With Art Basel Hong Kong 2020 cancelled, art institutions and openings in China delayed, important spring art auctions in New York postponed, New York’s Art Week 2020 postponed, private museums closing, travel impeded by the COVID-19 virus, wildfires raging in Australia, and floods in Venice, we may rightly ask what the heck is going on.
Behaviors and institutions that we may have taken for granted – art fairs, travel, museums, museum openings, art loans, traveling exhibitions, gallery openings, the buildings that house works and collections of art, cities, heritage – show themselves as vulnerable.
Vulnerable to various risks – geopolitical, natural (flood, fire), illness, travel (viruses are clever particles, requiring host cells in order to replicate; when host cells travel, so do viruses), funding, disengagement, generational change, wrongdoing, and “art-washing” among them.
“In a country where there has always been more space than people, where the land and wildlife are cherished like a Picasso, nature is closing in. Fueled by climate change and the world’s refusal to address it, the fires that have burned across Australia … are forcing Australians to imagine an entirely new way of life.”
(Damien Cave and Matthew Abbot writing in The New York Times, The End of Australia as We Know It, 15 February 2020)
“Buildings are deteriorating faster than ever before. It’s indicative of the changing environment and climate.”
Syfur Rahman, Department of Archeology of Bangladesh, quoted in
“Heritage on the Edge, How people around the world are protecting their cultural sites against climate change,” Google Arts & Culture in collaboration with CyArt and ICOMOS
“Our shared history is at risk”
(“Heritage on the Edge, How people around the world are protecting their cultural sites against climate change,” Google Arts & Culture in collaboration with CyArt and ICOMOS)
The thousand-year equilibrium long maintained in Venice may, in the space of a century, have been destroyed. With little regard for the safeguards balance provides, risks of flooding, loss of habitats, and loss of livelihoods are increasing.
Venice is “a city that for over a thousand years has built a wonderful equilibrium between a human component, ecological component, art, nature. And in the last century, we have basically almost destroyed that balance.”
(Shaul Bassi, director of the Center for Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, quoted in Sylvia Poggioli, “With Waters Rising And Its Population Falling, What Is Venice’s Future?”, NPR, 30 November 2019).
In the face of protests, coronavirus, and the cancellation of Art Basel Hong Kong 2020, Tim Schneider of Artnet News asks
“Did the coronavirus merely provide a politically agnostic opportunity to call off an event that many Western exhibitors alleged had already lost viability after the ongoing pro-democracy protests convinced a significant number of their buyers and artists to opt out months earlier?
“And if so, did the organization take until February 6 to decide strictly because its international galleries were facing shipping deadlines? Or was something else entirely at work?”
He suggests that
“To decipher the answers, it turns out that we may have to look in what many, if not most, people view as the single unsexiest realm of arcana in the entire art market: insurance policies.”
(Tim Schneider, “The Gray Market: Why the Coronavirus Canceled Art Basel Hong Kong When the Protests Couldn’t (and Other Insights),” Artnet News, 10 February 2010)
Is sexy really a measure? Is insurance so arcane?
Let’s for a moment look at insurance, and risk, from another angle: able to track perils in real time, Swiss Re is changing the way it understands and models risk. Assessing risk and underwriting risk using real-time data rather than past data, Swiss Re will offer insurance products structured not only as ex ante compensation products but also as anticipative risk management services.
“With new insights from an ability to track perils in real time, we are able to change the way we model and understand risk. This will allow new means of risk assessment and underwriting, augmenting our traditional process of using past data. These shifts will see the nature of insurance products begin to change from ex ante compensation packages to anticipative risk management services.”
(“Underwriting: The Next Generation,” Edi Schmid, Chairman Swiss Re Institute and Group Chief Underwriting Officer, 30 April 2019)
Real value may be developed through collaboration with stakeholders, public and private, globally, together with expertise and capital offered by organizations such as Swiss Re.
What are forward-looking modeling and understanding of risk? What might a shift from ex ante compensation packages to the provision of anticipative risk management services enable?
How might long-term value be developed while using real-time data to anticipate and manage risk?
Let us work to better understand risk and risk management. We might then position ourselves to better enable long-term protections of works and collections of art together with the heritage, information, and value they represent.
See:
“Virus,” Science Daily
“Underwriting: The Next Generation,” Edi Schmid, Chairman Swiss Re Institute and Group Chief Underwriting Officer, 30 April 2019,
Damien Cave and Matthew Abbott, “The End of Australia as We Know It,” The New York Times, 15 February 2020
Georgina Adam, “Not here to stay: what makes private art museums suddenly close,” The Art Newspaper, 13 February 2020
Elizabeth A. Harris, “As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze,” The New York Times, 13 February 2020
“‘You Want to Pull Your Hair Out’: Artists and Gallerists Respond to the Long-Awaited Cancellation of Art Basel Hong Kong,” Ysabelle Cheung, Artnet News, 7 February 2020
Tim Schneider, “The Gray Market: Why the Coronavirus Canceled Art Basel Hong Kong When the Protests Couldn’t (and Other Insights),” Artnet News, 10 February 2020
Alexander Walter, “Opening of Tadao Ando’s He Art Museum in China delayed due to coronavirus fears,” Archinect, 3 February 2020
“Heritage on the Edge, How people around the world are protecting their cultural sites against climate change,” Google Arts & Culture in collaboration with CyArt and ICOMOS
Sylvia Poggioli, “With Waters Rising And Its Population Falling, What Is Venice’s Future?”, NPR, 30 November 2019
Image: Henry Moore’s “Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 5” (bronze, 1963-1964) overlooking the Øresund at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. Donated to the museum by the Ny Carlsbergfondat.