🟧 Global cultural vibes in crisis
Notes from a Swiss art summit.
Today, a dispatch from Verbier, Switzerland, where an international group of artists, curators, and writers debated intertwining global crises in a mini-Davos for the art world. What’s the purpose of culture in the polycrisis?
Kyle Chayka: I just got back to DC from the Swiss Alps, where I gave a talk at the Verbier Art Summit, an annual event that gathers together a group of artists, curators, writers, historians, and scientists for a few days of discussion on a theme organized by a different curator each year. This year’s curator was Phil Tinari, who runs the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (a collection of art museums in China) and who happened to be my first boss out of college, at a Beijing art magazine that he used to run as editor-in-chief. I trust Phil’s taste and gut sense of global culture implicitly; his theme was “Quarter Life Crisis: Art in a World on the Brink,” and he and the team, run by Anneliek Sijbrandij, had been working on this iteration since it was delayed during the pandemic. Fortunately (or not), the crisis has continued and perhaps deepened! We happened to be in Europe when Trump’s tariffs arrived and markets crashed everywhere. The speakers and audience alike were struck by a sense of vertigo that didn’t come from the mountains. The vibe was, what the fuck is even happening?? And how should I react to it??
It was a luxury to think about crisis from the balcony of a chalet overlooking snow-covered peaks where the ski season was still waning. But there’s an urgent need for any framework, any coherent discussion, of the intersecting emergencies of our time. (There’s a reason Adam Tooze’s adoption of “polycrisis” is so popular.) International warfare, economic crashes, climate change, fracturing globalization, artificial intelligence, the resurgence of realpolitik over neoliberalism, the spiritual dissatisfactions of late capitalism. Each presentation encountered the same themes and offered an inroad from different practices and bodies of knowledge. The Chinese artist Wang Tuo, who makes cinematic video pieces evoking the echos of political history, pronounced a kind of manifesto in the first talk: “My battle includes yours.” Which is to say, all of our struggles are interconnected, and perhaps solving one problem requires, in a way, solving all of them, or at least acknowledging that everyone is suffering.
The Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui, now at Erasmus University Rotterdam (RIYL BCH), spoke about the endpoint of globalization being “planetarization,” the entire sphere brought together by homogenized digital technology and capitalist drive. The quest for ever more growth is fruitless; “If we speed up, are we going to be free? We know this is not going to happen,” he said in an eloquent off-the-cuff presentation. “Neither acceleration nor deceleration are options.” (I’m now reading Hui’s new book “Post-Europe” and you should, too.) All institutions are in crisis. Clémentine Deliss, a curator in Brussels, critiqued the academic overexplanation delivered by most museums and imagined an always-open room in which visitors could encounter unusual historical artifacts without intervention — a situation that sounded a bit like exposure therapy for the Anthropocene.
What is the role of culture during such crises? How does it go beyond entertainment? Phil noted out that artists often register change before others, seeing around the corner of civilization. The London-based video artist Lawrence Lek, who makes CGI videos rendering court trials of self-driving cars and other near-future folktales, said that artists are good at “triggering small crises” that, once exploded, slow down the larger crises. Ultimately, culture is not a curative. Art is not medicine. But it offers a kind of meta-commentary, a way of thinking about what is happening, informing our perspectives and future decisions. Claudia Comté, a Swiss artist, presented her sculpture practice, based out of a sprawling farm-like home studio outside of Basel. “How we see the world shapes how we care for it,” she said. Which might be the point: Change how you see the world, change the possibilities. Don’t get stuck in the traps of the past centuries.
In the Art Summit’s smaller “debates,” hosted in homes around Verbier, the concerns of the mostly northern European audience orbited around AI, a subject that every conversation was inevitably sucked in to. Is it a threat or a tool? Both — but no one could settle on just how useful it was or if it was saving our lives or destroying them. Convenience usually comes at the expense of art. Maybe we’re in for a bad decade, but a better era farther down the line? There was one thing most agreed on: Trump’s wild antics that week had proved that the United States was no longer going to be helpful, economically, militarily, or perhaps culturally. (I was the only one there based in the U.S.) Trump was bringing the European countries closer together into a stronger bond, all the better to confront the chaotic future. The view of the vast mountains from the clustered chalets of the village provided a certain amount of solace. Civilization is long, and American presidencies short.
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