Edgar Allen Beem – András Szántó: The Future of the Art World

András Szántó takes the pulse of the art world.

András Szántó once ran the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and now is a sought-after advisor to museums all over the world. I know Szántó through the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the Portland-based nonprofit that gives eight $50,000 Rabkin Prizes each year to art writers around the country. I am a member of the Rabkin Foundation board and Szántó is one of our key advisors. As such I took great interest in the publication of his The Future of the Art World: 38 Dialogues, the third in a series of museum and art institution books based on interviews with people in Szántó’s vast network of artists, gallerists, curators, museum directors, art fair executives, and corporate art supporters.

The Future of the Art World (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2025, $35) is a 400-page book of interviews dense with thoughts about everything from AI, digital art, and globalization, to speculation about the futures of museums, galleries, art fairs, and art markets. The thirty-eight interviews, conducted between April 2024 and June 2025, sample the thoughts and opinions of an international array of art world luminaries.

The “art world” of which they speak consists principally of the people who make, exhibit, collect, and generally care about visual art. To begin with, Szántó cites the Artnet Price Database to the effect that there are at least 300,000 artists worldwide, though I am sure that number must be much higher as artists have a wonderful way of escaping attention. He also estimates that there are “some three hundred biennials” and “some eight to ten thousand active art collectors worldwide.” He puts the number of museums of all kinds at “more than one hundred thousand” and uses the figure of $60 billion as the annual turnover of art sales. András Szántó is a sociologist by training and he primarily works with museums, so it is not surprising that his book is very focused on art institutions.

Mariët Westermann, director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, for example, speaks to how the Guggenheim now has facilities in Manhattan, Bilbao, Venice, and Abu Dhabi, yet she sees globalization slowing. “The momentum of the globalizing museum,” says Westermann, “is probably slowing a little because of the new nativism, the rising nationalism, the closing of borders that we are seeing.”

Marc Spiegler, an art journalist who was director of Art Basel for fifteen years, speaks to the future of the art gallery. He speculates that “Performance, installation art, immersive art, etc. will be more important, because such works are going to be more attractive to people seeking experience over objects.” “The only people starting galleries are those who don’t need to make money,” says Spiegler. “Being a mid-tier gallery becomes a hobby for the super-wealthy, like playing polo.” Spiegler’s main concern, however, is that the art market of 2050 “will be extremely boring.”

Addressing the subject of Art & Political Power, South African artist William Kentridge is co-founder of the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. Kentridge explains that “[t]he phrase . . . suggests that the grand ideas of history, of which people were so certain in the twentieth century, have not worked. From Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Stalin’s socialist realism, we now understand that these ideas have been calamitous. We need to find smaller, more local approaches.”

While the current US administration is attacking culture on many fronts, Szántó is optimistic that art will survive in the United States. He grew up under Communism in Budapest, where artists were “under the thumb of the state,” so he has seen the resilience of the creative spirit.

“I believe art is humanity’s most complex data,” writes Szántó in his introduction to The Future of the Art World. “It has been intrinsic to what it means to be human since we were dancing in caves.”

Szántó asked all of his interviewees: “Are we going to have another paradigm change?”  He dates the existing art world paradigm to the emergence of Impressionism in the late 19th century. Despite the velocity of change, Szántó was surprised to find that denizens of the art world do not see a major change occurring. “The bottom line,” he says, “is nobody is happy with the existing system, but they are not seeing a different one either. For me, what’s really fascinating is that we don’t seem to be barreling toward some kind of paradigm shift. The only area where there has been a paradigm shift is the art market with the rise of art fairs and mega-galleries.”

The art world the book surveys is a vast, international one, but it is by no means monolithic. There are many art worlds within the Art World. “I’m guessing in many ways Maine and Portland have an art world similar to New York in the 1960s,” says Szántó, by which he means a small community of artists and others who know one another intimately. I think Szántó is spot on with that assessment. I was pleased to come away from reading The Future of the Art World confident that the future does not necessarily consist entirely of AI avatars and NFTs purchased with bitcoin and delivered digitally. My guess is there will always be a demand for one-of-a-kind objects made by hand. And authenticity may be prized even more highly in a techno world of the artificial.