When Can You Call Yourself a Curator?
Many people seem to be using the words "curate" and "curator" these days. Almost everyone is a curator or engages in some form of curatorship. From gallery collections to Etsy shops, people are “curating” here and “curating” there. They are in control and we the consumers, are benefitting from their discrimination, taste and concern.
But the dilution of the term across so many fields has made its definition pretty challenging. Really, what does it mean "to curate"? One crucial variable is for whom you are curating: for what audience and what institution, real or virtual.
Before I move forward, a quick segue into another word that has gained currency to mean almost anything, and that is "collaborate", which from an artistic perspective (and well beyond that), is affiliated with the curating. "Collaborate" carries with it a sense of community and brothers-in-arms. A lot of it is nonsense. To be honest, it is used too often as a yummier world for "worked for" or "worked with" or just "contracted out by".
Curating is a similar deal. It’s often used instead of “organise” or “control”, for the sake of a little more elegance and moral weight. It can be used to describe, for instance, a "carefully curated image", as may be in the case of Madonna or Brad Pitt.
In art, too many people who call themselves curators based on not that much. On the try-hard rung, I know of one commercial gallery that calls the gallery assistant called a curator to give the position status it doesn't have. Pretty silly: how do you curate an artist's show when the artist is expected (as is the norm) to think of the number, order, and configuration of the works for a solo show? Does she make suggestions about which wall to use? Suggestions are always welcome, but you don't need to be called a curator to make them. Maybe it's all about reaching for top-tier names for regular jobs.
Working as an artist and in art schools and art departments for most of my professional life, I have also witnessed people who have organised a handful of shows call themselves curators and even taking up teaching courses on curating.
I’ve curated five or so shows if I remember rightly, but I’d never be so presumptuous as to call myself a curator. I have written quite a lot about curating, which I hope is ok, since I have been curated into many shows and have seen and written art criticism on many curated exhibitions.
So What Exactly is an Art Curator?
“Curator” derives from the Latin, curare, to “care” or “take care”. From curare we also get cure. And in what will again emerge as a darkly ironic twist to our argument, 'curator' is also used in Scotland for someone who is the guardian of a child.
Conventionally, curators exist anywhere there are collections of objects or documents that require order and preservation. Collections need keepers and minders who, it is hoped, understand their scope and have created a system to safeguard them and ensure ease of access. In antiquity, this task would have fallen to servants, who were tasked with ensuring that collections of weaponry or items like sculptural carvings, plundered or for religious purposes, were kept safe and in usable condition.
Aside from weaponry, the earliest significant collections were books, which were scarce and valuable before movable type. The most celebrated library of the ancient world was the Alexandrian Library, which has been established during Ptolemy's reign (285-246 BC). It was known as the "Shrine of the Muses" or "Museum" and constituted the greatest concentration of learning of antiquity.
The early example of the Ptolemaic Museum also illustrates the extent to which such collections were not a mere matter of the dumb massing of items (in this case books) and served the function of policing vetting and were therefore a form of surveillance of knowledge.
As Daniel Heller-Roazan explains, the men of learning housed in the museum were devoted to scholarship that took the form of a massive project aimed at the conservation and, more radically, the ‘emendation’ and ‘rectification’ of the works of the classical Greek authors: it is here that the many forms of textual criticism still employed by the modern library and historical scholarship, from the purification of diction to the practice of marginal annotation and the division and ordering of metrical sequences, are invented and refined.[i]
These scholars were the first curators, caring for the contents and putting them to some logical use to expand and purify knowledge.
What is instructive are the words "invented" and "refined". Translated into modern terms, the curator of art refines a collection by ensuring correct provenance, providing justified chronological attribution (whence the catalogue raisonné), and supporting the acquisition of works that would enlarge the depth of the collection and to widen the contexts of the holdings.
In the process of this refinement, the curator is inevitably confronted with decisions, since an overly proliferating set of relationships would have the negative effect of diluting meaning. Whether faced with an impoverishment of resources or of plenty, the kinds of structures that the curator puts in place are perforce inventions (hence translations), for they almost always involve gaps, be it in the work of individual artists or an artist's historical milieu.
When it comes to providing larger orderings, such as projecting a particular movement, interest of sensibility, the curator’s responsibilities are greater still, as what is put next to what, what is included and omitted, can have a sizeable effect on how works are read.
There will inevitably be value decisions based on particular theories of art. A curator of yesteryear under the influence of one of the founders of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin, for instance, may demonstrate the purported decadence of the Baroque style, and so on. As in any osmotic relationship, curators who have had an influential mentor will reflect that style its preservation or by a radical break.
The first collections that emerged out of the late Renaissance were not as encumbered by morality or dogma. As the name suggests, the 'cabinets of curiosities' or Wunderkammern, to appear in the early seventeenth century, consisted of a random variety of objects and images that reflected the collector's various fascinations.
It could range from the lurid such as a double-headed fetus to works of art that had been commissioned, acquired, plundered, or traded. It is a phenomenon that is historically accountable due first to the age of trade, exploration, and imperial conquest, and second to the burgeoning of science as typified by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes. They are representative of a marge larger number of thinkers who helped to move away from the Aristotelian worldview to usher in modern rational thinking.
While collections of natural history cannot relinquish their many connections to science, art museums conveniently forget such links. Remembering such a relationship introduces elements such as method and philosophy that would vitiate or certainly complicate the creative and intuitive dimension of a curator's work.
The earliest collections reflect the need to account for the anomalies and the exceptions of the world. They also served as convenient magnets for social discourse: men of like mind and 'curiosity' would gravitate to these collections expressly or on their travels.[ii] These associations would grow to fraternities that would become the ‘societies’ of the eighteenth century that would eventuate into university faculties.
What is to be emphasised here is the role of what would later become known as critical discourse. The early museums, ad hoc as they were, were sites for discussion: meeting, exchange, learning, and, indeed, friendship.
Instigated by colonisation and trade, the wealth that grew in the seventeenth century created the early incarnations of today's notion of conspicuous consumption, to which art was central. Art and architecture were crucial for the assertion of a grandee's wealth. What was commissioned and collected followed choices in the patron's best interests, to reflect his or her taste and wealth.
Pictures could be symbolic representations of the patron through history or mythology, bearing on past events relating to family, or having relevance to princely lands. In the words of Andrew McClellan in his history of the Louvre,
modelled on the late Renaissance kunstkammer [sic], early eighteenth century cabinets (the term often used to describe rooms set aside for the presentation of valued objects) signified princely rule through an abundant and harmonious arrangement of paintings. At Mannheim, for example, we find pictures densely and symmetrically arranged around a central vertical axis like pieces of a puzzle.[iii]
This kind of arranging art and artifacts carried through to the first museum for the public, the Luxembourg palace, which displayed the royal collection. Opening in 1750, visiting hours were exceedingly limited to Wednesdays and Saturdays for three hours. One purpose of making the collection available was not so much broader social edification but for artistic instruction.
Reflecting the most influential writer on art of the day, Roger de Piles notes that the arrangements of pictures of "the Luxembourg encouraged a comparative mode of viewing that revealed the strengths and weaknesses of chosen artists and the schools to which they belonged through calculated juxtaposition of paintings".[iv]
Thus, from the very outset, those responsible for the choice and arrangement of art followed some kind of theoretical agenda. More recently, we call it ideology. It is the very crisis in contemporary socio-political ideology that accounts for the crisis plaguing contemporary curating.
Hero Images/Getty Images
Now, What of the Modern Exhibition and Curator?
Before the birth of the pseudo-celebrity global curator in the 1980s, curators were intermediaries between scholars and the public on one hand and the benefactors, government, and institutions on the other.
They mostly begin with two incarnations.
The first was a cataloguer and decipherer, and the other was the hanger of paintings. Both were invested with highly ethical imperatives, either explicitly or by default.
The Paris Salon began in 1674 as part of the official academy of art and sculpture, and by 1725 it was the most important site for exhibiting works of art. Artists vied for medals, purportedly awarded by distinguished peers, which would then result in further state and private commissions, which would ensure an artist's livelihood. In the same manner as the private princely collections, and to cope with the volume of submissions, paintings were exhibited cheek by jowl, in an elaborate patchwork arrangement that would leave only the smallest glimpses of wall space.
These arrangements would be determined by a small group of artists selected by the academy, with one leading them. These positions were coveted and immensely coveted and prone to corruption, since the positioning of a painting at eye height presumed superiority over those placed far higher, which reflected a level of quality of lesser interest.
The eighteenth-century painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the great painter of still lifes, is a notable figure in this regard since he practiced a genre that was considered the most inferior in the academic hierarchy (history and religious painting were at the top). Yet he was held in such regard, both morally and aesthetically, to occupy the most esteemed post.
Indeed, the serenity and quality of his painting, which so enraptured the first great art critic, Denis Diderot, together with his personality, was considered genuine reflections of a post with such responsibility.
In Émile Zola’s novel L’Œuvre (1886, translated as The Masterpiece), a veiled fictional commentary on his estranged younger friend Paul Cézanne, the hapless protagonist Claude Lantier’s submission to the Salon is placed at such a remote height as to make it almost invisible. To make matters worse, He had only been allowed to submit his painting after a good deal of wrangling, and its weak positioning doesn't help the already lukewarm responses it receives.
The first notable curators are cataloguers and keepers such as Alexandre Lenoir and Dominique-Vivant Denon. Following the opening of the Louvre in the summer of 1793, Lenoir was the chief facilitator of the Museum of French Monuments two years after.
This process was very much a product of the Revolution. The emphasis on public access and public knowledge was at a premium (at least in theory). As opposed to sculptures from antiquity, the monuments in the museum were confined strictly to works relating to French history, including those salvaged from buildings ruined or demolished.
What is notable is the tendentious nature of Lenoir's arrangement of objects, designed to promote the reign of Louis XIV as, in McClellan's words, "one of four high points of civilisation alongside Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, and Renaissance Italy".[v]
In effect, Lenoir was instrumental in revising the belief instilled by the Revolution that Louis' reign marked the decline of culture that had been restored only by the sober and social-minded classicism of Jacques-Louis David. His is one of the first signal cases that demonstrate curatorial power. Unlike a critic or thinker who espouses beliefs in words, the curator could make a case through the assembly of objects. It is a kind of theory by stealth, since the concreteness of things has the power to convey the a priori completeness of the idea, despite the idea being a posteriori and perhaps incomplete and possibly mendacious.
It was one of Napoleon’s many insights to see this. More than any other ruler since Augustus Octavian, Napoleon used art in all its manifestations to benefit his power and image. Once the Musée Française, then Musée Central des Arts, the national museum was renamed in 1803 as the Musée Napoleon, intended by the Emperor as a ‘universal museum’, a shrine of world culture so to speak.
At its helm was Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon in the militarily botched but culturally highly successful Egyptian campaign of 1799. Denon published two volumes of drawings from this experience, which played some part in the Egyptian Revival (‘Egyptomania’) that subsequently occurred in architecture, design, and fashion. As a devotee of the Emperor, Denon zealously looted sundry treasures that were the spoils of Napoleon's successful campaigns.
In this period, artists of the early Renaissance were not as esteemed as they were today. However, as a man of diverse and astute tastes, Denon showed an interest in the "primitives" of Italy (generally understood as painters before Raphael) which he acquired in a plundering spree in 1812, and which form the basis of the Louvre's collection of Italian masters that remains to this day.
A highly significant precedent for such enthusiasm occurred only six weeks into Denon's appointment: he installed a series of Raphael works in the Grande Galerie to show the artist's greatness. There were also two works of the artist's teacher, Perugino. Denon's effort was conceivably, as Karsten Schubert states, ‘the first time that pedagogic aims and art-historical methodology had played such a central role in the display of works of art’. And in one fell swoop, it also shifted the ‘museum’s agenda from the political-ideological to the historical-documentary’.[vi]
Moral instruction had always been at the forefront of French cultural institutions, which accounted for the way paintings were hierarchised—according to their capacity to educated and edify. While this continued to be a standard of judgment, it is noteworthy that it also extended to how works of art were exhibited, which reflected a growing interest in historical purpose.
While this discussion has much broader parameters, including the genesis of the British Museum at roughly the same period with its controversy over the Elgin marbles, these examples are sufficient evidence that from the very start, curatorship lay rooted in responsibility concerning the objects 'themselves' and to the power with which specific messages could be made to the audience—how symbolic objects are, to use our opening conceit, translated into overarching signification—which in turn had the potential to affect how they understood the very organisation of their own culture and those relating to them (and in the case of remote and so-called primitive cultures, relation through non-relation).
Rose Art Museum. Curator looks on as a painting is cleaned. Photo/Mike Lovett. https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2017/may/rose-feature.html
Now to the Modern Museum
By the twentieth century, the museum was an essential dimension of the expression of nation, culture, history, and belonging.
Even if a country whose devotion to democracy was tenuous or non-existent, the museum was nonetheless born from democracy, emanating from individual rights and national ownership.
Since Denon, the curator, was the keeper of national treasures who would make them available to the public and place them in some order so that the lay public could see them in the most favourable light. Curators were, therefore, a new hybrid of scholars, cataloguers, and inventors (more recent developments have caused them to be called on par with installation artists).
Yet, it is important to recall that even as late as the 1920s, art history was only beginning to form into an established discipline, existing somewhere between archivists, anthropologists, historians, and connoisseurs. Indeed, curatorship was central to the development of the discipline as we know it today, and many of the foremost scholars act as curators within specialist collections.
For the specialist curator scholar, the "raw" collection is the equivalent of a laboratory. His or her role is to assign provenance, advise on further purchases, confirm knowledge, or offer insights through both written research and how the art objects are distributed for display.
For this discussion, two figures remain salient in the development of curatorship and for highlighting its ethical purpose with respect to its responsibilities to society and state: Kenneth Clark, who was the director of the National Gallery during World War II, and Alfred Barr, who founded the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The first of its kind for the Tate, in 2014 it staged a major exhibition devoted to Kenneth Clark's career as a critic and writer, patron and museum director. His incomprehension of some modern art notwithstanding, Clark's books on the Nude in Western art and Civilization continue to have traction and influence.
What’s at stake here was his contribution to British culture while holding the influential seat of director of the National Gallery, a post he held in the same time span as Hitler’s hold on power (1933-1945).
In the earlier years, he was a staunch defender of British modernists such as Henry Moore when public taste for modern art was not much in vogue. At the outbreak of war, he also advocated that artists not be conscripted for the sake of maintaining British art and culture. But Clark's role in such safeguarding was significant and material.
During the Blitz, he managed to have the museum's collection stored for safe-keeping, but not at the expense of a dispiriting vacuum: Clark would choose one notable painting housed in the museum that remained open. There were also regular musical concerts and other performances.
Although modest, Clark's initiatives reflected a deep understanding of the stabilising and rejuvenating power of cultural artefacts and gestures, and the role of art in community—an abstract notion that is erratic and, to some extent, eroded by governmental rationalisation in numerous developed countries since the 1980s.
Alfred Barr was just as aware of the intangible necessities of art and also witnessed its cynical manipulation as a political tool by the Nazis while on leave from the MoMA in Stuttgart during the year of their take-over of power.
The story of Barr and the genesis of MoMA has been told in detail[vii] but several points need to be highlighted to emphasise the ethical role of the curator as acquirer, preserver, and translator. Before assuming the position as the museum's inaugural director, Barr began as an art historian. He ran what was perhaps the first university course in modern art, ‘Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting’, while a junior professor at Wellesley College in 1926.
When he became the museum’s direct three years later, the culture of museums in the US still followed a European model, its focus on antiquities and the ‘classic’ paintings from the Renaissance to neoclassicism. Collections of modern art were confined to private enthusiasts.
As a city, New York was hardly alone in its ambivalence to a public collection of modern art. Many had no understanding of it or were openly antagonistic to it. Notwithstanding, Barr as director, quickly amassed what is now one of the most significant collections of postimpressionist, cubist, and other avant-garde art of the early twentieth century.
One of his many achievements was the Picasso retrospective in 1939-40, which, at the time, was another audacious move given that war in Europe was underway and that the artist was then still relatively young.
Barr's duty of offering the public the best and most up-to-date art was all-encompassing and visionary. He anticipated the collections of the contemporary museum and its acceptance of media not formerly considered art, including film and photography.
Barr famously stated that the museum would be “a laboratory; in its experiments, [where] the public is invited to participate”.[viii] This was not intended in the more contemporary, insipidly literal sense of the term ‘interactive’ in which touch overtakes thought (more of this later), rather “participation” was intended as critical and educational (the more fashionable term today to integrate digital media is “interactive”).
And so, Barr also inaugurated the concept of public programs, which is today part of the basic make-up of any major museum. In effect, he maintained the idea of the museum as a site for discussion, investigation research, and reflection, as was incipient in the Wunderkammer, and institutionally formalised it, giving it sophistication, breadth, and intellectual mobility.
He encouraged lectures and other activities intended to provide an open discourse for art, which also had the salutary effect of enabling contemporary artists to reflect on their own practices.
Barr was also very advanced in taking photography and film seriously as media, establishing departments for these in the museum in the early 1930s.[ix] In the words of Sybil Kantor, “innovation was of primary importance in Barr’s lexicon, overshadowing any other reason for art’s coming to being”,[x] effectively foreshadowing the later bias of conceptual art to emphasis on process and experimentation, or later the contentious debate of whether art is a form of research.
His idea of the laboratory opened up the museum, as a concept and physical entity, to be more than a mausoleum of precious objects for veneration.
Instead, the premium that Barr placed on innovation, discovery, and discourse helped ensure that the work of art maintained its relationship to process and reflection, making the museum a fertile testing ground for ideas. Barr's vision of the new modern museum was to provide the place and the critical context for the positive critical exchanges between art, curators, and audience.[xi]
In their detailed study of the contemporary museum in the digital age, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook explain that
art galleries, musical venues, and theatres have all used the word laboratory to indicate an alternative approach that can deal with process rather than object, with participant rather than audience, or with production rather than exhibition. Even in high modernist times, Alfred Barr was describing MoMA as a laboratory. Since then, curators, including Hans Ulrich Obrist (2000), have also been using the term to stress the importance of research and to imply that the gallery can be a place of experimental methods of display, perhaps with a more active audience, whereas others have used the term factory to emphasise production beyond traditional art and authorship.[xii]
Words and phrases like "process", "participation", "research", and "active audience" are all worth drawing attention to here. They comprise some of the linchpins on what the contemporary museum is based on and what the curator is expected to instigate.
Unfortunately, however, as we will see, the ethic of inclusion, with its undertones of community and togetherness, has begun to eclipse intellectual accountability: audience/participants are "users" and curators are increasingly "providers", much as a film house will expect its producers to have certain films made to comply with seasonal tastes (Christmas holiday blockbuster, the summer teen flick, etc.).
In an interview, Hans Ulrich Obrist commented that William Sandberg, former curator of the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, that “For him ideas and information counted more than the experience of the object”.[xiii]
For the last two decades at least, it would seem that the “experience” has triumphed. To pause to think about the term is quickly to arrive at how broad and redundant it is, since one experiences the weather as much as an apple or a work of art. Sadly the experiential of the critically reflective brings art into a realm of banal equivalences.
It also appears that the artist infiltrating the gallery to make it his or her studio has become its own convention whose semantics of social subversion are acted out as pantomime. If an audience is to be challenged, it is in a game-oriented way. If ideologically, it must be in the realm of "already know", that is, I know that we should do something about world hunger, I know we should do something about the plight of first nation peoples in this or that country, etc.
But to call attention to the deceit and impotence at the heart of the complicity of art and entertainment is to shake the entire contemporary curatorial edifice.
What are some of the responsibilities, then of the contemporary global, or globalised, curator
So far, we’ve seen how the traditional curator identified himself or herself with the institution for which he or she was both ambassador and guardian.
The birth of a global curator originates partly in the freelance curator associated with the experimental practices that emerged since the 1960s. Working more frequently with artistic frameworks that were unconventional and ephemeral, artists had to act also as organisers, impresarios, and intermediaries.
Moreover, the rise in the art market meant that both dealers and consumers required more detailed knowledge of what they were purchasing. This need was especially acute after the war when historical works required detailed proof of their provenance, as certification that they were not acquired in immoral circumstances.
This isn’t to imply that the market was free from foul play, for it is by far the opposite, but instead, a diverse and increasingly complex art market required educated, savvy intermediaries to make sense of what was before them and to at least present a semblance of order and continuity.
The freelance curator was from a twin birth out of the commercial and non-commercial spheres. Although it is a phenomenon that begins to appear in the 1980s, as with globalisation, its visibility comes with the changes of social, political, and financial economies resulting from the digital age.
Described in the most graphic and perhaps most lurid terms, the global curator is like a circus ring man but with a virtual troupe. He or she will either begin as a member of an institution or from an art school, organising and facilitating exhibition opportunities for him or herself and for peers.
While statistics vary, there are, or were, over 12,000 people calling themselves curators in the US alone, earning an average of $60,000, which is similar to the salary of a junior professor at university. These are primarily freelancers, which makes their existence precarious, the Coronavirus pandemic is sure to have put many of these individuals out of business.
Standards for payment vary wildly, as do “honorariums” for artists. Naturally, fees depend on the curator’s reputation, which largely rests on the number of people that come to see the shows he or she organises, the quality of the catalogue, and the critical attention that an exhibition receives.
Success comes out of making choices of exhibition themes and their attendant artists that incite curiosity and, at best, debate. In the absence of conventional exhibition opportunity, which is the norm for the emerging artist (now a stock term), the artist-cum-curator will seek out a shop front for gallery space for the shorter or longer-term (known as 'artist run initiatives' or ARIs for short), or create opportunities by drumming up interest from foundations, corporations or government. In short, the contemporary curator in this mould is a creator of opportunity and a purveyor of ideas that might make the artists contained therein more accessible, more easily consumable, or at best more intellectually dependable.
What is most desirable to the curator, popularity, and pervasiveness on one hand or criticality and profundity on the other, is the fundamental question that from an ethical standpoint haunts curatorship to this day.
The aim is to get prestigious posts such as to curate Biennales. Once on the circuit, curators can command a lot of power, and they are susceptible to a lot of free lunches, chardonnays, and champagnes, as gallerists seek their attention so that the artists they represent might also get a gig in international shows, which in turn can bolster prices.
You have to like to travel. If you want to raise children, then forget it, unless you can find a stable position in a museum, but these are scarce and depend on a previous history of being familiar with the global market.
Globalisation in art is not easy to define but can easily begin with mirroring globalisation itself: the mobility and exchange of information, global markets, mass marketing, and digitally mediated exchanges, from monetary capital to imagery (tangible or intangible).
This is by now all fairly stock stuff.
But there is an important ethical integer that comes into it, namely what is being said and whose name. The age of ‘post-democracy’ is defined by the infiltration (or vitiation) of corporate interests in the democratic process in the most diverse, subtle, and deep ways as to make them homologous.[xiv]
To put this another way, a contemporary understanding of government without considering the diversity of corporate interests is naïve and inconceivable. This also means that every significant museum accountable to its benefactors and sponsors, whether state or private, is liable to be answerable to corporate interests.
It is censorship of the most covert kind but is a condition that in the last twenty years comes into dramatic relief with the rise of large-scale exhibitions. Let us leave aside the art fairs, which are transparent about their commercial trajectory and focus on international Biennales.
Although the Venice Biennale first opened its doors in 1895, the Biennale phenomenon only took root with the San Paulo Biennale in 1951, The Dokumenta in Kassel in 1955, the Whitney Biennial, and the Sydney Biennale both in 1973. In the 1970s, the Biennale could still claim to be a snapshot of what art at the time was like. It was also a proficient way of bringing a diffuse and broad range of art under one roof.
With the changes that occurred in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China after 1989, the Biennale model appeared to be a measure by which countries could reclaim a sense of their violability and traction within a cultural atmosphere that was becoming increasingly global and globally competitive, in its approach and outlook.
By the mid-90s, the Biennial had gone viral, from the Shanghai Biennale in 1996, to the Liverpool Biennale in 1999, more recently, the Singapore Biennale in 2006. Biennales also exist in Istanbul (1987), Berlin (1998), Gwangju (1995), and Vladivostok (1998). Clearly, the Biennale had become more and more mandatory for the stamp of cultural capital that, in a way, consummated an art museum.
Art museums themselves were a big architectural business: the hypermuseum, introduced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim in 1959, only came into full effect at the same time when the Biennale industry, if it can be called that, flourished globally by the 1990s. Virtuoso architectural performances from the Guggenheim Bilbao by Frank Gehry (1997) to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish History Museum in Berlin (1999), continued in the tradition of Wright’s critics who feared that the architecture overshadowed the art within. Indeed, Libeskind was open to paying customers for the first two years of its life with nothing in it. People were happy just to see the building.
The comingled birth of the great opera houses for art and the Biennale industry suggests that the whole is perhaps bigger than the parts. What is at a premium is the residual idea of magnitude over any lasting, or indeed measurable, cultural effect.
A trawl through the websites of the many Biennales will reveal one striking common denominator, namely that they calculate their success according to visitation numbers.
The spectacle is here in full force, drained of adjective or anecdote and reduced to plain numbers. This is where sustainability in the traditional sense might be written into the debate, to the extent that cities are expected to cope with the influx of larger and larger numbers of people.
The influx of visitors was a windfall for the formerly obscure city of Bilbao, so much so that the attraction of the architecture gave birth to the term “Bilbao effect”.
But the sheer number of Biennales and the numbers expected to visit them begs the question of whether there can be so much decent art, and what is the experience of these pageants after all?
One answer is that of “net effect”: one had a ‘cultural experience’ from which we extract one or two works that we “liked” (where “liking”, thanks to social media and YouTube also becomes a vapidly universalist gesture). This like—together with the “likes” some of us are expected to make in a world where everything is expected to be rated—forms the basis of some anecdotal conversation, that is, if you still converse, given that it is much easier to ‘chat’ through truncated, written text.
But the culture of ‘liking’ can only lead to the admission that the exponential profusion of liking and disliking is only to conceal the more sinister truth that reasoned opinion is rare. But the obsession with visitation numbers reveals imperturbably that reasoned opinion is not what is valued or is even desirable.
Since Julian Stallabrass’s coinage of the phrase "High Art Lite" 1999, a topic of critical debate has been how art is in the service of entertainment and, with it, the demise of critical debate.
Public museums and art festivals like Biennales are made possible by public funds, donors, and corporate sponsors. While public institutions are subject to questions of propriety, donors and sponsors are steeped in vested interests.
Few are the sponsors who will give money to the kinds of commentary that actively undermine the interests and procedures from which the wealth came from in the first place. However, sponsors, individuals, and corporations are eager to subside work that looks and smells edgy, lest they disclose the dubious contradictoriness of the entire dynamic.
To be too cloying is to give the game away. This meretricious and disingenuous double-play is described by Slavoj Zizek as follows:
If you accuse a big corporation of particular financial crimes, you expose yourself to risks that can go even as far as murder attempts; if you ask the same corporation to finance a research project on the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, you stand to get a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars.[xv]
The bleakness of this state of affairs lies in how the corporate sponsor stands as a gatekeeper to ensure that the commentary is "not much". But what is so dangerous is that critical analysis is allowed to exist, but always in a diluted form.
This is the quandary of the so-called post-democratic age that contemporary art finds itself in is more sinister than the culture of totalitarianism. For the socialist realism of totalitarian art is so unerringly predictable and monotonous that it all but spells out that it is the false patina, the scrim behind which lurks a more vibrant, more courageous, and more authentic vision of things.
Public contemporary art, the art funded by government grants and sponsors, is given a pre-ordained limit: it is decaffeinated and pasteurised (an apt metaphor as we may note that it is impossible under lawful circumstances to get in countries with strict quarantine rules the delicious unpasteurised cheeses available in Europe).
Here’s the bottom line: can we imagine a Biennale staging a work such as Chris Burden’s Shoot (1974, in which he had a friend shoot at him) or Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll (where she slowly unravelled a long paper text from her vagina while reading from it 1975)?
Freelance curators may have more leverage than those ensconced in institutions. They may be able to take more risks and to be sharper in the questions they raise, but surveying the last ten years or more reveals that even freelance curators are reluctant to take risks for fear of scaring off all the right people that may help them in securing a stable job in the future.
There are precious few curators who approach their work philosophically. The norm is to have marketing in mind.
It is often said that, aside from money itself, the most valuable capital in the contemporary art world is social capital: who you know and to whom you have access.
Unfortunately, this means that curators have to join the cult of flatterers. It also means that they are trained to be cynical, as they find themselves in the inevitable cycle of being the go-to person when they have a curatorial post and then lose all attention once it is closed.
The laboratory ethic, in which viewers were encouraged to become active participants, that was so revolutionary in Barr's age, has now devolved into passive participation. While this might at first seem an oxymoron, it places activity at a premium and criticality as a remote second. Invented and retooled words such as ‘relationality’ and interactivity are important ways in which the curator shows that he or she is deploying the work for public involvement. However, the cerebral aspect of participation, which had been necessary to Barr, is now no longer desirable.
Related to audience inclusivity is how curators have to negotiate gender and race. It is today an unspoken mandate, if not a routine reflex, that large exhibitions have a creditable cross-section of races and creeds and balance of gender that would not court too much criticism. And to curators themselves: a signal example of the global phenomenon of curating is the figure of the now-deceased Nigerian-born Okui Enwzor.
In his time, something of a cultural celebrity—in 2011, ArtReview named him on the top 100 list of the most influential people in the artworld—Enwezor’s height of fame arrived when he curated Dokumenta 11 (1998-2002)—which was intended to represent an alternate perspective to contemporary art. Before we turn to the quality of the exhibition, which was high, what it amply showed was the extent to which the culture of correctness of global curating has made such a perspective impossible, simply for the fact that every such exhibition is billed as providing a new vision of something.
Then there remains the most delicate of questions: does Enwezor’s professional and cultural valency rest mainly on the fact that he was born in Nigeria? To what extent are we presented with the bad faith lurking inside the conflicted heart of political correctness.
We might ask yet more cryptic questions: what does the curator set out to present and express when the status quo is organised to act as if “it” is already being presented and expressed with due good faith and authenticity? And if the culture of contemporary art reflects cultural pluralism, in whose name and for whom does the curator speak? Whom does he in fact serve?
These are questions with more than one answer, for they reflect the instability and the protean nature of global pluralism itself. What Enwezor’s Dokumenta opened up, arguably for the first time, was a level of cultural diversity on the level of representation but also of approach.
While the question had already begun to loom large as to how a diversity of critical standards—the standards that had challenged and all but replaced Euro-American modernism—could productively be deployed curatorially to make something coherent, as opposed to a curatorial equivalent of licorice all-sorts.
Or, to put this in terms established at the beginning of this essay, what does the curator choose to translate and into what language, and who judges the quality according to what terms? One of Enwezor’s strategies was to start as a group, nominating six other curators to help shape the exhibition.[xvi] As Enwezor’s explains,
I wanted to emphatically make it clear in the context of Dokumenta 11 that there was no single author but a group of collaborators very much in tune with each other's strengths and weaknesses. This was by far one of the most transformative, energising, and challenging group of people to work with. What is the degree of the contribution by the group? We wanted to address the context within which we were working and entering into a dialogue that we could make visible to a broader public what was going on globally in contemporary art. And I deliberately chose people who were not curators by profession.[xvii]
By choosing people “who were not curators by profession”, Enwezor not only sought a dynamic diversity of voice but was in effect re-injecting the exhibition with a level of intellectual engagement that is commonly vitiated through many contemporary curatorial processes that, indeed, mirror political machinations, namely professional friendships with artists and the interests of sponsors and donors.
In addition to Enwezor’s “deterritorialising” initiative, we pose two other ethical responses to curatorship that attempt to displace the corporatist trap. We use the word “displace” advisedly, as it suggests a grasp of capitalist systems that is not naïve.
That is, it is a position that admits that there is no "revolutionary" escape from the capitalist system, only slippages, and gaps that arrest its most damaging development. The two ethical strategies are, first, direct and empathetic engagement with the artist and his or her process. Second, the attempt to use art—objects, interventions, events, performances—with the ambition to reflect the knowledge and create new knowledge.
The former position acknowledges the artist's position within the overarching formula of the curator, the latter places ideas back into the epicentre of the experience. In both cases, we move close to what the academy calls 'research'. For although, since the 1980s, there have been repeated critical comments about the similarity of the curator to an installation artist, a corollary that has its merits, a curator is a researcher where the artist is not.
Interest in becoming a curator appears to be rising. “Curatorial Studies” is now a creditable area of study, rising from the 1990s, with programs in major universities such as the University of Sydney, or in the US anywhere from NYU to Rutgers to the New School.
You can now do a PhD in the subject. The question is, who is teaching it and the standards by which the subjects involved are taught.
Here’s my proposed two-step program out of curatorial delinquency[xviii]
Enwezor’s curatorial strategy was exceptional, yet far from isolated, move to allow for a more direct and engaged form of curatorial practice in which the artist is not treated as a pawn, brand, or covert cultural indicator.
In other words, it is common for curators to cater to denominations of race in the manner of a pie chart.
To put this another way, there is an unspoken mandate that the "artistic director" of a biennale or equivalent incorporate artists from the Middle East by dint of what is going on there, or gays and lesbians because of the international ferment over same-sex marriage.
Large exhibitions, therefore, begin to take on the look of a Baskin Robins ice cream parlour with all manner of cultural “flavours”, which, as I have suggested already, creates a politically correct smokescreen that allows for atrocious political events to go on as is.[xix]
This means that artists are plucked out for ‘use’ as artistic-cultural products, based on a set of unspoken reasons and expectations. An adverse effect of this is that, where applicable, the artist is effectively expected to ‘perform’ race, or if a brand/name artist (Serra, Barney, Koons, Sherman), ‘perform’ what he or she is best known for.
While we are in no way decrying the need for overstepping cultural boundaries and norms, we suggest it is done so, ethically, together at the behest of the artist, that is, in immersive discursive exchange between curator and artist. This takes time and, without the lapse into sentimentality about communication, it is essential for the generation of something specific to both artist and curator's aims.
The second step, tied to the first, is the need not to repeat knowledge but to open up new techniques—on the part of both curator and artist—of concept, expression, and the platforms from which art can be critically received.
Here I’m calling on the distinction that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stipulates between “ethics” and “morality” in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Making out a different turn from Aristotelian ethics, Lacan articulates the need for ‘subversion’ and ‘surprise’ in the subject to provide for new positions that do not participate in the socially regulated habitus, which for him is the symbolic order.[xx]
The philosophical corollary to Lacan’s position is Friedrich Nietzsche’s immoralist or his “hammer” that ruptures the sclerotic framework of a morality driven by power and fear. Lacanian ethics suggests a reach to areas that would, in the first instance, be measured as immoral, but whose results, while explosive, would ramify to something more creditable. In short, it is the role of ethics to crack open moral law.
The curator is an ethical translator who knows of the sacrifice that needs to be made in a "good" translation and can satisfy the inevitable misgivings with the result that is not a shadow, but a new creation that, as a sum of parts, a posteriori justifies the kinds of ethical violence it needs to perform.
I hope this helps to set the record straight. And if it does, I can think of a bunch of curators who should resign their jobs straight away.
References:
[i] Daniel Heller-Roazan, “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria”, October 100, Spring 2002, 136-137.
[ii] See Geczy, “Display”, in Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions, London and New York: Berg 2008.
[iii] Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Berkeley and London: California UP, (1994) 1999, 2.
[iv] Ibid., 3.
[v] Ibid., 189
[vi] Karsten Schubert, The Curator’s Egg: The evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day, London: Ridgehouse, (2000) 2009, 21-22.
[vii] See Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr Jnr., and the intellectual origins of the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2002, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Aftred H. Barr Jnr., Missionary for the Modern, Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989. See also Alfred H. Barr Jnr, Defining Modern Art: The Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr Jnr., New York: Abrams, 1986
[viii] Cit. Schubert, The Curator’s Egg, 45.
[ix] Kantor, “The Multimedia Museum”, in Alfred H. Barr, 222-225.
[x] Ibid., 330
[xi] For a good account of the notion of the laboratory in the contemporary context, see Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson eds., Curating and the Educational Turn, London and Amsterdam: Open Editions/de Appel, 2010
[xii] Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2010, 235. The reference in the text is to Eva Diaz, "Futures: Experiment and the Tests of Tomorrow", in Paul O'Neill ed., Curating Subjects, Amsterdam and London: De Appel and Open Editions, 2007, 92-99.
[xiii] Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interview with Harald Szeeman, in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, Zürich: JRP/Ringier Verlag, 2008, 84
[xiv] For a lucid account of this see Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, New York: Polity, 2004
[xv] Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003, 44.
[xvi] Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya.
[xvii] Okwui Enwezor interviewed by Paul O’Neill, “Crating Beyond the Canon”, in Peter O’Neill ed., Curating Subjects, London and Amsterdam: Open Editions/de Appel, 2011, 117
[xviii] This is a loaded reference to the panel delivered at the 2014 CAA (12 February) by Brad Buckley and John Conomos, “The Delinquent Curator: Has the Curator Failed Contemporary Art?”
[xix] This predicament has been thoroughly dealt with in my chapter (Three), “’Look at me I’m different!’: Identity Art and the Expectations of Race”, in Geczy and Millner, Fashionable Art.
[xx] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychanalysis, 1959-1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, ed Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. With notes Dennis Porter, London: W.W. Norton, 5, 7
