András Szántó’s final museum book widens into a portrait of the art world itself
What happens when a writer who has spent years thinking about museums turns his attention to the larger ecosystem around them? In The Future of the Art World: 38 Dialogues, cultural strategist András Szántó brings his trilogy to a close with a book that moves beyond institutions and into the shifting terrain of galleries, collecting, digital culture, and cultural diplomacy.
The volume follows two earlier books, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues and Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, but this one broadens the frame considerably. Szántó speaks with gallerists José Kuri and Atsuko Ninagawa, collectors Alain Servais and Sylvain Levy, artists William Kentridge, Holly Herndon, and Mathew Dryhurst, curator Fatoş Üstek, academic Albert-László Barabási, former Art Basel director Marc Spiegler, PR consultant Calum Sutton, and Sheikha Al-Mayassa Al Thani, whose cultural agenda has helped shape Qatar’s ambitions over the past two decades.
The result is less a single argument than a map of competing pressures. Szántó notes in his introduction that there is no settled view among his interviewees on whether the art world is still expanding or has entered a period of slowdown or stagnation. Different regions, he writes, are moving along different trajectories.
Several of the most pointed exchanges focus on value, visibility, and the role of technology. Barabási argues that artistic value is not objective, but produced through an invisible network linking artists, works, art history, and institutions. Citarella, meanwhile, says museums do not reflect contemporary digital life and that social media has not become a priority for the art world, despite shaping culture for nearly 15 years. Girst is even blunter, saying that only one in 100 art students will ever make a living from art and warning that market expectations can flatten artistic risk.
Sheikha Al-Mayassa offers a different emphasis, defining cultural diplomacy as a way to create dialogue and exchange between nations, even when political conversations remain rigid. That tension between openness and structure runs through the book, which Szántó frames around what he calls “change catalysts” — shifts in art itself, changing tastes, and globalization’s reappraisal of the canon.
The book’s strength lies in its range. Readers can move through it in any order, picking up distinct perspectives without needing to follow a single thesis from start to finish. After more than 640 questions, Szántó’s conclusion is measured but clear: he leans toward hope.
That may be the most revealing position of all. In a moment when museums, markets, and digital culture are all being renegotiated at once, the future of the art world appears less fixed than contested — and still very much in motion.
