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Saying No for Change: Dawn Chan On Grounding Herself in a Jet-Setting World

After a flood in her mother's basement collapsed the line between criticism and climate anxiety, she began declining flights, passing professional opportunities to local talent and proposing absurdist conceptual alternatives to showing up on site.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in September 2025. Many in the international art world adore its jet-setting ways, but a few years back, the writer and academic Dawn Chan embarked upon a research project that tackled this aspect of the lifestyle head-on by asking: What happens when an art critic refuses to fly for art events and press trips? Chan is a core faculty member at CCS Bard and well-known for her writing in the New York Times, ArtReview, Spike and, formerly, Artforum, where she was an editor in the 2010s. She’s spoken about the project before, but if haven’t made it to any of her lectures in person, you might have taken a page from Chan’s book and sent a doppelganger. (She met an artist named Dawn Chan, based in Europe, who is willing to collaborate.) Observer caught up with the critic to hear more about the project and the consequences of staying grounded.

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How did this project come about?

My elderly mother’s basement flooded in 2023, in an extreme weather event, and I was dealing with water ankle-deep and rising while simultaneously being on the phone with an editor who was picking apart a line I’d written in an art review. For me, that was a visceral moment; before that, I’d compartmentalized my work as a cultural critic and kept it separate from my concerns as an average person worried about the climate crisis. A flight seems so incomparably convenient compared to a train ride. But you just kick the can down the road. There I was, logging at least thirty hours that summer fixing up that basement after a flood, calling Verizon and remediators and plumbers and contractors. Did I actually save time by taking those flights to see art shows? Looking at the bigger picture of cause and effect, it suddenly didn’t seem so clear.

You emphasize that this isn’t about shaming colleagues who travel. Why was it important to you? Because it’s so ubiquitous?

It’s definitely not about shaming colleagues. There are structural realities built into how art’s various global ecosystems work right now. You can’t ask people to risk their jobs or pass up opportunities and just ask someone to comply because someone else’s index finger is wagging at them.........

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