Why We Need New Art Institutions

Most of us can agree: we are living through a cultural crisis. It doesn’t come from a single source—it isn’t just algorithms, aesthetics, politics, or the economy. It’s the convergence of all these forces, and beneath them, the erosion of institutions that once anchored collective life. Over the past decade, digital platforms, like social media, promised to be a new kind of connective tissue—a democratizing force to replace more slow-moving institutions. But while platforms have transformed our economies and society, they’ve also hollowed out the very structures that once gave us shared ground. Mike Pepi has long been a sharp voice in this particular debate. Straddling both the tech industry and the worlds of art criticism and cultural theory, he brings a rare perspective. His writing, which has appeared in Frieze, e-flux, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail, also takes the form of a compelling new book called Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia that was published earlier this year. In it, Pepi dismantles some of Silicon Valley’s most enduring myths, and it’s a bracing argument about what we have lost and what’s at stake as we hand over so much power, diminishing along the way some of our core institutions. But he also looks at how we might begin to rebuild them. For the art world in particular, the implications of Pepi's ideas are profound.