Charlotte PAUL
Author
When two activists from Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022, and asked: "What is worth more, [...] art or life?" the backlash that followed: outrage over the soup, near-silence on the climate revealed what the art world avoids confronting: its own enormous, largely unacknowledged footprint.
The global art sector is estimated to produce around 70 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent annually, with shipping and travel accounting for roughly 26 percent of this total. According to the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), transport alone can make up more than 70 percent of the total operational emissions: artworks travel by air freight in single-use wooden crates and require energy-intensive cooling and humidification. In addition, fairs like Art Basel rely on short-lived, material-intensive infrastructures. Even public institutions contribute significantly: the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation emits 30,000 tonnes annually, while staging exhibitions on species extinction or polar ice melt.
It would be tempting to call this an efficiency problem: too much fuel per artwork, too little recycling per fair. That framing, however, misses the point. The concept of sufficiency is not about doing the same thing with less. It asks a prior question: what is this for? And when we ask that of the contemporary art market, the answer is uncomfortable. While the system is nominally devoted to meaning, beauty, or human flourishing, it is organized around ownership, speculation, status, and ultimately carbon-intensive mobility. In 2025, global art market sales grew by 4 % to an estimated value of $59.6 billion. The carbon it emits is not an accident, it is the exhaust of a market logic applied to culture.
This distinction allows us to separate art as commodity from art as practice: the former drives accumulation and emissions, the latter can function as sufficiency in action. This is where art, understood as practice rather than commodity, contains its own remedy. Samuel Alexander argues that our obstacles to social change are not intellectual but aesthetic, emotional, and bound up in social identity. A different life has to be felt before it can be desired, which is precisely what art enables. Art helps bring a sufficient society into being by expanding what we can imagine. What capitalism hides, that meaning does not require accumulation, art can bring to light.
In practice, art fairs are not just markets; they are rituals of belonging, recognition, and self-definition. Asking someone to leave that world is asking them to grieve a version of themselves. Policy and argument alone cannot do that work. Only a compelling alternative image of the good life can. Sufficiency doesn't change by convincing individuals one by one; it changes when the social and material context shifts. What happens when neighbourhood studios become as socially prestigious as private collections? When making is as culturally legible as owning?
Beyond this, practiced outside the market, art itself can be a form of sufficiency. Sketching, singing, making satisfy deep human needs for creativity, expression and connection without material throughput. They require no crate, no freight, no booth; they cannot be owned and exemplify sufficiency by focusing on needs satisfiers instead of objects. Crucially, this concept is not about sacrifice or deprivation but offers a richer idea of what a good life looks like within planetary boundaries. However, for art to extend beyond the individual and to reorient away from ownership toward practice, it requires public support: funding communal studios and accessible creative spaces, so that art-making as practice is not a privilege reserved for those who can already afford it.