Artist residencies have risen to the top of the artworld’s global economy and become a key feature of contemporary art practice [1]. Their growing professionalization—meaning the organization of residency work according to increasingly formal professional standards—makes it timely to ask what this expansion is doing to artists and their practice. The same is true of commercialization: the increasing influence of enterprise and market logic on an activity once discussed primarily as artistic support. These changes promise rewards, including new opportunities and forms of connection, but they also carry risks and consequences that require scrutiny. Where did this actively commercializing enterprise come from? Who benefits from it, and what might be lost? A critical conversation can examine residencies not as a neutral backdrop, but as a force shaping twenty-first-century art.
A useful point of entry is Momus: The Podcast episode 2, in which publisher and host Sky Goodden leads a critical conversation about the expanding artist-residency enterprise [1]. Goodden is joined by co-host Lauren Wetmore, a Brussels-based curator and writer, and by an international group of voices close to the subject: Daniel Baumann, director of Kunsthalle Zürich; Kristy Trinier, an artist, curator, and former Banff Centre director; and Aaron Cezar [1].
The episode asks not only what residencies have become, but where this actively commercializing model came from. Here, “commercializing” means increasingly shaped by enterprise and market-oriented thinking, while “professionalization” refers to the activity’s growing organization according to formal professional standards. The conversation considers how those developments affect art practice in the twenty-first century, keeping both their risks and their rewards in view [1].
Its distinctive format is conversational and international rather than narrowly institutional: people with direct proximity to residencies discuss the phenomenon alongside its broader consequences. That positioning matters for researchers because it frames the residency as an active force in contemporary art, not merely as a service or setting. The episode’s central question is therefore double-edged: what new possibilities might a more organized and commercially connected residency system offer, and what pressures or losses might accompany it? By asking where the enterprise came from, Goodden and her guests open space to examine its assumptions, beneficiaries, and effects without reducing the subject to either celebration or critique .