Elisa Carollo

BB: You have been described as a ‘connector’ and, looking across your work, you seem to move deliberately between galleries, artists, collectors and institutions. What have you gained through working across different aspects of the art world that you might not have understood from just one of them?

EC: Having started in the secondary market, I gained an in-depth understanding of the economic and financial dynamics that move art, but also of the very different reasons people buy, collect and support it. At the same time, coming from a humanities background, I never stopped looking at the philosophical, poetic and psychological contexts that shape an artwork’s symbolic value—and that, in my view, should ultimately substantiate its economic one.

Moving later into the primary market, curating and writing allowed me to look at value creation from different angles. Today, I am particularly interested in understanding how those dynamics are changing and what new structures might support more groundbreaking and emerging forms of artistic production, while helping to create both the critical context and the social networks that allow them to develop and circulate.

Moving fluidly across different tiers of the art world and across different regions has also allowed me to build a broad community. I have always enjoyed finding connections between people, ideas and contexts that might not otherwise meet. Ultimately, I think a healthy art world should function much more as a cohesive and collaborative ecosystem than as a series of separate silos.

BB: You’ve spoken about artists who had ‘fast-track careers’ during the pandemic, with prices rising rapidly, and the importance of institutional recognition in sustaining such careers. Having observed that, what do you now look for in an artist to ensure longevity in their career?

EC: The frenzy that developed during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath was fueled in large part by speculation and by a renewed enthusiasm for the financialization of art—the idea of art primarily as an investment. It coincided with disposable income, new digital buying habits and wealth generated through areas such as crypto. In some markets, particularly the U.S. but also South Korea and elsewhere, this pushed fresh paint works by artists sometimes barely out of their MFAs to significant price levels way too quickly.

Many of those prices proved unsustainable once that enthusiasm faded, particularly when there was not a sufficiently broad collector base or a solid institutional trajectory behind them. We are still seeing some of the consequences today, especially in the difficulties facing the middle market and in a primary market that had become accustomed to a volume and velocity of transactions that were never entirely healthy.

For me, career longevity requires a much broader ecosystem of achievements and relationships around an artist. Auction results should be a relatively minor—and ideally later—factor in that equation, emerging from rather than determining a career. What matters more is sustained institutional engagement: museum acquisitions, meaningful solo exhibitions across markets and geographies, biennials and other contexts that demonstrate that a practice is participating in a broader cultural dialogue and has relevance beyond an immediate market cycle.

But beyond all those more “market” factors, I still believe that the art that ultimately survives time has the ability to do something that myths and classics have always done: tap into something universal and archetypal. The most powerful work emerge from a very specific cultural or historical context but is still reaching toward deeper questions about human existence, the psyche and our position within a larger cosmos. This is what can make an artwork last much longer than a market momentum.

BB: You have written about the acceleration of the art world and the pressure it has created for galleries and artists. Do you think the art world has become too focused on making art and artists visible rather than creating conditions in which they can develop?

EC: Yes, and I increasingly think that as the art world questions where it is heading in this very delicate moment, we often forget that artists are at the center of the entire system. They are its creative source and its pulsing heart; everything else—the institutions, galleries, fairs, auctions, criticism and market—exists downstream from artistic production.

Much of the recent discussion has focused on whether galleries are “okay” and whether the gallery model is working. Those are important questions, but the gallery is ultimately one historical and social mechanism through which art can be produced, supported and circulated. It is not the reason art exists. New systems and approaches continue to emerge to allow artists to make work, reach audiences, sustain their practices and, ideally, have an impact on society.

The context is also shifting because audience behavior and priorities are changing. Younger generations tend to seek more personal forms of engagement. They want direct relationships with the artists and ideas they support, and they increasingly value participation, experience and impact over the rigidity of traditional art-world models. Recent researches into next-generation collectors repeatedly show that they approach art through personal storytelling, identity, relationships and a desire to support artists, rather than through financial return alone.

More broadly, we are living through a moment of growing alienation and digital dissociation, and I think people are becoming more conscious of the value of human and emotional experiences. Art should naturally occupy that space. Yet as parts of the art market expanded into something resembling the luxury industry, it often adopted the same branding, marketing and return-driven dynamics and risked marginalizing precisely those qualities.

Perhaps this moment gives the art world an opportunity to return to its core. Before being a price, art is a form of human expression capable of giving shape to questions of meaning. It creates a space outside the purely pragmatic, utilitarian and commodified world and reveals the positions we take on matters of ultimate value. Art creates things that are intended to remain with us materially, but also psychologically or imaginatively. To borrow Richard Rojcewicz’s formulation of Heidegger’s Dasein, artists occupy a privileged relationship to Being; I still believe that dimension matters.

BB: You’ve talked before about young galleries working to build communities rather than audiences; what do you see this distinction as? And what does a community make possible for artists that an audience doesn’t?

EC: I think community is becoming essential to creating a support base that can sustain both a gallery program and an artist’s practice over time. Younger generations in particular are increasingly reluctant to buy products or objects simply for what they are. They buy into visions, stories and value systems they want to participate in and incorporate into their own sense of identity.

This came through very clearly in my recent research on younger collectors. They increasingly describe art as a form of personal storytelling: something that resonates with their values, activates an emotional response or expands their symbolic imagination. Many want relationships with artists and with the people around the work. Supporting art becomes a way of belonging to and contributing to something rather than simply possessing an object.

I think that distinction becomes especially important in a society where many of the large narratives and traditional structures of belonging have progressively weakened. One of the great needs today is precisely a sense of belonging. Art and artistic communities are particularly well positioned to respond to that because they naturally produce symbolic worlds, stories, conversations and shared forms of meaning.

A gallery that has an audience can attract people to an exhibition. A gallery that has a community can create sustained relationships among artists, collectors, writers, curators and people who may not yet define themselves through any of those roles. That community can support experimentation before there is a market for it, follow an artist through different stages of development and create the social and intellectual conditions in which a practice can grow.

This is also why I think some of the most interesting younger galleries today are returning to dinners, salons, residencies, studio visits and more intimate formats. They are not simply producing visibility; they are creating a cultural scene around a shared vision. Historically, some of the most influential galleries did exactly that.

BB: I feel that a lot of your work seems to be driven by an interest in how the art world is changing and understanding that change. After working within it for over a decade, what do you think has had the biggest impact and where do you see the next decade taking us?

EC: Being a Millennial has given me an interesting vantage point because I entered an art world still largely shaped by older generations and by systems of thinking and operating that had been established decades earlier. At the same time, my generation was itself transitional: we remember life before constant internet access, smartphones and social media, but we also adapted to all of them as they transformed almost every aspect of culture, communication and consumption.

My sister is ten years younger than I am, and her worldview and priorities are already markedly different. Her generation grew up amid continuous economic, social and environmental crises and has been digitally connected almost from the moment it learned to speak.

Millennials experienced something slightly different. Many of us grew up at the tail end of the postwar promise of expanding prosperity, with globalization seemingly opening an ever-wider field of possibilities. Yet as we entered adulthood, wages and wealth might have grown for some, but housing, education and the basic structures of economic security became dramatically more expensive. Our parents might have been able to buy homes relatively early; property ownership has now become an increasingly remote prospect for many people across multiple geographies.

That matters enormously as the great wealth transfer unfolds. We cannot assume that trillions of dollars changing generational hands will automatically flow into the same categories or institutions that benefited previous generations. And into the art world Younger people have different priorities, different relationships with ownership and different ideas about what constitutes value. The art world will have to understand those changes in how people buy, live, travel and construct identity if it wants to remain relevant. Recent surveys revealed that even inheritors of major collections increasingly want to reinterpret rather than simply preserve what they receive, while self-made younger collectors are approaching art through intellectual inquiry, advocacy and personal identity.

At the same time, art itself has become far more embedded in popular lifestyle culture. Instagram has made exhibitions, artists and art destinations visible to an audience that might never previously have entered the traditional art world. Nearly two-thirds of younger collectors in one recent survey use Instagram to discover artists and exhibitions, yet the same generation still places enormous value on meaningful in-person encounters.

We can see this appetite in blockbuster exhibitions and in artists who are successfully collapsing the boundaries between exhibitions, experience, retail and participation. I also think the resurgence of collectibles, from Pokémon to Labubu, as well as artists as Daniel Arsham, KAWS, emulating these franchises successfully laddering the access to their art, tells us something important. And there’s no surprise that those are also successful among younger buyers. They make accessible their narrative and symbolic worlds, creating different entry point for people to incorporate those into their identities.

Art has always operated within precisely that symbolic economy, but perhaps the art world needs to become better again at communicating the stories, worlds and meanings that make objects matter.

So I remain hopeful. There is clearly a growing appetite for art and, more broadly, for stories and forms of human expression capable of resonating at a deeper and more universal level. What may change radically over the next decade is not art’s value to society but the mechanisms through which it is produced, funded, circulated and experienced. The traditional art market will have to adapt to wider social, generational and technological transformations. But I suspect those transformations may ultimately reaffirm why art matters rather than diminish it.