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40 Academy of Arts in London, who described the challenges facing arts organisations as a “binary position”. “There’s an uncompromising belief in what you’re programming, but there’s also a desire to get bigger audiences, so thresholds have to be lowered. Are those different things or is there a common ground?” he asked. Mr Marlow was joined by the Swedish curator, art critic and writer, Lars Nittve, founding director of Tate Modern in London, a former director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the executive director of M+ museum for visual culture, scheduled to open in Hong Kong this year. “I believe that the material, the things, the ideas that we work with are extremely important and they shouldn’t be compromised,” said Mr Nittve, who likened his career to that of an arts “missionary”. “Because you have two clients: on one hand you have the artist, and on the other, you have the audiences, and you have to optimise for these two parties, but there are many other pressures and factors in play.” Mr Marlow and Mr Nittve were joined by Munira Mirza, Executive Director for Culture at King’s College London and former Deputy Mayor for Culture and Education at London City Hall from 2008 to 2016, and former dancer Farooq Chaudhry, Executive Producer and co-founder of the Akram Khan Company, which is renowned for its popular, successful shows. “We’ve had great \[audience\] numbers over the years but we certainly didn’t start out popular,” said Mr Chaudhry. “We started out by experimenting, taking risks and not softening our creativity. “Hopefully if we do that well enough, then we engage the public, but the danger of popularity is that once you achieve it, then you spend the rest of your energy trying to keep it, and populism is the kind of disease ... that comes out of that \[desire\].” Mr Chaudhry wondered why notions of elitism plague discussions of culture, when it is never seen as an issue in the field of sport. He proposed that distinctions between popular and elite culture were to a certain