The Raised Hand

Dear friends, thank you for opening this letter. I am glad to share with you a few stories I have not told before.

I was eight or nine when my mother and I happened upon an auction. It was the first time I had seen so many grown-ups sitting quietly together, waiting only for someone to raise a hand. So I raised mine. I cannot remember what I was thinking; I suppose I only wanted to know what it felt like. The auctioneer did not pass over me for being a child. He brought the hammer down. The whole room turned to look at me, and I was frightened out of my wits. It was only a hundred-dollar painting by an unknown hand, but that was more than I could save in a year of pocket money. I thought that if I played dumb the bill might pass me by. My mother sat up straight, waited for the slip to be brought over, glanced at it, paid, and said to me: I will pay this once, but remember, the hand was yours. On the way home she never mentioned it again, which fixed it in my memory more surely than any lecture could have. The painting is a peony in ink, by a painter who left no name. It still hangs near me; the ink has faded a little, and the flower is still open. It took me many years to understand what had happened that day: an adult had treated an eight-year-old as someone who could answer for himself. She could have pressed my hand down, or laughed the matter away. She did neither. My first collection, and everything I have done since, began with that fall of the hammer.

In writing this letter I want first to say what we see, and then why we see it that way. Over the next ten years artificial intelligence will do a great many things quickly and well. This does not worry me. I have loved computers since childhood (the years of secondary school I gave to World of Warcraft may have something to do with it), and watching machines grow more capable only pleases me. What concerns me is something else. The more capable the machines become, the more clearly the questions they leave alone stand out. What do people actually care about? Why? And for whom? These questions used to cost nothing, because everyone had a ready answer. From now on they will grow dearer, because the answers will have to be found. I believe the next important cultural institutions will be born where technology and culture meet, and that the next cities worth living in will be those that keep their people and help them flourish. ARTIFACT Futures is willing to stake itself on that judgement, and willing to wait. Look back along the road and you will see why I think so.

As a child I was taken through many countries, and I loved collecting the local coins and notes. Banknotes from each place went one by one into albums, and at night I turned the pages as if reading a map without words. Look at enough of them and you notice something interesting: a banknote is what a country puts into everyone’s hands every day, and what it puts there has been chosen. Some print their founders; some their poets and scientists; some print no one at all, only a bridge, a bird, a line of hills. What a people places in every hand is what it holds dear. Later I came to call it the letter a people writes to the world. And what the letter speaks of, without exception, is people, or what people treasure.

After my studies I worked at an auction house in New York, where the work of Lê Phổ and other Vietnamese masters passed through my hands. That generation of Vietnamese painters had learned in Paris and turned back to paint home, and what they made belonged neither to Hanoi nor to Paris, yet was honest to both. I began to collect their paintings, and to wonder about the city they had set out from. Years later my team and I went to Hanoi to do research. On my first day in the country I went out alone and hailed a motorbike. The driver asked whether I had eaten. I said no, and he stopped asking where I was going and took me to a phở shop deep in an alley. There was nothing in it but low plastic stools, and a few leaves of mint floated on the clear broth. For years afterwards the city’s artists, scholars and cultural officials received us as that driver had: first they asked whether you had eaten, then who you were. In that goodwill VAC grew from a research group into one of the most active cultural institutions in Vietnam. I have never thought of this as my doing. A city begins by taking in one person, and only those who have been taken in know how far that reaches. It became the way we choose our cities.

Our friends in Shanghai’s cultural world gave our team a place when we were still small, too small to deserve one, and have kept it for us every year since. Several elders of the art world stepped in at almost every turn and never spoke of return. In Silicon Valley, young and gifted founders, researchers and investors were willing to walk into a gallery dinner on a weekday evening, lay their phones face down, and talk late into the night about memory and creativity, and about what technology and people will be to each other. When it ended no one asked what the evening had bought, but everyone agreed to meet again soon. The greatest luck of my life has been to meet, through collecting, through art and through one community after another, so many people willing to help me, and not one of them asked for anything back. Turn that over long enough and a conclusion follows: the foundation of an institution is never the institution itself, but the people who choose to trust it. So when we began to support thinkers and founders, we too bet on the person first and spoke of results later. I have seen it done the other way round. It always seems to me to do less for the community and the city, and something in it falls a little short.

I first saw technology and art meet many years before ARTIFACT Futures existed. More than a decade ago in Cambridge, my teacher Frederick Baker and I produced an art film made to be projected. It was shot at King’s College, and its first screening was on the bank of the Cam, beneath King’s College Chapel. That night a faint projected light rose from the water and settled between the arches of the bridge and the willows, and the punters on the river let their poles rest. It was simply beautiful. Later I joined him in shaping the idea for Klimt’s Magic Garden. A few years on, at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, visitors put on a headset and walked into Klimt’s garden; it was among the last works of his life. He passed away a few years ago, and Skype, on which we had always written to each other, was shut down a few years after that. It saddened me. I often think that it was a teacher who took a student, who was nothing yet, to see the particular light that appears when technology meets art. Left to myself, I am not sure I would have found it. The moment a person most needs to be believed in is precisely the moment he has nothing to show for himself. I was given that trust, and so I dare, early, to give the same trust to younger innovators.

I loved technology as a child and my profession carried me towards culture, so I have friends on both sides. The two rarely sit down at one table, yet as far as I can tell they are truly curious about each other; it is only that no one lays the table. Since artificial intelligence arrived, that table has suddenly mattered. Each step technology takes hands people a new question. What is memory? What counts as making? What remains of a person once a machine has overtaken him? These are all human questions, and culture has been answering them for thousands of years; the answers are simply scattered through books and paintings, temples and market streets, waiting for someone to go and fetch them. What ARTIFACT Futures does is simple to say: we clear the table and seat researchers, artists, founders and policymakers together, and early on we back those willing to sit down and build. We research, we publish, we gather people, we run education programmes, we help young makers and researchers build and exchange, and behind all of it is a single thought: culture lights up a community, and when a community comes alive its city gains meaning. A city that helps its people flourish will be made to flourish by them.

Looking ahead, I cannot help thinking of the past two years, in which every visit to Abu Dhabi has left me moved by this oasis in the desert, and I am not easily moved. That within two generations a coast and a desert became a nation at the forefront of the world is something everyone knows. What interests me more is how. In Al Ain I have seen the falaj, a thousand years old. Scarce water still runs in the shade of the oasis, shared fairly among every household. Zayed was born there. I have also sat in a majlis, the room where people gather to meet and talk: the door open, a place for whoever comes, elders and the young, strangers and neighbours in one circle, coffee and dates passed round and round, things said face to face and settled between people. The one places resources in the midst of people; the other places decisions there. A people arranged its life this way centuries ago, and when it builds museums today and thinks fifty years ahead, it is using the same cast of mind: looking far into the future, and holding people dear. It made me feel that the table I had been imagining has long had a name here. In 2026 we bring it to its homeland. Our annual Inquiry closes there, and the next one begins there. Those who think about the future should gather where people are held dear.

The story at the start of this letter taught me that a promise, once made, must be kept. So I want to set down the following lines, for our friends and for ourselves. We plan on a horizon of ten years. If something holds lasting value for people, we will do it even with no return in sight; if something is only a stir that fades without trace, we would rather miss it. We back people first and speak of results later. We will stay open, and the door of opportunity stays open to those who come after us. We will keep speaking in many languages, because understanding begins in the other person’s tongue. We hold ourselves to a single measure: years from now, how many people went further because we were there.

There are things we will not do. We will not give up our character for scale, say what is not true for a moment’s attention, or squander the trust of friends as if it were a resource. These lines are written here so that one day someone can hold us to them. A promise written down, like the hand raised that day when I was eight, is a promise to be kept.

My mother taught me one more thing: give more, ask for less. This institution has no secret. It has only a group of friends in different corners of the world doing the same thing in different ways, and a table that keeps growing longer. I hope that years from now, when people speak of ARTIFACT Futures, they remember whom it helped to flourish, rather than how high it stood.

Thank you for being willing to walk this road with us.