From acts of solidarity to new business models, many in the art world are teaming up during this pandemic to bolster the system and rethink its infrastructure. Joining us for today’s show are guests including financial journalist Felix Salmon; gallerists Sadie Coles of Sadie Coles HQ and Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa; artist Doron Langberg; culture and politics writer Marisa Mazria Katz; and nonprofit executives Carolyn Ramo of Artadia and Deana Haggag of United States Artists.

“We are all protecting our small castle or encampment and promoting our own content,” says Sadie Coles. “But actually, if you start reaching out to people, it is all about dialogue— and things develop from there.”

For more, tune in today.

The art historian, critic and curator Germano Celant— one of the most influential art thinkers of the postwar period—died of complications from Covid-19 in Milan this week. Celant, who coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, organized some of the most beautiful exhibitions in recent memory: “Jannis Kounellis” at the Prada Foundation in Venice last year was pure poetry in art. In his landmark essay “Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War”, he wrote: “No longer among the ranks of the exploited, the artist becomes a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantages conferred by mobility, surprising and striking, rather than the other way around”.

Celant joined Allan Schwartzman and host Charlotte Burns in late 2017 for this conversation about everything from “Poor Art” to politics in art, or the ways in which the American art market has come to dominate the history of art. “Art history has to be rewritten,” Celant says in the interview, because American museums promoted a history based on formalism: “Anything that has some ideology has been completely canceled. Action painting and the Abstract Expressionists cancel all this kind of content. In order to understand European art, especially Italian, you have to understand Futurism. Futurism is a total language that includes not only painting, but the idea about changing the world: fashion, design, sexuality. And, if you don’t understand that, and you don’t rewrite history in a certain way—the idea of the political engagement of the art—you don’t understand what’s happened today.” American history based around “the formal object that stays in the house, that’s a decoration for the apartment. It’s a commodity. It’s not a political action.”