OKAY, BOOMER: A RESPONSE TO MARC SPIEGLER

Former Art Basel Marc Spiegler used the New York Times to tell us galleries are in trouble. London-based gallerist Jacob Barnes has a two-word response, and then a longer one.

Art Basel 2026. Site-specific commission across Messeplatz by Nairy Baghramian. Courtesy of Art Basel.

I have always thought the okay boomer social media trend was a little boring. I imagine it being said to my own mother or grandmother and felt it both a little dirty and sad, or at the very least, comedically lazy. The enunciation of generational difference to the otherwise unsuspecting elderly carries the grimy aura of dunking on the mildly disabled, or mocking someone's barely noticeable speech impediment. It's not so bad as to be totally passé, but to joke about it is to indicate one's own lack of imagination or tact. After all, everyone sooner or later falls subject to the mere passage of time.

And still, reading former Art Basel director Marc Spiegler's Op-Ed in last Friday's New York Times, the only appropriate response seems to be okay boomer. It's not so much that Spiegler is wrong per se – his attempt at analysis advocates for fiscal responsibility and an attention to one's clientele – but what gall to insist that such pithy observations can pass as revelatory. We can all hubristically overplay the weight of our own insight, but most of us don't have the poor sense to call up an editor at the New York Times about it. So, yeah, okay boomer.

Spiegler at the DLD Munich Conference 2024, January 11, 2024. Photography courtesy of Philipp Gülland / picture alliance for DLD / Hubert Burda Media.

The real shortfall of Spiegler's piece is that he fails to understand the scope of the problem at hand; the ways in which industrial ill-adaptations have intersected with the heart of broader, social and systemic dysfunction that threatens the future of sincere cultural production. It is the equivalent of trying to survive in a burning house by simply opening up the windows to let out the smoke.

Parts of his commentary (I hesitate to call it analysis) are undoubtedly correct. It is increasingly difficult to partake in the globalised infrastructure that has subtended high-level commercial art for the last thirty-five-odd years. Transport is more expensive, rent is more expensive, and the barriers to entry further harden as these issues trickle down to younger practitioners and are reflected in our operational realities. Not only curatorial ambition, which often implicitly comes at the expense of financial reward, but a kind of international omnipresence while pursuing such, is demanded of even the youngest of art's neophytes. Meanwhile, all the pieces that might allow them to succeed have become harder to attain, much less keep. Spiegler's call to champion the regional is both a positivistic imploration to not forget, as he puts it by way of Esther Schipper, our own backyards, but also a reflection of today's near impossibility of doing otherwise.

Yet, as is maybe commonplace in the thinking of Spiegler's generation, this conclusion ascribes a kind of agency to art workers today that is simply lacking. While many of us have been Stockholm Syndrome-ed into fetishising the D-rate jetsetter lifestyles art demands, defined by sparsely decorated Airbnbs and an unnatural familiarity with "hacks" to outsmart the baggage regulations of budget airlines, we don't travel the world for pleasure, but instead because that's what legibility in this context demands. Legibility not only in the eyes of our peers, the more senior of which only now seem to be understanding the great feats of endurance or daring we've achieved to just get ourselves in the rooms they inhabit, but legibility in the eyes of our clients, who either share our aspirations towards the upward mobility and class legibility internationalism affords, or are just too wealthy to care. These imperatives, staked out over a generation of globe-trotting, price-hiking, and nose-thumbing, do not just disappear.

Any kind of continuation of the system – this system or anything else – needs a clientele. Spiegler's suggestion that we develop stronger local client bases turns the well-heeled, generationally-wealthy gallerist into a foregone conclusion, assuming that anyone with the means to be in art must have access to capital, or at least know which rocks to look under. Even for the older gallerists of which this is not true, those who have survived benefitted from an influx of capital into the art market in the 90s and early 2000s that has now calcified into circles of wealth, albeit ones in which art dealers may serve more as court jesters than wise sages. Provided they do the equivalent of a delicate little dance, those who have thrived in this former system have the tools to know where to look for new clients. Of course, if they didn't, they wouldn't have survived this long.

Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. Courtesy of Art Basel.

Meanwhile, a younger generation continues to twiddle its thumbs, waiting for the Great Wealth Transfer that promises to make an emerging cohort of collectors – and by extension, all of us – rich. But the problem we all must reckon with now is: does anybody care?

Art is no longer the status symbol it once was, and for those whom it still functions as such for, auction houses provide easy shortcuts into the best of the best. Those spurred on by "art-as-asset-class" and the promise of quick buck have likely been burned (and have moved on to some other, more easily understood and aestheticised insider trading like crypto or Pokémon cards). And so in a world that is increasingly hostile and expensive, replete with demands on our attention from TikTok to stagnating economies and rising inflation, we wait for people to commit to art for little more than the love of the game.

This is not a problem that can be fixed with an explanation. The general public does not steer clear of the rarified chambers of contemporary art because they "don't get it" or "didn't know they could come in." For one, the industry as a whole has spent a good deal of time and energy expressing to the layman that they are explicitly not welcome, which makes any kind of collective beckoning a little rich. But more saliently, in a world with almost infinite ways to spend time and money, art's place within that attention and financial economy is uncertain. It neither carries a glitz that is communicable over social media, nor does it fall neatly into contemporary demands for self-betterment and efficiency. It typically doesn't make our food taste better, our hair any thicker, or our orgasms more powerful. And by way of sheer enjoyment, why pay thousands for an artwork when you can watch an AI-generated video of a dog jumping from a roof into an above-ground pool?

So despite what the good people at the New York Times think fit to print, there is no easy fix. At the very least, it isn't as easy as staying home and making a few phone calls to our rich friends. Art is in need of a more legitimate overhaul, with serious consideration to what success, or even survival can look like.

Minor Attractions 2025. Photography courtesy of Minor Attractions.

Art foremost needs to become comfortable with becoming less siloed, and more conducive to more generalised cultural appreciation. The work done by outfits such as Basel Social Club or even my own Minor Attractions, combining art with performance, film, food, fashion, and nightlife, gestures towards the possibilities that lie in the experiential. The financialisation of that experience remains an open question – it is of course difficult to translate an industry defined by low-volume, high-value transactions into its inverse – but, as a model, experience-driven art viewing will create opportunity afforded by (relative) democratisation.

This turn, ultimately, allows for a much-needed re-aestheticization. The aesthetics of that have carried the art world of the last generation – namely, those of the ultra-wealthy – now feel out of touch if not gauche. Nor are they reflective of contemporary mores: for better or worse, we live in a world much more inclined to celebrate the rich for their taste in expensive watches, luxury cars and designer fashion than for what they have in their art collection. For those of us that can't – or don't want to – live in pursuit of the recognition of the mega-rich, contemporary cultural production has given us a viable rubric for what art-as-lifestyle can look like. The artist/craftsman hybrid is an identity effectively embodied by scores of small restaurants and personality-driven chefs that have achieved recognition for their commitment to both quality and personability. Multi-hyphenates like Anthony Bourdain, Matty Matheson, Eddie Huang, and David Chang have, in their most public iterations, given us a blueprint for how to express a love of craft, and pursuit of excellence, as a broader cultural universe within which the product – the food or book to be eaten or read – is only a piece of the broader puzzle.

In doing these things, we give ourselves the opportunity to give up our self-imposed yokes of the past, and by God do we need to take it. For years, the potential for nomadic, decentralised programs, or alternative exhibition models, have been the topic du jour of the art world. The question is not whether or not we can conceptualise that future, it is whether we can convince ourselves to actualise it. I have yet to come across an "alternative model" that is able to achieve unquestioned legibility, but that moment will come, and when it does, we must, undoubtedly, take it. If Spiegler was right about one thing, it was that galleries are indeed in trouble, and Marc Glimcher was, by my count, correct in saying that the system is irrevocably broken. We must find it within ourselves to let it crumble, refusing to patch the panoply of leaks that spring from its cracks. It is only from that wholesale destruction that something good can happen.

---

Jacob Barnes is the Gallerist of Season 4, Episode 6, Fair Director of Minor Attractions, and Founding Editor of Curatorial Affairs.