White Lotus has quickly transformed Sicily into a high-profile international tourist destination, especially from the United States, without any direct government intervention or tax incentives. In stark contrast to Puglia, a government-led film credit scheme has boosted tourism, bringing its beauty to international screens. In the art world, however, we have heard next to nothing about Sicily since the unforgettable Manifesta 12 in Palermo in 2018, despite a wave of non-profit spaces and cultural projects that have flourished and closed in the years since. Now, Hauser & Wirth has chosen Palermo for its only site in Italy to date, bringing new hope to the city’s art scene.
Hauser & Wirth has acquired Palazzo De Seta, a 19th-century palace in the historic Calsa district, Repubblica reports. Built by the Deseta family, one of Sicily’s most famous aristocratic bloodlines, the building embodies the city’s layered cultural and political history, its foundations once belonging to the Jesuit complex Casa Professa, before the Bourbon expulsions reshaped Palermo’s urban fabric and architectural character. Its neoclassical vocabulary, including large salons, loggias facing the sea and frescoed interiors, made it the center of Palermo’s intellectual and social life in the late 1800s, with a very aristocratic environment depicted in literary and cinematic works ilgatopado Immortal.
Before the sale, the palace was privately held by the De Seta family but remains partially open for events, openings and institutional projects, as it has long hosted the Circolo Artistico di Palermo, a cultural association founded in 1882 that brought together writers, artists and members of the city’s professional class. The property remains subject to historic monument restrictions and the Sicilian Ministry of Region and Culture has 60 days to exercise its right of first refusal.
While the gallery has not released details of future plans for the space, it has confirmed the acquisition to the media. “I am deeply honored to be given the opportunity to restore a site of such profound significance and beauty and to create a new arts destination in a place known for centuries for cultural exchange,” gallery chairman Iwan Wirth said in a statement.
Already during the 2018 Manifesta Biennale, there were rumors of possible negotiations for Palazzo Constantino in the Four Song District. Palazzo De Seta is just a few steps away from Palazzo Butera, another baroque noble palace owned by collector Massimo Valsecchi, who occasionally opens the palace to showcase contemporary art in dialogue with its historic interior.
The move is in line with Hauser & Wirth’s strategy to reach its brand well beyond traditional commercial galleries and transform its locations into cultural destinations, often combined with high-end hotel experiences. While Hauser & Wirth’s involvement in the hospitality industry is currently led by Artfarm, a hotel and catering company that extends the gallery’s brand into immersive destinations, its involvement in the hospitality industry predates Artfarm’s official launch in 2014. The Wirth family has a long tradition of running hotels and meeting places in Switzerland, and when they opened the gallery in 1992, the idea of creating a place of encounter was already fundamental. Bookshops and cafés were integrated into the first Zurich location, a model that later expanded with the expansion of the Somerset campus, which houses an arts centre, a farm, a restaurant and a guest house.
Artfarm’s portfolio now spans a range of hospitality businesses, extending Hauser & Wirth’s cultural world into lived experiences, from The Fife Arms in Braemar, its arts-led flagship hotel with 16,000 pieces of art, site-specific commissions and a Michelin-approved kitchen, to Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a farm-to-table restaurant on the gallery’s countryside campus. Somerset also includes The Guesthouse (a boutique accommodation concept) and Durslade Farmhouse (a guesthouse designed by the artist for collectors, artists, and tourists), while in California, Manuela is a full-service restaurant within the gallery’s Los Angeles complex that recently expanded into New York’s new Soho location. The portfolio continues to grow with the launch of the Ringlestone Inn and other UK countryside attractions, further developing its arts-based rural cultural tourism model.
While the blurring of the lines between art, lifestyle and experience allows the gallery to extend its brand reach well beyond traditional art audiences, anticipating and fully aligning with the approach of other luxury brands in this experience-based economy, it is noteworthy how Hauser & Wirth continues to strengthen its identity by aligning these operations with a genuine cultural commitment to preserving and reactivating historic sites, a mission most clearly expressed through its art centers in Somerset, Menorca and downtown Los Angeles.
In Somerset, the transformation of 18th-century Deslade Farm into a contemporary arts campus set the benchmark for sensitive rural regeneration and won the farmhouse the 2014 William Stansell Award for Historic Architecture. Taking a similar approach, the gallery’s adaptive reuse of a former flour mill complex in downtown Los Angeles repurposed the site into a new community center, an intervention recognized for its leadership in preservation with the 2018 Los Angeles Conservancy President’s Award.
The company’s recent projects on Menorca’s Isla del Rey, including the restoration and transformation of an 18th-century naval hospital into a cultural destination, have received international acclaim. It has received the 2021 European Heritage Award from the European Commission and Europa Nostra, as well as accolades that underline its architectural impact and community value, including the 2021 Best Socially Responsible Initiative Award from the Government of the Balearic Islands, the 2021 Interior Design Best of the Year Award, the 2022 Wallpaper*Design Award for Best Art Destination, Architectural Digest’s 2022 Works of Wonder Award, the 2022 Master of Architecture Award, the 2022 DNA Paris Design Award and the 2022 Créateurs Design Award of the Year. Importantly, all of these actions extend their impact beyond the arts world, returning these places to local communities as new sites of gathering, cultural production and education.
Create destinations defined by meaning, memory and presence
While the combination of the recent 5% tax reduction regime (VAT and exports) and the flat tax regime that attracts wealthy foreigners to obtain residency have certainly made Italy an attractive destination for the art industry, Hauser & Wirth’s intentions, specifically the intention to choose Palermo over major cities and art centers such as Milan or Rome, went well beyond the need to open an outpost in Italy as a commercial gallery. Rather, the aim is to help ensure that the palace’s historic role as a cultural venue is continued and developed through international contemporary art projects. At the same time, by combining branding with placemaking as it has done elsewhere, Hauser & Wirth is likely to prioritize establishing a sustainable institutional presence that integrates into Palermo’s existing social and cultural ecosystem, ideally helping to develop wider key groups and new audiences.
The news comes as Sotheby’s is transforming its newly renovated Brower Building headquarters in New York into a cultural destination and hosting holiday exhibitions of iconic masterpieces for sale by the company, in an apparent effort to expand its reach beyond its traditional auction business. In different ways, the strategies of Hauser & Wirth and Sotheby’s reflect a shift in the luxury sector, with lifestyle brands seeking to embed themselves into the cultural sphere through institutional partnerships, artist collaborations, equity sponsorships or heritage restoration projects. These initiatives demonstrate a willingness to prioritize the creation of cultural and creative capital, allowing them to build not just visibility but real symbolic value, a form of long-term cultural capital that cannot be generated through traditional marketing cycles.
Brand equity today depends on sustained, meaningful engagement with physical experiences, inspiring cultural production through storytelling, and creating a symbolic and narrative world that audiences can enter and create their own. As Pierluigi Sacco points out, this reflects a shift from a consumption-based Culture 2.0 model to a co-production-based Culture 3.0 model, where audiences are no longer passive but want to generate meaning, share content and actively shape narrative ecosystems around a brand or cultural experience. Through audience participation, brand capital and cultural capital become indistinguishable. From this perspective, Hauser & Wirth and Sotheby’s are not just creating new places, but investing in narrative-led experiences that become core mechanisms of semiotic production, in the process building brand value more powerfully than traditional marketing.
In an age of overexposure to digital content and online marketing, the most powerful sources of symbolic value seem to come from projects that generate meaning, memory and presence: rooted in local experiences, community engagement, shared creativity or heritage. Whether by restoring a palace in Palermo or a historic farm in Menorca, converting a former museum site into an auction house and year-round cultural attraction, or linking a luxury brand to a major museum facility (such as Chanel or Audemars Piguet), these strategies not only enable businesses to improve their social responsibility scores, but also create lasting cultural anchors. Unique experiences with multiple layers of emotional and narrative impact can build a lasting sense of belonging, something audiences increasingly seek in today’s fragmented and alienated society, but which traditional marketing channels cannot replicate. As people become increasingly burdened with products and information, they are not necessarily seeking to have more, but rather to experience and feel more.
