The Art Angle Podcast: China’s Most Adventurous Museum Director on Global Art’s Post-COVID Future

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

In late January, Philip Tinari, the director of Beijing’s
pioneering UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, was in Davos,
Switzerland for the latest outing on the non-stop international
carousel of events that has defined the art world for much of the
21st century. It was there, on a ski lift, that he began receiving
frantic messages from his team back at the museum: a mysterious
disease had begun afflicting an alarming number of Chinese
residents, and the government was beginning to shut down borders,
cities, and businesses—including museums like theirs—to try to stem
the spread.

That mysterious illness was, of course, COVID-19, the lethal
respiratory disease that roared to life in Wuhan, China and went on
to grind much of the global economy and the art industry to a halt.
Its emergence gave Tinari, a Philadelphia native who has led the
UCCA Center since 2011, a rare front-row view to the societal and
cultural impact of the virus near its point of origin, as well as
the considerable damage it has done to the already-strained
relationship between the United States and China.

But just over three months later, China’s extreme response to
the virus has proven effective enough for the country to begin
resuming some semblance of normal life, including visiting art
museums and galleries. On May 21, the UCCA Center reopened with
“Meditations in an
Emergency,” a multipart exhibition created in response to the
virus, making Tinari and his staff among the first to have to
adapt the in-person art experience to a post-pandemic world. On
this week’s episode, Tinari joins Andrew Goldstein to discuss how
the crisis has changed the art landscape in China, the practical
challenges of shutting down and restarting museum operations in a
crisis, and what the future may hold for the art world at
large.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)

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Museum Director on Global Art’s Post-COVID Future appeared
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