What creative ideas are there for sustainability and climate protection in the art world?

What does Berlin's Humboldt Forum have in common with the approximately 6,500 residents of downtown Frankfurt am Main? The energy consumption. The website of the museum and event building features an interview with Thomas Herrmann, the head of facility management, who states that the heating and cooling capacity required for the Humboldt Forum would be sufficient for around 1,500 to 2,000 single-family homes - the equivalent of 6,000 to 8,000 people on average. Quite a lot of energy for a single building complex. And even the annual energy consumption of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, at least before its refurbishment, was 12.5 million kWh, which is equivalent to the consumption of around 2,500 single-family homes. Figures that suggest that art and cultural institutions have only given very limited consideration to their climate impact to date. But why do some arts organizations need the energy of an entire small town in the first place, and what does that say about their ecological footprint?

Works of art are sensitive creatures and place high demands on the room climate. For their optimal preservation, international guidelines stipulate a constant room climate: In summer and winter, a steady 20°C with a constant humidity of around 50% is prescribed. This explains the high energy consumption and thus the poor climate balance of many modern art institutions: In order to maintain the prescribed climate curve, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems run around the clock, and additional electricity is consumed by lighting, among other things. This does not even take into account the so-called gray energy of cultural facilities. In other words, energy generated during production, storage and transport. Waste management, the construction, dismantling and renovation of exhibitions and the materials used in museums, galleries and at trade fairs, as well as transport and loans, all contribute significantly to the ecological footprint. Artwork loans, in particular, are repeatedly repackaged for exhibitions and shipped internationally by land, sea, or air. During peak exhibition periods and as part of traveling exhibitions, many artworks are therefore on the road for most of the year. The expense of preserving and securing the works is added to this. But it's not just art: curators and employees of cultural institutions also travel the globe, visiting exhibitions and cultivating contacts with artists - not to mention cultural tourism, which had already assumed enormous proportions by the time the corona pandemic began in 2020.

In a July 2020 article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frances Morris, director of London's Tate Gallery of Modern Art, is quoted: »Our buildings consume 26,000 tons of CO₂ a year, while 260,000 tons are caused by our traveling visitors.« It's a paradox: art lovers traveled around the world to marvel at art and culture in institutions or at fairs, and cultural journalists traveled after them to report on the current documenta or the new exhibition at MoMA, and at the same time the Golden Lion of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 went to three artists from Lithuania for their performance opera Sun & Sea (Marina), whose themes are climate change, species extinction, and ecological catastrophes. And while guests at the exhibition view the various works that address climate change and its negative consequences for the environment, their art journeys, as well as the production of the event itself, contribute significantly to the effects that they view judiciously on the later awarded exhibits. 

However, it is quite possible to act in a more environmentally conscious way even in the art business itself: Corinna Vosse co-founded Germany's first reuse center in Berlin in 2006, primarily to provide sustainable support for educational institutions and artists, but also for trade fairs and exhibitions. At the non-profit association Kunst-Stoffe - Zentralstelle für wiederverwendbare Materialien e.V., materials that are no longer needed are handed in or can be picked up by the association on request in order to make them available to others at low cost for works of art, design objects, stage sets, decorations and much more. The idea of the network with the main goal to save waste and resources as well as to form a competence center of sustainable cultural development worked out: What began in small garages in Berlin now extends to two material warehouses, an open workshop for woodworking, a metal workshop for cargo bike construction and two so-called Repair Cafés. These days, there are similar providers in Germany, such as Material Mafia, a social enterprise also based in Berlin, which makes leftover materials from trade fairs, exhibitions and the creative industry available for reuse, or Hanseatische Materialverwaltung, a non-profit fundus based in Hamburg, which rents out and sells stage sets, props, materials, chairs and tables, among other things.

What's more, the fact that there are other ways to run museums and exhibitions than with the energy consumption of a small town is proven by the electricity plant, 30 minutes from Berlin, in the actual small town of Luckenwalde: built in 1913 as a coal-fired power plant, it produced energy from coal until it was shut down in 1989. Acquired by Performance Electrics in 2017, the nonprofit energy provider transformed the so called E-Werk into a center for renewable energy and contemporary art. In the process, the building, with its four floors, large outdoor space and a total of more than 10,000 square meters, is powered entirely by the renewable Kunststrom generated there. The same goes for the quarterly contemporary art program offered at the E-Werk. At the beginning of the year, a Kickstarter campaign was run with the aim of showing the award-winning performance opera Sun & Sea (Marina) at E-Werk Luckenwalde for the first time with 100% CO₂-neutral Kunststrom, heat as well as light, and also to offer the team sustainable travel options. Although CO₂ was still produced by the spectators the performance attracted, the campaign was successful and the opera, which won an award at the Biennale, was presented at the E-Werk in mid-July for the first time with 100 % CO₂-neutral electricity.

Granted, not every institution has a reuse center around the corner or can generate its own Kunststrom on the fly, but there are many other approaches to running the arts that have ecological change in mind, such as »the green museum«. It is a series of events that addresses issues such as efficiency and sustainability in museums and other historic buildings. If you want to improve, it often helps to know where you stand first in order to do so.

However, this is where it already fails to a large extent: Many cultural institutions do not even have the data concerning their own eco-balance. Last year, the art magazine ART launched a survey on the subject of gray energy in the art industry. Around 70 institutions worldwide took part in the survey, including museums, museum associations, collections and five biennials, with the disillusioning result that none of the participants knew their exact eco-balance. Only six institutions were able to provide precise information on their annual plastic consumption, while 15 had accurate figures on the amount of air travel by staff and artworks. Through the interviews accompanying the survey, ART Magazine concludes that the majority of institutions are aware of their shortcomings and are striving to make changes. For the time being, however, most of these changes are related to technical solutions such as energy-saving lamps and optimized climate control.

So while the focus in terms of sustainability for some is primarily on materials and technology, others, including an increasing number of art businesses in Germany, are calling for further comprehensive changes. The majority of German museums are under state or municipal administration and are often run by public associations or foundations. Therefore, the responsibility lies with cultural policy as well, on whose financial support the institutions depend in order to be able to position themselves appropriately in terms of climate policy. This is one of the reasons why renowned directors, artists and scientists addressed Monika Grütters (CDU), the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in an open letter in November 2019. The total of 26 people from the art world call for a task force »dedicated solely to the climate policy challenges in museums and other public exhibition venues, as well as mediating between the state and federal levels and between ministries and museums. It should advise museums, work with them to formulate concrete goals, and quickly develop a catalog of actions for a more sustainable public art industry.« This would allow the creation of a certification process, including a seal of approval, which would demonstrate the institutions' contribution to climate protection in terms of »air conditioning, lighting, loan traffic, mobility, heating, waste management, new buildings, choice of materials and products, etc.«.

The authors of the open letter argue that this should enable the arts and culture sector to be a pioneer in climate protection and make a significant contribution to the German Green New Deal. The Green New Deal, a term borrowed from the New Deal policy of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, refers to economic concepts aimed at promoting ecological and sustainable industries with the intention of counteracting climate change. In this context, German cultural policy not only has an opportunity for sustainability at a national level, but also to link up with the European Green Deal, a concept presented by Ursula von der Leyen to the European Commission in December 2019. Among other things, it pursues the goal of becoming the first continent to become climate neutral by 2050.

The demands to the Minister of State for Culture and the Media make it clear that at least part of the German arts and culture sector has now recognized the urgency of the climate crisis and the resulting relevance of its own actions in favor of climate protection. The Green Deal concepts at the national and international level suggest something similar, and expect that this realization will also increasingly flow into cultural policy. The one thing that was not foreseeable at the time of the presentation of the European Green Deal, however, was the corona pandemic and its impact on the entire arts and culture sector. Many countries were, and still are, taking precautions and restrictions to contain the infectious outbreak. The accompanying shutdown of public life is affecting cultural tourism, cinemas, theaters, museums, galleries, libraries, etc. cultural creators and consumers worldwide with a full broadside.

But as is so often the case, there is also an opportunity in this crisis. For example, with and alongside digitization, it can make much faster progress in dealing with climate protection and sustainability, and make both central tasks of cultural policy. The pandemic situation contains problem-solving approaches that are also useful for climate protection, because both crises are literally pushing us to question long-established practices in the art world. On the one hand, there is cultural tourism: instead of blockbuster exhibitions aimed primarily at tourists, cultural institutions could focus more on regional audiences in the future in order to strengthen their ties with them. There would be an opportunity to exhibit and collaborate more with local and regional art and culture makers in addition to their own collections. »Museums have a very relevant role in society to form social discourse and democracy and to create bonds between people and art,« Stefan Weppelmann, director of the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, described very aptly in an interview with Deutschlandfunk in January 2021. In order to fulfill this role more effectively, cultural institutions could focus more strongly on educational offerings and seek a more intensive exchange with urban society, Weppelmann continues. That way, topics such as sustainability and climate change would be easier to grasp and implement for local visitors, because they would be closer to them. However, this can only involve a shift in focus, not a complete abandonment of the »big« exhibitions, which, by attracting large numbers of visitors, make art accessible to broad sections of the population, fulfill art's educational mission and make a significant contribution to its democratization.

Furthermore, the conditions based on distance and reduced contact since the pandemic have led to a shift of cultural mediation and consumption into the digital space, thus forcing a general rethinking and rethinking of the experience of culture. The question arises as to whether art must always be viewed in its original and on-site form as a matter of principle, since both crises offer many art institutions the opportunity to view themselves both as physical and as virtual institutions in the future. Moreover, in addition to art mediation, production could also increasingly take place in virtual space; digital art forms such as the newly emerging NFT art demonstrate this. In any case, for the implementation of the new experience of culture, politics too is in demand. The first speech on the state of the European Union in September 2020 by the President of the European Commission, Ms. von der Leyen, gives hope in this regard, because here she lets it be known that she not only wants to support the fields of art and culture, as well as architecture and design, but to let them participate actively in order to achieve the goals of the European Green Deal.

In this context, von der Leyen presents the EU Commission's NextGenerationEU stimulus program, an environmental, economic and cultural project for Europe. With the help of this stimulus program, von der Leyen wants to establish a »new European Bauhaus - a space where architects, artists, students, engineers and designers work together and creatively toward the goal of a NextGenerationEU.« A dedicated website for the Bauhaus Creativity Initiative will serve as a platform for cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange, bringing together technology, science, art and culture to ultimately steer Europe together toward a sustainable and climate-resilient future with the Green Deal. The European Union is making a total of 750 billion euros available for the recovery programme, which is to be invested primarily in climate protection, digitisation and crisis recovery. Ms von der Leyen spoke of the recovery fund as the »biggest economic stimulus package in Europe since the American Marshall Plan.« In June this year, she travelled to Berlin to inform Chancellor Merkel that Germany will receive EU grants of almost 26 billion euros, of which 52% will go toward climate protection measures and 42% to digital projects.

And the Bauhaus Creativity Initiative continues to unfold as well: To promote sustainable ideas, the European Commission is awarding prizes worth a total of €450,000 under the initiative, including categories such as »Preserving and Transforming Cultural Heritage« and »Mobilizing Culture, Arts and Communities.« Winners will be named on Sept. 16, 2021. It can be assumed that the great promises for the European area will also have a positive impact on cultural policy around the German Green New Deal, and it is to be hoped that the visions around sustainability and climate protection can ultimately be implemented in the small art and cultural enterprises, so that they too can live up to their role as pioneers in climate protection, as art has so often been for so many concerns over the course of time.