Modernism marks the beginning of linear time and the end of circular time, commented novelist Alvaro Enrigue. His remarks came amid an exchange with artist Adrián Villar Rojas— one of seventeen performances, keynotes, and dialogues presented as part of AIR Aspen: Life as No One Knows It, a weeklong interdisciplinary conference organized by the Aspen Art Museum. The inaugural festival, held in late July to time with the Aspen Art Fair and ArtCrush Gala, is the latest ideas summit to mine the Bauhaus-inflected legacy of the Aspen Institute’s legendary International Design Conference and gather minds in the Rockies.

The geography is fitting. Enrigue’s modernism loosely begins with American colonization, followed by the expansion of an abstract grid across the continent. Aspen, with its founding as a silver-mining town, rebirth as a twentieth-century think tank, and present distinction as a parking lot for private jets, falls into the manifest destiny timeline as a valley that concentrates capitalism’s basest urges. The median home price is $16 million, and the setting is fucking beautiful. Why not invite artists, architects, scientists, technologists, and writers here to parse whether our moment is the beginning of something or the end?

The symposium title, Life as No One Knows It, is lifted verbatim from a 2024 book by theoretical physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and, in this elevated context, reflects art world pretenses to engage in the loftiest of contemporary subjects more than scientific rigor. Artist Sophia Al-Maria, perhaps best known for coining the term “Gulf Futurism,” joined Walker in a cosmic conversation. It’s hard to quantify the embodied privilege of deliciously mucking about in the quasi unknowns of planetary consciousness, artificial intelligence, and temporal slippage while sitting beneath the museum’s timber space-frame roof, designed by Shigeru Ban—with an eight-figure view of Aspen’s slopes.

Alpine and African sensibilities collided in Pritzker Prize–winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré’s charming presentation, which brought the donor class up to speed with his hand-built brick structures in Burkina Faso. He also shared a less humble design: Kéré Architecture’s ninety-thousand-square-foot Las Vegas Museum of Art breaks ground in 2027.

Kéré’s talk, alongside keynotes by grizzly lover Werner Herzog and wave maker Maya Lin, was one of three events underwritten by Chicago collectors Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul and moderated by world-famous curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose habit of waxing philosophical in the face of global crisis proved contagious across the programming. For her part, Lin challenged a packed audience in the Aspen Institute’s Herbert Bayer–designed auditorium to do just 20 percent more to stave off climate apocalypse—“My role is to connect you back to the natural world,” she entreated. Her modest appeal was met with feel-good applause. Still, within this collectors’ paradise, presentations trod gingerly over political terrain. Instead, architecture was cast as a ballast in turbulent times. Frida Escobedo joined the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s José Esparza Chong Cuy for a conversation that teased her studio’s forthcoming wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and renovation of Paris’s Centre Pompidou with French studio Moreau Kusunoki. “Material absorbs time,” said Escobedo, seated in front of an image of Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas, a site that collocates more than five hundred years of history.

In Aspen, however, layered time seems to be slipping away as development crowds the old-timey downtown and alpine enclaves replace modest chalets. Squeezed between two historic sites, the Aspen Center for Physics and the Aspen Institute campus, the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies (founded in 2022) tries valiantly to hold the designer’s legacy. When asked about the art museum’s interest in preservation, Lees demurred. “The past is great material to reference,” she said. “We are very invested in the future at the present moment.”