According to the definition given by the United Nations World Commission on the Environment and Development, the sustainability refers to a type of development that fprovides the best possible conditions for both people and the environment. Sustainable solutions use the Earth's resources in a way that doesn't destroy the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Unfortunately, the art world had had little interest in replacing its destructive and unsustainable economic model until very recently when the pandemic shook our lives and the entire world. However, even if the contemporary art world has turned its attention to the matter, promoting positive environmental causes there is not yet a truly concrete response from the production of works and its market that adopt sustainable measures.
Going back to 2019, i.e. to the period before the pandemic, Art Basel and the UB Global Art Market ReportArt dealers from around the world were asked to rank their top business priorities for the next five years, and the response was: Attending art fairs, finding new clients, and building better relationships with collectors of the utmost importance. The priorities of promoting sustainability art and the adoption of new technologies were among the lowest concerns, with only 3% of art dealers who wished to deal with such problems as part of their five-year strategy. This attitude reflects a art market – especially contemporary – which depended on mechanisms that were anything but sustainable and decisively driven by the "jet-set" preferring over the last few decades, with a busy calendar of live auctions, art fairs and exhibitions proving central to the exchange of information and sales.
Following in 2020, the pandemic obviously it also involved the art world, which had to launch desperate attempts to reinvent and capitalize on the online components of its market almost overnight. Despite the overall contraction in sales, aggregate online sales hit a record $12,4 billion, doubling the value from 2019. This period also demonstrated that art can be made, shared, experienced and traded digitally. with this growing number of online distribution, the new market has developed the potential to become a sustainable practice for the art world in the future. It was necessary – necessarily – to review the role of gallery events as well as auction houses and reconsider new models also of the number of events in which they will participate in the future. “The biggest change we can make to reduce our carbon footprint will likely be in flights and shipping“, says Artlogic founder and CEO Peter Chater in an essay. “Compared to these areas, the digital carbon footprint of a typical art gallery will be minimal. Christie's for example has become a supporter of GCC and pledged to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030.
But this is just one of the examples for the climate emergency, but there is still a lot to be done in raising social awareness towards environmental sustainability with a consequent improvement in the quality of life. Art can play a fundamental role, in production and its communication, think of works produced with recycled materials or in any case with low polluting content whose message can make every generation think and not just the younger ones who see sustainability as something that has already become part of their way of being.
Even if something is happening, even the long-term effect has yet to be seen. The art world's recent efforts at sustainability give cause for cautious optimism. We would still have to wait to understand if there really is an awareness of it, in the meantime there are art forms with a notable social communicative impact – see street-art and others that use recycled materials capable of communicating a message free from prejudices and unsustainable fashions. And also the production of NFTs – which still appears unclear to us – in its economic interest it should go in this direction and not appear purely speculative.
The work "" on the cover dates back to 2019 on the occasion of the Venice Biennale: The art installation is the work of the Albanian sculptor Helidon Xhixha and the young Swiss photographer James Braglia. The idea starts from the will raise citizens' awareness of the environmental threat posed by plastic, which is seriously endangering the fate of the planet.
