Culture is Participation
Written by Zoe Sharif
Published on October 2nd, 2026
Just outside the doors of Christie’s New York, amid the constant movement of Rockefeller Center, a small interaction stopped Roxanna Zarnegar in her tracks.
“I walked out of the building just to grab some sun, and this little boy started running toward me,” she recalls. “I thought, How cute. He’s going to come see art.”
Before the child could reach the entrance, his father rushed over, took his hand, glanced at Zarnegar, and quietly pulled him away. “You don’t ever want to go in there. We can’t go in there. That’s not for us.”
They walked away, leaving Zarnegar stunned. “I was taken aback,” she says. “I thought, ” What? Is this where I work? Is it really that intimidating?”
What happens before someone becomes a collector? What keeps people from ever walking through the door?
The moment lingered. Inside Christie’s, she and her coworkers would occasionally discuss how few people realized they could walk through the auction house’s galleries free of charge and stand inches away from some of the world’s most amazing works of art. Yet, just outside its doors—tucked between Fifth and Sixth Avenue alongside Rockefeller Center and FAO Schwarz—the institution remained, for many, a place they assumed was off-limits.
The disconnect reflects a broader paradox. Museums are reporting record attendance, yet many people still feel that contemporary art, and the institutions that surround it, isn’t meant for them. The American Alliance of Museums reports that the percentage of US adults who visited a museum in the previous year climbed from 25% to approximately 33% in 2025.
After nearly three decades helping shape the business of the art world through leadership roles at Christie’s Americas and Artnet, Zarnegar found herself asking a different question: What happens before someone becomes a collector? What keeps people from ever walking through the door?
Inside the Art Market
Ironically, Zarnegar entered the art world as an outsider herself. When she first joined Christie’s, she hadn’t studied art, nor did she consider herself an art lover. Her experience was in communities and events, bringing people together, creating experiences, and encouraging involvement. The art market was unfamiliar territory
That changed the day she found herself standing in front of a Mark Rothko. She didn’t know the artist’s name or the painting’s value. She only knew she couldn’t stop looking at it.
“It was one of those moments where your brain tells you your life is about to change,” she says. “You don’t know exactly what’s happening, but you know it’s important.”
Then she glanced at the lot card. The painting was valued at $35 million.
“My first thought was, Well, no matter what I do in life, I’ll never own this piece,” she says. “Then another part of my brain was like, Yeah, but you can enjoy it. Why do you need to have it? It’s here. It’s free.”
Unlike the little boy outside Christie’s who believed he needed permission to enter, she understood that experiencing the work was enough.
After returning home, she became engrossed in studying more about artists rather than the auction market. To duplicate Rothko’s palette throughout her Manhattan apartment, she sought out a painter who made ends meet by painting houses in between commissions. Every time she passed through her house, she could experience the sensation of standing in front of the original because each room had one of the colors from the painting. Those moments, she says, are what kept her in the art world.
For Zarnegar, the problem isn’t that there are too few art lovers. “The art world is actually a very large place,” she says. “People just don’t feel like they’re invited.”
She developed a career that touched almost every aspect of the industry over the next 20 years, from executive leadership at Christie’s and Artnet to teaching design at Parsons and, now, creating her own platform. Yet the deeper she became embedded in the business of art, the more one question lingered: if someone with no formal art background could discover a lifelong passion simply by walking through the door, why weren’t more people doing the same?
For Zarnegar, the problem isn’t that there are too few art lovers. “The art world is actually a very large place,” she says. “People just don’t feel like they’re invited.”
That disconnect is what she calls “the missing middle.” The audience that exists between casual appreciation and serious collecting. They visit museums, pause in front of paintings, feel something profound, and then leave believing the art world isn’t meant for them.
The Missing Middle
To better understand where people fall away, Zarnegar decided to remove herself from the art world altogether.
For an entire year, she stopped going to openings, stopped spending time with colleagues in the industry, and stopped talking about art. If she wanted to understand why so many people never became part of the art world, she reasoned, she first had to step outside of it.
“I stopped looking at art for one whole year,” she says. “I completely refrained from it.”
When she returned, the thing she had missed most wasn’t the artwork itself. It was the conversations. She missed discovering a new artist and wanted to ask someone about their work right away. She missed sharing ideas, hearing various perspectives, and finding new artists via the passion of others rather than an algorithm. She came to the realization that confidence starts somewhere between viewing art and talking about it.
For someone newly curious about art, that step is often missing. Where do they go after their first museum visit? How do they meet artists? Who answers their questions? How do they learn enough to trust their own opinions before anyone expects them to buy a piece? The art world offers countless destinations, but few clear entry points.
Social media has made discovering art easier than ever. An endless stream of artists, galleries, and exhibitions is available with a swipe. But abundance isn’t the same as understanding.
“Social media has done a fantastic job of giving you an abundance of choices,” Zarnegar says. “But it hasn’t taught you how to build taste.”
Algorithms can bring up images, but they are unable to explain why one piece of art sticks in your memory while another does not. They cannot take the place of the discussions that mold individual preferences or the self-assurance that grows from frequent exposure to art and its creators.
For Zarnegar, that is the missing middle: not a lack of interest, but rather the lack of opportunities for curiosity to develop into understanding, confidence, and ultimately participation.
In her book, The Participatory Museum, Nina Simone emphasizes just that: rather than being guided by unhelpful social pressures and false prejudices, people should feel clear about where they can enter the art space with careful direction.
What Traditional Institutions Can Learn
An individual’s identity is shaped and curated by their exposure to art. To see Keith Haring on a wall in New York City, you don’t need a ticket, but to join the VIPs at Art Basel, you do need a ticket and permission. For Zarnegar, this disconnect is part of what traditional institutions don’t always recognize. The barriers surrounding art can prevent individuals from absorbing it, developing their own taste, and ultimately creating within their own realities.
If you take everything and put it under the scope of art—land art, sound art, traditional fine art, digital art—the number of artists in our universe is far greater than five million. Zarnegar believes it could be closer to 120 million artists, many of whom simply haven’t been tapped yet.
But asking traditional institutions to reach those people is, in her view, like trying to turn a gigantic cruise ship.
But asking traditional institutions to reach those people is, in her view, like trying to turn a gigantic cruise ship.
“The minute the captain tries to turn that wheel to move a gigantic ship like a Christie’s or a MoMA, it takes a half an hour for it to make that left turn,” she says. “That’s why people like me and you are more nimble.”
Street art, she argues, is one of those nimble activation points. Artist-run spaces, digital art communities, and public art can create opportunities for people to interact with art without first having to understand the rules of the institution surrounding it. They may serve as venues for people to learn about artists, develop their taste, and ultimately come to understand their own role in the art world.
What traditional institutions could do more of, Zarnegar says, is simply discover people.
“Celebrate more people and maybe not put it around money, right?” she says. When she thinks back to her first encounter with the Rothko, she remembers how quickly the $35 million price tag threatened to change the experience. “I don’t want to always correlate money with art.”
Rather, she wants to give individuals the chance to develop their taste first. Before discussing something’s monetary worth, she wants people to experience it, discuss it, and determine what it means to them. She argues that if people feel like they are part of the creative community, the value of the art will inevitably follow.
“Institutions aren’t meant to create culture. They’re meant to protect culture,” Zarnegar says. “The activators of culture are street art, digital art.”
“Institutions aren’t meant to create culture. They’re meant to protect culture,” Zarnegar says. “The activators of culture are street art, digital art.”
The distinction is crucial. Museums and auction houses preserve and protect the cultural history that already exists. However, the process of creating new art lovers might take place in far more direct settings, such as an artist’s studio, a web community, a city street, or an unexpected encounter with a piece of art.
For Zarnegar, it can be as simple as tapping someone on the shoulder, “Hey, you’re standing in front of a Keith Haring. Want me to tell you a story about him?”
That small invitation, she argues, can be the trigger that changes someone’s relationship to art. A passive observer becomes a participant and a stranger becomes part of a conversation.
“Suddenly they’re going to be like, ‘Holy crap! I’m an art lover, and I didn’t know it.'”
The little boy running outside Christie’s wasn’t rejected by art. He was rejected by an institution. And for Zarnegar, closing that gap is what the missing middle is ultimately about.
Algorithmic Discovery
Technology has made art infinitely available, but has it also made discovery less adventurous?
Social media gives abundance. Technology helps you learn. People help you interpret. Conversations help you build taste. Confidence comes after that.
Zarnegar is quick to point out that she isn’t anti-technology. In fact, she’s building a tech platform for artists, and her own collection reflects how deeply she believes digital spaces can expand the way people encounter art. A longtime street art collector who knows the history of street art in New York, she sees a natural connection between street art and digital art—not NFTs, but digital art itself.
She has collected more than 50 pieces of digital art through Sedition, a platform that has introduced her to artists she might not have come across otherwise. One of those artists was Universal Everything. She first discovered the work online, sitting on her phone, and decided to challenge her own taste.
“I was like, I’m going to challenge myself. I’m going to see if I’m going to be a tastemaker,” she says.
She bought a piece in 2014. Years later, that discovery led her somewhere much more physical. In 2022, she traveled to London to visit Universal Everything’s studio and see an exhibition of the collective’s work in person.
“It was the coolest exhibition I’ve been to in years,” she says. “And I have to thank Sedition for that.”
The experience serves as an example of what technology can do at its best. It can introduce someone to an artist, give them the confidence to explore something new, and create a path toward a deeper relationship with the work. It can even lead them from the screen into a physical space. But for Zarnegar, the most important part isn’t the technology itself. It’s the community that forms around it.
Technology can make art easier to find. It cannot, on its own, tell you what to look for.
“The reason I like collecting digital art more than I like collecting physical art is because the digital art community is so much more welcoming,” she says. “I feel like I belong.”
That realization brought her back to the missing middle. If someone with decades of experience in the art world can feel more comfortable entering a digital art community than walking into a traditional art space, what does that say about the people who are still trying to find their way in? Technology can make art easier to find. It cannot, on its own, tell you what to look for.
“I’ve realized that the amount of exposure I’ve had to art has helped me evolve into who I am today,” Zarnegar says. “And it happens slowly and subtly, kind of like a little sidecar buddy that just whispers in your ear.”
These little interactions add up. One artist inspires another. One discussion alters your perspective on a piece of art. Your taste is tested with one piece. Discovery eventually leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to confidence.
That, Zarnegar believes, is where technology has an opportunity to do more than recommend.
“If I really believe that there’s like 100 million artists and art lovers and collectors that we don’t know about yet, then I’ve got—I can build a platform for that,” she says. “I can build a platform that just has community and events in mind, and let people just go.”
Technology has made finding art easier than ever. Building taste, however, remains something else entirely.
RubyArt
So, what does belonging actually look like in practice? For Zarnegar, it starts with creating a place inside culture that provides comfort and conversation. Belonging isn’t about membership, it’s about removing the feeling that you’re standing on the outside looking in.
When creating RubyArt, Zarnegar intentionally left major institutions out of the database. She deliberately avoided major art fairs like Art Basel and Frieze in favor of showcasing and promoting extraordinary, frequently overlooked street artists and art communities worldwide. She looked to the Philippines, where a strong feeling of community and collectivism provided a model of what she was attempting to create. She explored street art in Poland. When she gave an art talk in 2019, she recalled meeting a street artist in Moscow. She centered the database on street art, which served as her inspiration or circle.
The method originated from the same experiment that had once led her to abstain from the art world. What if, instead of stepping away from art entirely, she stepped away from the institutions. Instead, she traveled to art events that few people knew about. She went to Poland, Kentucky, and wherever else conversations and curiosity led her.
Occasionally, that fascination began with something quite ordinary. At five o’clock, she may go out for a drink with a friend, who would tell her that Kentucky bourbon was the greatest and order a scotch. “And in my brain, I go, wait a minute. If there’s bourbon, there’s art. Let me look up what goes on in Kentucky.”
That search led her to a biennale in Kentucky. She went and found exactly what she had been looking for: an art event without the pretentiousness she had come to associate with the traditional art world, where the entire city participated. They couldn’t afford an exhibition center, so the organizers installed the artwork in office buildings along the main strip. Visitors didn’t need to buy a ticket. They picked up a map and walked around Louisville, following the locations marked throughout the city. Zarnegar remembers walking into a law office and finding Ansel Adams on the walls.
“I spent the year that I spent abstaining, I filled the next year with just—I traveled for 52 weeks everywhere I could,” she says. “I saw art that was not readily available, and I did it by having conversations.”
Those conversations became her guide. A friend in San Francisco might tell her to meet him in Copenhagen, and she’d wonder what kind of art was there. She’d Google “Copenhagen art” and start digging. But eventually, the administrative task of searching became exhausting.
“And then I realized, well, why don’t I just make a database of art events?” she says.
That concept evolved into RubyArt, an expanding database of artistic and cultural events accompanied by brief summaries intended to make the process of discovering art feel less like research and more like discovery. The database itself began to grow through the same conversations that had led Zarnegar to these places in the first place. Someone would email her about an event in Indiana, for example, and tell her about an art fair called Butter. She’d look it up, become curious, and add it to the database.
The goal is not to tell people where to find art, but to give them a reason to go.
RubyArt is designed around meeting people in person. Users will be able to search events, create their own events, and, for artists without representation or a traditional gallery system, share studio visits and invite people into their workspaces.
The platform also incorporates a community board, allowing users to connect to events in real time: “Hey, I’m at the street art event on Houston Street. Is anyone else there?” The idea is to make RubyArt a sidekick to going somewhere—to see who else is there, meet up, and turn an individual experience into a shared one.
That emphasis on getting people out of their comfort zones is intentional. In the first version of RubyArt, users can connect with people, but they cannot follow them indefinitely. Zarnegar is concerned that following could replicate the same passive behavior that plagues social media: lounging on the couch and observing others’ cultural experiences rather than engaging with them.
After three mobile connections, the platform prompts users to get out of their comfort zone and go to an event. You can connect with as many people as you want, but the goal is ultimately to meet them somewhere in the real world.
While the RubyArt app is still in production, users are invited to engage on rubyart.net.
For Zarnegar, the idea extends beyond any one platform. She believes the future of culture is participation, and that participation might require reimagining what we consider a transaction in the first place.
“I didn’t sell this piece, but 5,000 people showed up,” she says. “That actually goes back to the original intent of art.”
After years spent inside the institutions that define the traditional art world, and then years spent deliberately looking beyond them, Zarnegar’s answer to the missing middle is ultimately simple. Give people somewhere to go, something to discover, and someone to experience it with.
Zoe Sharif – Born and bred in Queens, New York, Zoe lives at the intersection of street culture, contemporary art, and creative production. With a background in International Criminal Justice, Digital Media & Journalism, her work is shaped by an interest in visual storytelling, public space and the systems that shape how art is communicated and received. She explores creative communities, looking at processes and the ways street-level expression can move between public space and institutional contexts.