Dean Kissick on the art industry’s relationship to climate change and its neoliberal big money backers: “None of these are complicated projects. Pharrell’s ‘100 Years’ won’t be released for 100 years. Paterson’s ‘Future Library’ is a library for the future. Visitors to Eliasson’s “Ice Watch” can watch the ice melt. Also, it looks like a watch. As society turns against nuance, expect plenty more massively expensive and unsubtle environmental artworks to follow. Just last September, curator Klaus Littmann, taking inspiration from a Max Peintner drawing from 1970, moved a forest of 300 trees into the Wörthersee soccer stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria to make a piece called ‘For Forest.’ This is the new kind of land art, where you just move things into cities. All 300 trees will remain there until the end of October, when they’ll be replanted nearby as a ‘forest sculpture.’ All of these ideas take a lot of carbon to stage. For the London sequel of ‘Ice Watch,’ Eliasson commissioned a report on the carbon footprint of shipping nine refrigerated containers of ice from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, which was found to be 55 tons of CO2 total; roughly equivalent, the report says, to 52 people flying from London to Greenland and back to see the ice themselves. Paterson’s library project takes the opposite approach, with flights for herself and one of her authors to Norway every year to perform a handover ceremony, and likely causes more emissions. However, rather than getting bogged down in the logistics of jetting around and around the world to exhibit or experience contemporary art, and how this is accelerating climate change—because, ultimately, the carbon footprint of the art world remains relatively insignificant compared to other industries—we might want to ask more questions about how power works, who really makes environmental policy decisions, and where, if anywhere, the culture industry fits into this puzzle. Who’s funding these projects, for instance? Where does the money come from? All three iterations of Eliasson’s ‘Ice Watch,’ in Copenhagen, Paris and London, as well as his less didactic, more joyful past folly the ‘New York City Waterfalls,’ (2008), were underwritten by businessman and Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s charitable-giving foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies. Bloomberg is around the ninth-richest man in America. He likely has a significant portion of his $60-billion fortune invested in oil and gas companies. He’s an advocate of drilling and fracking and author of a book, Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet (2017), in which he explains why he thinks fracking makes sense, why he doesn’t want to stop the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and describes natural gas as ‘a godsend for the environment and public health.’”