When the pandemic hit, the author and cultural consultant András Szántó didn’t let the crisis go to waste. He picked up the phone, calling museum directors for a series of interviews that formed his 2021 book The Future of the Museum. That led to his next book, about the physical trappings of museums, which gathered conversations with architects under the title Imagining the Future Museum (2022). Rounding out the trilogy is Szántó’s latest book, the considerably more ambitious The Future of the Art World, which brings together a full 38 interviews conducted between April 2024 and June 2025 with numerous different stakeholders in the art ecosystem, from artists, curators, collectors, patrons, and members of the art trade (dealers, auctioneers, art fair directors) to sociologists, philosophers, and policymakers.
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As with the previous two volumes, Szántó spends much of his time discussing museums, and how they should evolve. But he has let artists into the room this time, and not all of them think museums will be on the menu in the future.
“I think it’s possible that the museum as a construct may not survive,” the Polish-born, New York–based artist Agnieszka Kurant tells him. “I have a strong feeling that maybe in a thousand years there will not be any museums. Changes in society, culture, and technology will be so rapid that it will be more important to be up to date with what is new. We’re already observing this acceleration. Instead of museums, there may be places for enabling contact with what is happening now or for creating new, unknown forms of experience, which will be hard to categorize.”
By far the most interesting parts of Szántó’s latest volume are those where his subjects are willing to stick their necks out to either criticize the current state of things in the art world, or to make predictions about how the future might turn out. Not surprisingly, the most compelling speculations come from artists.
At Szántó’s urging, artist and writer Joshua Citarella sketches out a dystopia and a utopia, the former a scenario in which museums “become the foreground in displays of political disobedience” in such an extreme way that the function of the museum as a kind of “public square…could be shut down.” Alongside that, museums could become “giant private collections available only to the ultra-wealthy.” By contrast, Citarella’s utopia involves “investment into artist studio spaces” and “the cultivation of an entire generation of artists within the domain of the museum.” “Those institutions,” Citarella says, “would produce novel works, the likes of which we cannot yet imagine.”
The science fiction-obsessed Kurant imagines “a fusion of collective and non-human intelligences, from microbes and animals to AI, as co-creators of future thought forms and art forms.” Her “first advice” for artists preparing for this future “is that you probably shouldn’t go to art school. Study sociology, anthropology, or literature. Read books and newspapers. Travel. Go to a demonstration or a conference, intern at an NGO.”
Kurant doesn’t mince words when it comes to the negative effects of professionalization. “Trying to replicate professional career patterns or market success leads mostly to cookie-cutter, commercial, uninspiring art,” she says.
She is also refreshingly frank in her assessment of digital art.
“A lot of contemporary digital art is not challenging intellectually,” she says. “It is essentially data visualization. To ask philosophical and political questions of technology, we often need to use old or dead media, not the latest AI. What interests me is not the most up-to-date app, but the political, economic, and social mechanisms that govern the evolution of technology.”
(Because the interviews are arranged chronologically, Kurant’s comments come later in the book than those of Refik Anadol, and come as an inadvertent riposte. Anadol, whose artworks one suspects Kurant might just be alluding to with that “data visualization” comment, tells Szántó, “Most likely, AI will become an invisible layer in humanity’s fabric. …My inner voice says that this new field of imagination will be about constantly generated reality. As such, it will not be easy to grasp or to define.”)
Another refreshing voice is Jose Kuri, founder, with his wife Monica Manzutto, of the gallery kurimanzutto, which is based in Mexico City and has a second location in New York. The new mega-galleries may seem like they will last forever, but Kuri, who sees a gallery as a fundamentally creative enterprise, is not convinced that galleries can or should exist beyond their founder. “When Gerhard Richter dies, could the studio of Richter continue making his paintings?”
He also has some harsh words for art fairs. “They are reproducing the power structures that we’ve been living with in the gallery system,” he says. “They are replicating those structures instead of questioning them.” Case in point: booth locations. “They put the five largest galleries at the center of the fair, giving them the best access. The smaller galleries, which could be super-interesting, are way back next to the bathrooms.”
Speaking of fairs, the book’s best self-own comes former Art Basel CEO Marc Spiegler, who observes that, “aesthetically speaking, the rising importance of art fairs spawned ‘art-fair art.’” To be fair to Spiegler, I’ll give you the whole quote: “And let me be careful with my wording here,” he says. “Yes, it’s truly rewarding when I take time to systematically go through the booths of a strong fair and discover so much great art. But there’s also a kind of art world merch—domestic-size, bright-colored, less-expensive versions of artists’ better works. Simultaneously, a somewhat homogeneous International Style has emerged, like those lounge bars that feel the same the world over and always play the Hôtel Costes soundtrack.”
As for the current CEO of Art Basel, Noah Horowitz, he has thoughts on how his fair needs to evolve. “We need to think beyond exclusively being a fair,” he says, pointing to Art Basel’s “new retail initiative.” In plain speak, this would be the Art Basel shop, where everyone was buying Labubus in June. Back to corporate speak, Horowitz muses, “Can we become an accelerator for other modes of connectivity?”
Horowitz doesn’t mention the upcoming Art Basel Qatar—presumably Szántó’s conversation with him happened before it was announced–but he does hint at it. “Are there other cities where we could land full-fledged Art Basel fairs? Maybe.”
And so, later in the book, does Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. “When we founded Qatar Museums twenty years ago, many art fairs wanted to establish themselves here,” she says. “I personally did not feel it was the right time. Countries just starting cultural investments and attracting galleries or auction houses inevitably end up subsidizing them, and that doesn’t necessarily serve them well. Instead, we wanted to first build knowledge, cultivate collectors, and create our artist base.”
Mega-galleries looking for their next location might want to pay attention to this part: “Now, moving forward two decades,” Sheikha Al-Mayassa says, “if someone wanted to open an international gallery in Qatar, I would say yes—because now we have the knowledge, we have the appreciation. People now understand that art is an asset, like real estate…”
Elsewhere in the Gulf, we go behind the scenes of Saudi Arabia’s museum-building-boom with Riyadh-based cultural advisor Mona Khazindar, who shares that the kingdom aims to establish around thirty national and regional museums by 2030. Two are on the horizon: the Red Sea Museum in Jeddah, which “will be devoted to the civilizations of the Red Sea” and the Black Gold Museum, which we learn will be located in a one of a complex of five pavilions that the late architect Zaha Hadid conceived in 2013 for the King Abdullah Center for Science and Petroleum. (They ended up not using it as a library.) We learn that another museum will “showcase artifacts, artworks, videos, and interviews that tell the story of [date] palms in the kingdom.”
One of the main lessons of Szántó’s book is how different things look in the art world depending on where you are geographically. If Saudi Arabia has the goal of building 30 new museums by 2030, Mia Locks, who cofounded the organization Museums Moving Forward to assess the health of U.S. museums as workplaces, has the goal of “sunset[ting] the organization in 2030, so there is an urgency to our work, because we’re on a deadline!” She has a lot of work to do: her recent survey results found that about two-thirds of museum workers were considering leaving their jobs, the top three reasons being low pay, burnout, and lack of opportunities for growth. Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, founder of ART X Lagos, Nigeria, offers yet another perspective: “The museums that are going to come out of Africa over the next five to ten years are going to be very, very different creatures from their counterparts in the Global North.”
The interviewees are often torn on globalization and expansion—the big ballooning of the art world over the past two decades. “The art world,” says Carol Yinghua Lu, director of Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum, “has expanded enormously, but at its core, its ability to think and to lead imagination has not grown commensurately. It has become too regulated, too capitalized, and too bureaucratic for the development of art. We need the wildness back in our thinking and practice.”
Throughout the book, the dominance of the art market is lamented. A typical assessment comes from Atsuko Ninagawa, founder of Art Week Tokyo. “One issue we all have to consider,” she says, “is how we can continue to support art that is challenging and makes people think when there is so much pressure from the market, the attention economy, and privatization to make art that ‘pays for itself.’” For Kurant, the bright side of the market’s current dip may be change in artistic modes. “The current political and economic meltdown, the absolute commercialization of art, and the current downfall of the art market are about to result in a refreshing wave of conceptual art that is not grounded in market value at all,” she tells Szántó.
And yet, there is no talking about the future of the art world without contending with the future of the market.
Marc Spiegler’s “worst-case scenario” for the future “starts with the premise that the art market of today is radically tipped in favor of collectors. That super-dominance creates a fear—completely justified—that trying anything new will undermine deals. And this blocks the adaptations that are essential for smaller and mid-tier galleries to thrive. So the worst-case art market of 2050 is radically consolidated—a smaller number of galleries speculatively selling a small number of artists. The only people starting galleries are those who don’t need to make money. Being a mid-tier gallery becomes a hobby for the super-wealthy, like playing polo.”
If this sounds like a bang, it’s more of a whimper. “Just to be clear,” Spiegler clarifies, “my concern about the art market of 2050 is not that it won’t exist. My concern is that it will be extremely boring.”
