András Szántó: No Such Thing as a Neutral Space

Internationally renowned cultural strategist and journalist András Szántó has built a distinguished career advising leading universities, museums, and corporations on cultural enrichment and strategy, with a particular focus on the evolving power of culture and storytelling in shaping public imagination. His work spans a wide spectrum of the cultural landscape, shaping programmes and initiatives that define 21st-century engagement with the arts. Szántó’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, alongside his acclaimed The Future Museum book series. He also leads journalism and writing programmes at prominent academic and cultural institutions. This fall, he continues the conversation with the release of his new book, The Future of the Art World (out November 4)—a visionary exploration of how creativity, institutions, and audiences will redefine culture in the years ahead.

As an advisor, Szántó has directed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Global Museum Leaders Colloquium and regularly moderates discussions at Art Basel. He has also launched forward-looking initiatives such as The Museums of Tomorrow Roundtable, in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In conversation with hube, Szántó shares his perspectives, ambitions, and concerns about the evolving role of cultural institutions in a rapidly changing world.

hube: You originally come from a background in sociology. What first drew you to that field, and how did those early academic interests evolve into the multifaceted cultural consultancy career you’ve built today?

András Szántó: My education started in Hungary, where sociologists were seen a bit like lawyers in America. A sociology degree meant you could enter public life or become an expert in many different areas. The first democratic parliament after 1989 had quite a few sociologists. When I came to graduate school in New York, it wasn’t with the expectation that I would have an ivory tower career. And a background in sociology has really helped my consulting life. It gives you analytical skills, empathy, the ability to view things from different points of view, and an instinctive way of seeing the world as a set of organisational and institutional processes. That’s helpful to consulting, of course. That career, however, grew gradually and intuitively. I don’t think anyone in my generation started out by thinking, ‘One day I will be a cultural strategy consultant.’

hube: Why do you think cultural storytelling has become so important for brands today? What deeper value does it bring beyond traditional marketing?

ASz: Because brands, in and of themselves, have no meaning. They acquire meaning—they need to be filled with it. And cultural storytelling, with its vast range of possibilities, allows you to create nuanced meanings and narratives around almost any brand. What’s the story you want to tell? Art can help tell almost any story—and it can do so in a way that feels authentic (sometimes aspirational), infused with the highest levels of creativity, and often connected to special venues where a brand’s audience is already present.

hube: In an era marked by growing political instability and polarization, what role do you believe museums and cultural institutions should play? Are they neutral spaces for reflection, or should they take a more active stance?

ASz: Museums play multiple roles. They mean different things to different people—and they may serve a different purpose for you at 10 a.m. than they do at 6 p.m. Museums are certainly vehicles for self-understanding and a sense of community belonging, and they can offer refuge and solace during difficult times. At their best, I think, museums remind us that an entire society can coexist—and that social divisions can be bridged through shared experiences.

There is no such thing as a neutral space for reflection. But the museum must also recognise that it welcomes people with a wide range of perspectives. In a polarised society, finding that balance becomes even more difficult.

hube: In your opinion, what motivates brands like BMW or Audemars Piguet to invest in long-term cultural initiatives rather than short-term sponsorships or ads?

ASz: You’re making an assumption that it’s typical for brands to invest in long-term, strategic cultural initiatives. If only that were the case. The vast majority of arts-related activities are one-offs—and often quite superficial: an artist creates a version of the product, and there’s a big party.

BMW and Audemars Piguet stand out for their long-term approach—in the former’s case, a half-century of cultural engagement; in the latter’s, about a decade of thoughtful, deeply involved partnerships with the art world that bring real value to the cultural ecosystem. I’ve had the privilege of working with both, and I can only hope that more brands follow their lead.

hube: What’s the biggest misconception brands have when they first approach cultural collaborations?

ASz: The sentence I hear most often is: “What we make is also art.” True—some of what these companies create is indeed a remarkable feat of engineering, imagination, and craftsmanship—and, frankly, it often resonates more broadly within contemporary culture than the work of many artists or arts institutions. But that doesn’t make your product art.

What you should aim for is a deep and authentic connection between what you and your brand do, and what artists are doing. It’s important to understand that these are two distinct lanes. They can intersect, but our society has set fairly robust parameters around what is considered art—and what is not. Once this is clearly understood, it becomes much easier to approach the interaction as a kind of dialogue.

hube: Museums have historically been seen as keepers of heritage, but increasingly they are expected to be agents of change. How do you reconcile these two roles—preservation and progress—in contemporary museum practice?

ASz: That’s a wonderful question. I believe museums can be agents of change—particularly in shaping mentality, fostering creativity, and encouraging reflection. And there is certainly a wide panorama of opportunity when it comes to reinventing what it means to engage with culture, as well as rethinking the institution itself.

However, when it comes to the broader economic and technological changes you’re referring to, museums are rarely in a position to lead. Like everyone else, they respond to new opportunities and challenges that originate outside their walls. Even artistically, museums tend to be more responsive than proactive. They are rarely the first testbed for new art—more often, they become participants in conversations that have already begun elsewhere. The real question is how the museum chooses to respond to change. It doesn’t need to jump on every passing trend—yet ignoring certain shifts comes at its own risk.

hube: Your book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues was shaped by the urgency and sense of transformation that defined the early months of the pandemic, particularly in the U.S. Five years on, the global mood feels markedly different—more fragmented, perhaps even regressive in some ways. How has your outlook on the issues raised in the book evolved in light of the shifting political and cultural climate?

ASz: The people-oriented museology that surfaced so clearly in that book has only become more pronounced in our field. Museums—and their buildings (the subject of the book that followed)—continue to work toward greater inclusivity, a more radical sense of welcome, and, perhaps, a kind of humility and interconnectedness in their institutional and communicational posture.

However, the world around museums has changed—and not for the better. I’m grappling with this in my next book, which comes out at the end of this year and explores the overall art system. One can take some reassurance, perhaps, from two considerations. One is that museums are hard-wired to survive over the long term; they are capable of enduring even under harsh social and economic conditions. The other is that—and I firmly believe this—times of tension and upheaval in society, times that truly test people, highlight the importance of civic institutions.

hube: In your global work with institutions, have you noticed regional or cultural differences in how museums define their missions or engage their publics? What can they learn from one another?

ASz: In my first book, I advanced the idea that we are entering a period of institutional pluralism, just as art entered a more open period of pluralism after the 1970s. It’s museums, in the plural, not just “the museum.” As the art world expands globally and museums take root worldwide, the institutional form opens up to more cultural influences and need not follow a prescribed Western model. I believe we are only in the early stages of this opening up—and I think it will have fertile consequences for the field.

hube: How do you measure the impact or success of a cultural initiative from a brand’s perspective? Is there a way to quantify cultural capital?

ASz: In the corporate sector, as elsewhere, we are actually still rather stumped when it comes to providing nuanced measures of impact. We need to do a much better job than just measuring press coverage or how many people attended an event. Very exciting work is happening now to draw out connections, for example, between art, health, wellbeing, and social connection. And we can do better. For too long, the measures have been framed in terms of economic benefits of one sort or another. But we’re talking about art. I would add that in the world of brands, many insiders feel art is being held to a higher standard. Art initiatives are supposed to give a detailed accounting of their measured impacts. Meanwhile, millions are funnelled into classic marketing initiatives of dubious outcome.

hube: As someone who has worked closely with both artists and institutions, how do you see the evolving relationship between the two? Has institutional critique given way to something more collaborative—or more constrained?

ASz: I think it’s hard to generalise. In the larger scheme of things, not that many artists centre their work on institutional critique. I am fascinated when they do, but the vast majority of artists engage with topics that lie outside the confines of institutional dynamics. Most artists are immensely happy to enter into collaborations with museums—only a very few (and to add a critique of my own: far too few) are fortunate enough to be in that situation. This picture of antagonism, I think, is not borne out in the wider landscape of artist-institutional relationships.

hube: How do you see the role of cultural programming evolving in the face of rapid digital transformation and AI-generated content?

ASz: It’s early days. A big question I think about a lot is whether, from a market and institutional perspective, these emergent practices will infiltrate the legacy art system—as photography and video did, albeit over the course of decades—or whether they will form a new, parallel field outside the established institutions. Let’s check in on this a decade from now.

hube: If you could redesign how the corporate world engages with the arts from the ground up, what would you change?

ASz: Everything.