticed, in part, by Italy’s advantageous new tax system: Foreign income earners who make Italy their residence pay an annual flat tax on all of their income (currently amounting to 200,000 euros, or about $223,000).
The outlook at the top of the global art market, however, is bleak.
This year’s conference coincided with disappointing results at the marquee art auctions in New York, as the most expensive lot in the spring sales — a bronze Giacometti bust priced at more than $70 million — failed to sell at Sotheby’s, and Warhol’s “Big Electric Chair” (estimated at about $30 million) was withdrawn at the last minute from a Christie’s auction.
The market is “stagnating,” and the “hot money” is no longer chasing art, said the Belgian collector Alain Servais in a panel discussion on the art market. He said people “don’t believe” in the art market anymore because a lack of transparency and of price consistency (between the galleries and the auction houses) means that art is “not functioning as an investment.”
The Italian gallerist Massimo De Carlo offered a similar analysis.
“It’s a difficult moment,” he said in a separate conversation. He said that in recent decades, the dominant narrative had been to link art to finance. “To buy art was a good deal, an investment,” and people purchased works to be “part of the deal,” he said. This narrative “gave wealth to everybody, to culture, to business,” but was misguided, because it overlooked the fact that buying art carried the risk of a price decrease, he said, adding that it was time for the art world to change its “business model.”
One standout contributor to both the exhibition and the conference was Beatriz Colomina, a professor of architecture at Princeton University and co-curator of a section in the exhibition titled “We the Bacteria.”
An exhibition wall text explained that for more than 4 billion years, tiny microorganisms had “transformed the crust of the Earth so that it could be inhabited by other organisms,” and microbes were “the architects, builders, maintenance workers and inhabitants of the biosphere and every form of life within it — including humans.”
The biosphere’s highest density of microbes was in humans’ 8-centimeter-wide colons, and the second highest was in the 10 centimeters of the Earth’s topsoil. But in the last 10,000 years, “humans have used buildings to separate themselves from the soil they evolved with for hundreds of thousands of years — dramatically reshaping themselves and the microbial world they are part of.”
In a panel discussion, she noted that while humans have hundreds of trillions of microbes living inside us, and “we depend on them for our survival, for our health, for our mental health,” we have “an antagonistic rapport with bacteria.”
As a result, she said, we are “losing microbial diversity at such a speed” that “this is a bigger crisis to our species than climate change.” In fact, she added, “this will kill us first.”
Architecture and the kind of buildings we design and live in were, in large part, at fault, she said: “We need to make architecture related to the soil and not about killing bacteria.”
While speakers and panelists were busy debating aspects of art, architecture, the art market and biodiversity, the killing continued in conflict zones around the world, including Ukraine and Gaza.
In a panel on art and war, Nomi Bar-Yaacov, an international peace negotiator and a former United Nations adviser, said the situation was a lot worse than it was 20 years ago.
“There is a crisis of leadership in the world,” she said. “There are countries that bragged about being the leading democracies in the world that are acting in an autocratic fashion.”
Because of the “irresponsible” role played by the world’s giant technology companies, “it has become fashionable to be rebellious and anti-democratic. So it’s a massive threat to democracy.”
Her co-panelist Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese political cartoonist, expressed similar concerns.
“This is a time where people like me, artists, activists, feel like we are in a different world, because there’s no safe space,” he said. Previously, if you were an artist or activist and had “issues with your dictator,” he said, there were countries supporting freedom of speech and expression and democracy who would say, “we can host you and you can continue your work.”
“Now this does not exist, as we can see with all the deportations that are happening,” he said, referring to the deportation of migrants in countries such as the United States. “So for people like me, this is a very different time.”
Wrapping up the conference onstage at the Teatro Lirico, Koons sounded an optimistic note. As slides of many of his best-known sculptures looped on a giant screen, he conveyed the pleasure he had in doing what he did. There was “a joy in being able to participate,” and “the joy, also, to share what you’ve perceived — with others.”
He said the Art for Tomorrow conference was a celebration of “what we can become through the arts, how we can transcend and grow,” but more important, “how we can take that knowledge and share it with others.”
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