apexart

Cautionary Tales:
Critical Curating
Copyright 2007, 2010 by apexart
Published by apexart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any

means without the written permission of the publisher.

Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating

Edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris
ISBN: 978-1-933347-10-3
ISBN-10: 1-933347-10-4
1. Curatorial Studies 2. Cultural Studies 3. Art History

Printed in U.S.A.

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
t: 212 431 5270
f: 646 827 2487
www.apexart.org
[email protected]
Contents

Preface 7 Steven Rand

Introduction 11 Heather Kouris

The Bias of the World:

Curating After Szeemann & Hopps 15 David Levi Strauss

Who Cares? Understanding the

Role of the Curator Today 26 Kate Fowle

Independent Curatorship 36 Jean-Hubert Martin

The Curator as Iconoclast 46 Boris Groys

Curating: In the Public Sphere 56 Geeta Kapur

Editing as Metaphor 69 András Szántó

Why Curators Matter 79 David Carrier

Beau Monde, Upon Reflection 91 Dave Hickey

Independent Curating Within

Institutions Without Walls 99 Sara Arrhenius

Curating in a Global Age 108 Young Chul Lee

Additional Reading 119

Cover Image Credits 124

5
 apexart is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit visual arts organization founded in 1994 by
artist Steven Rand. Originally an exhibition venue, it’s activities now also include
an international residency program, book publishing, an active public program and
occasional conferences.

This is the second edition of Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, which was origi-
nally published in 2007. It is the second book in a series which consider issues in
the visual arts. The first book, On Cultural Influence, published in 2006, is a col-
lection of essays from past conferences in Poland, Brazil, and Hawaii. Playing by
the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces, published in 2010, is the third
in the series. Special thanks to NLW.

6
Steven Rand

Preface

I started apexart in 1994 so I could go to a place like apexart. The intent was to be idea-
centric rather than promotional and invite artists, writers, and others to be in the role
of a curator. The thought was that everyone had ”one good show” much like the idea
”everyone has one good book.” To good ends this has proven to be the case.
In a program shift during the late 90s, we began to invite the new group
of independent international curators coming from programs such as de Appel in The
Netherlands, Bard College in New York, and others, as well as numerous individuals
working and learning on their own. De Apple is a seven-month program while Bard is a
two-year program that awards an M.A. degree. The intent was to show in New York City
what was being seen in Europe, Africa, and Asia, to experience and assess it.
While this is now a ubiquitous practice, it was not the case at that time.
Beginning in 2005 apexart largely returned to its earlier ideology and began including
content outside the contemporary art world. We continue our ”Unsolicited Proposal”
program to serve the curatorial community, and have instituted a so-called Franchise
program to provide opportunities for artists and curators in their own countries. Please
see our website www.apexart.org for more information on how to participate.
I recently mentioned to a past director of a curatorial program that we are doing
a curator book and the reaction was, ”Just what we don’t need.” I agree and hope that you
do not find this ”just another curator book.”
It started with the idea to ask ten individuals to write what they would like to
say to someone considering a career in curatorial studies. Not how to curate, but what to
consider, what to look out for, to avoid, or to reconsider. This seemed especially important
being ten years into a profession with conclusions and observations being made about
the value and efficacy of the practice. The authors take different paths, defining the
practice, describing it, and being critical of it. They speak to the potential of what it can
be and what it means to them. Some are more cautionary than others.
Most curatorial programs consist of considering social theory, philosophy,
and the dynamics of organizing an exhibition. Often the issues discussed and values

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Cautionary Tales

considered are very pragmatic. Support of artists can be more productive to one’s career
than criticism, while creating opportunity is more satisfying than fulfilling obligation. The
production can become more important than the creativity, and public recognition more
than personal satisfaction.
Political affiliation and networking within the field combined with an urgency
of career has replaced time-consuming research in less popular, though more diverse
and disparate, topics. To some degree this is understandable in that it reflects the values
and insecurities in society today, but it may not bode well for creativity in the arts. It
seems that the study of history has been receding in high schools for years because of
a sense that so much happens in such a short period that experience is preferable to
overview and the consideration of history unnecessary.
Similarly, the interest in art history has been declining while there has been an
increasing interest in curatorial studies, based more on a business model of performance
than a creative model of investigation. With the continued expansion of the consumer
upper class, the desire to be involved in the art world is often, and understandably, greater
than the desire to question it. Art has become another collectible, another manifestation
of class signification while increased museum attendance is less about an interest in art,
per se, than a desire for an afternoon of entertainment with a sense of bettering oneself.
The creative model that encourages chance-taking and celebrates failure as experiment
and innovation is no longer an acceptable one to corporate funders and museum boards.
Is the art world losing its sense of adventure and creativity or is the changing role of art
responsible for its more controlled nature in many cases?
Working in a creative field is autobiographical, a reflection of one’s interests,
values, and sensibilities. Identifying and understanding this connection is key to
understanding the work as the artist, author, or viewer. In discussions with curatorial
students around the world, I have been surprised at the disconnect between what really
interests them and what they do as curators. Why do they want to be curators, what
excites them and why? What do they see themselves doing in five years? The level of
confusion is surprisingly and appropriately high. While in the institution, the direction
seems clear, but after leaving there is a kind of free fall. Many of these young curators
tend to work with a relatively small group of artists and influences and within a narrow
range of defined issues. They don’t venture outside the expected models of exhibition
or relationships, or consider alternatives. This isn’t because they aren’t intelligent, quite
the opposite. Many are extremely bright and this was the reason for their consternation.
They aren’t ”getting it.” What they aren’t ”getting” is the real potential of what they’re

8
 Steven Rand

doing because in many programs they aren’t being properly prepared, adequately
challenged, or particularly well-educated. Often the readings tend to be superficial and
disconnected, while discussions of practical issues such as fundraising and promotion
take precedent over conceptual and ideological concerns. There are few classes or
lectures about sociology or anthropology that contextualize and connect the readings,
making it difficult to address larger issues. Too often this results in exhibition essays
describing the work, quoting others, and engaging in classical obfuscation by using the
kind of rhetoric that makes the insecure give undue credit to the writer rather than
question the content.
Would curatorial programs be better served if they were integrated into
art history/art studies departments rather than operating as freestanding facilities or
departments? Students might then better fill in historical and contextual areas not
covered in the curatorial program syllabus. While students are told not to treat a curatorial
program as a terminal degree, this is often the case. We should consider whether we are
fostering a profession that might be much more valuable and effective with additional
training and study. As the mediator between the artist and the public, the non-affiliated
curator could provide a valuable, challenging opportunity to all involved.
Familiar models develop to keep funding organizations from being surprised
and the current manifestation of the independent curator model owes more to the
power image of the corporate executive and less to the traditional academic—in control,
well dressed, socially elevated, connected, and needed. Art reflecting society’s values. As
of this writing there does seem to be some reassessment of this image and it remains to
be seen whether it will affect the larger orientation.
There are two discernible paths of direction emerging with curatorial programs.
As noted, students and recent graduates often seem rather confused as they attempt to
connect their program experience with the world outside. As a program focuses one’s
interests and practices, it can also narrow them as the willingness to take risks gets
suppressed by ever greater competition and expectations of success.
One path is that of a facilitator, whose primary commitment is bringing art to the
public. This involves selecting the artist(s), locating a venue, and then organizing everything
in the exhibition so that the art is presented per the artist’s intent, largely in a non-critical
advocacy role. In the artist selection process they decide what is good (what they like) and
what is bad (what they don’t like). They attend international events, doing more studio
visits than the next person, and with it a sense of purpose, importance, belonging, and
direction. The other and more compelling path is wanting to understand the work and

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Cautionary Tales

place it in a socio-cultural context in an attempt to understand and explain why the work
was done, how it was done, what were the influences, the sociological and anthropological
connections, and ideally to present it in a way that provides others entry and interest.
Assessing how the work might be important or noteworthy, rather than good or bad, is
the real challenge.
The College Art Association began advising curatorial students several years
ago that positions as curators would not be available in the numbers needed, and
certainly not in the major art centers where most want to be.
The desire to be a curator isn’t enough, just as one’s desire to be a writer
doesn’t make it happen. The potential of the profession is much greater than we accept,
and it is up to each individual to determine what motivates him or her and why. Being
creative is at times the easiest and the most difficult endeavor. It is mostly solitary by
nature and lonely and cannot be taught. But it can be encouraged, guided, and directed
by responsible educators and colleagues in an atmosphere of creative thinking and asking
the questions that cause consideration. An institution is at its best when it encourages its
staff to question its institutional structure. Success is being able to define and pursue the
questions worthy of interest and obsession and to be able to maintain a lifelong interest
in the pursuit.
What follows is a great collection of essays that address various issues of the
creative process and provides that all important “food” for thought. Enjoy.

Steven Rand is a working artist and practicing agonist. He founded apexart curatorial program
in 1994 in response to a perceived ”increase in commercialism and promotion at the expense
of an emphasis on inquiry and creativity.” His work is exhibited internationally with solo
exhibitions in New York, Cologne, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai, as well as many international
group exhibitions. A permanent large-scale commission for the European Union Patent Office
in Munich, Germany, was completed in 2005. Mr. Rand has spoken and lectured at the National
College of Art and Design (Dublin), Rhode Island School of Design, Quarini Stamplia (Venice),
Corcoran Museum, National Academy of Art (Vienna), School of Visual Arts, and University
of Austin, CAAM Canary Islands, W139 (Amsterdam) University of Utrecht (Utrecht), Queens
College, College Art Association, Art Space Seoul_Geumcheon (Seoul) among others. You can
direct questions or criticism to Mr. Rand at [email protected]. He will respond.

10
Heather Kouris

Introduction

What is the definition, evolution, and purpose of independent curatorial practice as

compared to institutional engagement? Is the curator responsible for maintaining the
integrity of the field with respect to promoting artists and advising? Is it the responsi-
bility of independent curators to disseminate the culture of our times or are they held
accountable for another specific direction? Do curatorial training programs adequately
prepare graduates for the reality of administrative and funding duties required as an
independent curator? Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating attempts to consider the
changing role of the contemporary curator over the last decade. We invited ten
diverse writers to address the questions above. Each author responded with what he
or she felt were the relevant issues based on his or her various experiences.
How has the curator changed? The general working concept of the
contemporary curator began in the 1960s when Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps
started working independently from institutions. Before that, art curators were
always associated with an institution. Over the last ten or so years, curators have
become an increasingly important player in the field of art. There are now no less
than twenty curatorial training programs worldwide—from dedicated schools to
specialized degrees in art history departments. The growing popularity and explosion
of the curatorial profession means more training is necessary and more venues are
incorporating the work of independent curators into their programs. The curator has
also become much more “powerful” and has a stronger voice than ever before.
The authors of the essays included in Cautionary Tales each point in their
own way to the important aspects of what it takes to be a “successful” curator. One
main underlying concept of the essays is that curators must take risks in preparing
their projects. A good exhibition is not merely a gathering of works of the fifty
greatest artists, but should involve some reflection of societal input, and/or a certain
recognition of art history, geography, and culture, not to mention sharing some

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Cautionary Tales

sort of personal perspective. Those acting in the role of curator should be able to
communicate their ideas or intentions easily and openly with the public who see their
exhibition.
David Levi Strauss reflects on the work and influence of Szeemann and
Hopps and considers various models of curatorial possibility as well as the limitations
imposed by the conservative institutions of the art world. He points to the essential
attributes of curating, including the willingness to take greater chances and working
against the bias of the world. Also using Szeemann and Hopps as primary examples
of the first generation of contemporary curators, Kate Fowle explores how recent
curatorial approaches respond to changes in art practice, as well as starting to estab-
lish its own vocabulary and status as a form in its own right. She shows how the art
scene developed into a “dynamic and contradictory system” wherein the curator was
released from the responsibilities of presiding over culture.
As Boris Groys emphasizes in his essay, artwork requires an exhibition and
a curator to be seen; however, through his or her specific agenda, the curator often
alters the significance of the artwork. His essay discusses the inherent value of an art
object and the potential abuse the curator may inflict to art in terms of how the
curator may change the meaning of art through its presentation. Rather than relying
solely on the artwork's message, the curator reinterprets the artwork through the
exhibition idea, thus taking the responsibility for the message of the exhibition. The
changing approach of curatorial practice is discussed by Geeta Kapur through her
examples from the 60s, 80s, 90s, and present day exhibitions to demonstrate how
the contemporary curator works variously as a collaborator, an artwork co-producer,
and a cultural critic, among other roles.
Sara Arrhenius, Young Chul Lee, and Dave Hickey address the inner workings
of assembling biennial exhibitions through their specific experiences of biennial
curating. Biennials begin with the ideal of bringing attention to a city, which places
certain expectations on the invited curator by the biennial organizer. The curator
must present a topic general enough to draw interest, but be interesting enough to
survive the criticisms of the art world. Working as an external curator brings advan-
tages as well as limitations. Sometimes biennials can result in homogenization, as Lee
points out in his discussion of the “inter space” of cultural differences.
We learn also from the essays that the voice of the curator has begun to
outweigh that of the critic. David Carrier presents many cases of the critic's voice not
being heard as loudly as it once was. The critic may have had the tendency to “make

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 Heather Kouris

or break” an artist; now it is the curator who appears to wield that power. The
importance of curators being good writers is addressed in Andras Szanto’s text; he
uses an extended analogy between curating and editing—two enterprises faced with
some similar challenges—to give advice to curators on how to approach exhibition
making.
With so many training programs for people interested in the arts to learn
“how to be a curator,” it is important to consider the criteria used to ensure students
understand what kind of responsibility curating entails. Finding the venue and writing
a good essay are equally important parts of what the job requires. Jean-Hubert
Martin gives advice on how to be a good independent curator based on his years of
experience as a curator and administrator, including integrity and good communication.
Curators add a great deal to how artwork is viewed—they are not simply the
“middle man” between the art and the viewer. Is there perhaps a way to ensure that
curatorial practice maintains a high standard of exhibition making? Some professions
have guidebooks or ethics guidelines. With the fast moving progression of how
curators work, and the many variations of their practice—from large institutional
curator to the artist as curator to curating a collection of books in a bookstore—it is
nearly impossible to establish a one-size-fits-all way of working. There are also recent
trends of artist as curator, critic as curator, and fashion designer as curator that make
the profession seem somewhat of a free-for-all. Should there be standards for
curatorial training programs to follow? Or would such standards put a shackle on the
creative act?
While the essays in this book do not provide all the answers about the
changing role of the contemporary curator nor exactly define the role of the curator,
each one provides an interesting perspective and allows readers at every level of
interest to pose their own questions and to find new answers.

Heather Kouris has been Special Projects Director of apexart since 2003; she was Gallery Director from
1999 to 2002. Now based in Athens, Greece, she continues her work with apexart and is developing
work with the artistic community in Athens as well as writing about art. Her past curatorial efforts include
Everyday Hellas (2004, White Box, NYC, and Parko Eleftherias, Athens) and The Passions of the Good
Citizen (2002, apexart).

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Cautionary Tales

14
David Levi Strauss

The Bias of the World:

Curating After Szeemann & Hopps

What Is a Curator?

Under the Roman Empire, the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in
charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing.
The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The
curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the fourteen regions
of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts. In the Middle Ages,
the role of the curator shifted to the ecclesiastical, as clergy who had a spiritual cure or
charge. So one could say that the split within curating—between the management
and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the
beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest.

That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity,

Commodity, the bias of the world—
—Shakespeare, King John1

For better or worse, curators of contemporary art have become, especially in the last
ten years, the principal representatives of some of our most persistent questions and
confusions about the social role of art. Is art a force for change and renewal, or is it
a commodity, for advantage or convenience? Is art a radical activity, undermining
social conventions, or is it a diverting entertainment for the wealthy? Are artists the
antennae of the human race, or are they spoiled children with delusions of grandeur
(in Roman law, a curator could also be the appointed caretaker or guardian of a
minor or lunatic)? Are art exhibitions “spiritual undertakings with the power to conjure
alternative ways of organizing society,”2 or vehicles for cultural tourism and nation-
alistic propaganda?
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Cautionary Tales

These splits, which reflect larger tears in the social fabric, certainly in the
United States, complicate the changing role of curators of contemporary art, because
curators mediate between art and its publics and are often forced to take “a curving
and indirect course” between them. Teaching for the past five years at the Center
for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, I observed young curators confronting the
practical demands and limitations of their profession, armed with a vision of possibility
and an image of the curator as a free agent, capable of almost anything. Where did
this image come from?
When Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps died within a month of each
other in February and March 2005, at age seventy-two and seventy-one, respectively,
it was impossible not to see this as the end of an era. They were two of the principal
architects of the present approach to curating contemporary art, working over fifty
years to transform the practice. When young curators imagine what’s possible, they
are imagining (whether they know it or not) some version of Szeemann and Hopps.
The trouble with taking these two as models of curatorial possibility is that both of
them were sui generis: renegades who managed, through sheer force of will, extraor-
dinary ability, brilliance, luck, and hard work, to make themselves indispensable, and
thereby intermittently palatable, to the conservative institutions of the art world.
Each came to these institutions early. When Szeemann was named head of
the Kunsthalle Bern in 1961, at age twenty-eight, he was the youngest ever to have
been appointed to such a position in Europe, and when Hopps was made director of
the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1964, at age thirty-
one, he was then the youngest art museum director in the United States. By that
time, Hopps (who never earned a college degree) had already mounted a show of
paintings by Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Jay DeFeo, and many
others on a merry-go-round in an amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier (with
his first wife, Shirley Hopps, when he was twenty-two); started and run two galleries
(Syndell Studios and the seminal Ferus Gallery, with Ed Kienholz); and curated the
first museum shows of Frank Stella’s paintings and Joseph Cornell’s boxes, the first
U.S. retrospective of Kurt Schwitters, the first museum exhibition of Pop Art, and the
first solo museum exhibition of Marcel Duchamp, in Pasadena in 1963. And that was
just the beginning. Near the end of his life, Hopps estimated that he’d organized 250
exhibitions in his fifty-year career.

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 David Levi Strauss

Szeemann’s early curatorial activities were no less prodigious. He made his

first exhibition, Painters Poets/Poets Painters, a tribute to Hugo Ball, in 1957, at age
twenty-four. When he became the director of the Kunsthalle in Bern four years later,
he completely transformed that institution, mounting nearly twelve exhibitions a
year, culminating in the landmark show Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become
Form, in 1969, which exhibited works by seventy artists, including Joseph Beuys,
Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long, and Bruce Nauman,
among many others.
While producing critically acclaimed and historically important exhibitions,
both Hopps and Szeemann quickly came into conflict with their respective institu-
tions. After four years at the Pasadena Art Museum, Hopps was asked to resign. He
was named director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1970, then
fired two years later. For his part, stunned by the negative reaction to When Attitudes
Become Form from the Kunsthalle Bern, Harald Szeemann quit his job, becoming the
first “independent curator.” He set up the Agency for Spiritual Guestwork and
co-founded the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) in
1969, curated Happenings & Fluxus at the Kunstverein in Cologne in 1970, and
became the first artistic director of Documenta in 1972, reconceiving it as a 100-day
event. Szeemann and Hopps hadn’t yet turned forty, and their best shows were all
ahead of them. For Szeemann, these included Junggesellenmaschinen—Les
Machines célibataires (“Bachelor Machines”) in 1975-77, “Monte Veritá” (1978,
1983, 1987), the first Aperto at the Venice Biennale (with Achille Bonito Oliva, 1980),
Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk, Europaïsche Utopien seit 1800 (“The Quest for the
Total Work of Art”) in 1983-84, Visionary Switzerland in 1991, the Joseph Beuys
retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1993, Austria in a Lacework of Roses in 1996,
and the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001. For Hopps, yet to come were exhibitions
of Diane Arbus in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1972; the Robert
Rauschenberg mid-career survey in 1976; retrospectives at the Menil Collection of
Yves Klein, John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol, and Max Ernst; and exhibitions of Jay
DeFeo (1990), Ed Kienholz (1996 at the Whitney), Rauschenberg again (1998), and
James Rosenquist (2003 at the Guggenheim). Both Szeemann and Hopps had exhi-
bitions open when they died—Szeemann’s Visionary Belgium, for the Palais des
Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and Hopps’ George Herms retrospective at the Santa Monica
Museum—and both had plans for many more exhibitions in the future.

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Cautionary Tales

What Do Curators Do?

Szeemann and Hopps were the Cosmas and Damian (or the Beuys and Duchamp) of
contemporary curatorial practice. Rather than accepting things as they found them,
they changed the way things were done. But finally, they will be remembered for
only one thing: the quality of the exhibitions they made, for that is what curators do,
after all. Szeemann often said he preferred the simple title of Ausstellungsmacher
(exhibition-maker), but he acknowledged at the same time how many different func-
tions this one job comprised: “administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian,
manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.” I have
heard curators characterized at different times as:

Administrators
Advocates
Auteurs
Bricoleurs (Hopps’ last show, the Herms retrospective, was titled
The Bricoleur of Broken Dreams ... One More Once)
Brokers
Bureaucrats
Cartographers (Ivo Mesquita)
Catalysts (Hans Ulrich Obrist)
Collaborators
Cultural impresarios
Cultural nomads
Diplomats (When Bill Lieberman, who held top curatorial posts at both
the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died in
May 2005, Artnews described him as “the consummate art diplomat.”)

And that’s just the beginning of the alphabet. When Hans Ulrich Obrist asked
Walter Hopps to name important predecessors, the first one he came up with was
Willem Mengelberg, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, “for his unre-
lenting rigor.” “Fine curating of an artist’s work,” he continued, “that is, present-
ing it in an exhibition—requires as broad and sensitive an understanding of an
artist’s work as a curator can possibly muster. This knowledge needs to go well
beyond what is actually put in the exhibition….To me, a body of work by a given
artist has an inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts
you in a certain psychological state. I always tried to get as peaceful and calm as
possible.”3

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 David Levi Strauss

But around this calm and peaceful center raged the “controlled chaos” of
exhibition making. Hopps’ real skills included an encyclopedic visual memory, the
ability to place artworks on the wall and in a room in a way that made them sing,4
the personal charm to get people to do things for him, and an extraordinary ability
to look at a work of art and then account for his experience of it, and articulate this
account to others in a compelling and convincing way.
It is significant, I think, that neither Szeemann nor Hopps considered himself
a writer, but both recognized and valued good writing, and solicited and “curated”
writers and critics as well as artists into their exhibitions and publications. Even so,
many think the rise of the independent curator signaled the demise of criticism. In a
recent article titled “Do Critics Still Matter?” Mark Spiegler opined that “on the day
in 1969 when Harald Szeemann went freelance by leaving the Kunsthalle Bern, the
wind turned against criticism.”5 There are curators who can also write criticism, but
these precious few are the exceptions that prove the rule. Curators are not specialists,
but for some reason they feel the need to use a specialized language, appropriated
from philosophy or psychoanalysis, which too often obscures rather than reveals their
sources and ideas. The result is not criticism, but curatorial rhetoric. Criticism involves
making finer and finer distinctions among like things, while the inflationary writing
of curatorial rhetoric is used to obscure fine distinctions with vague generalities. The
latter’s displacement of the former has political and social origins and effects, as we
move into an increasingly managed, post-critical environment.
Although Szeemann and Hopps were very different in many ways, they
shared certain fundamental values: an understanding of the importance of remaining
independent of institutional prejudices and arbitrary power arrangements; a keen sense
of history; the willingness to continually take risks intellectually, aesthetically, and con-
ceptually; and an inexhaustible curiosity about and respect for the way artists work.
Szeemann’s break from the institution of the Kunsthalle was, simply put, “a
rebellion aimed at having more freedom.”6 This rebellious act put him closer to the
ethos of artists and writers, in which authority must be earned through the quality of
one’s work. In his collaborations with artists, power relations were negotiated in practice
rather than asserted as fiat. Every mature artist I know has a favorite horror story
about a young, inexperienced curator trying to claim an authority he or she hasn’t
earned by manipulating a seasoned artist’s work or by designing exhibitions in which
individual artists’ works are seen as secondary and subservient to the curator’s grand
plan or theme. The cure for this kind of insecure hubris is experience, but also the

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Cautionary Tales

recognition of the ultimate contingency of the curatorial process. As Dave Hickey said
of both critics and curators, “Somebody has to do something before we can do
anything.”7 In June 2000, after being at the pinnacle of curatorial power repeatedly
for over forty years, Harald Szeemann said, “Frankly, if you insist on power, then you
keep going on in this way. But you must throw the power away after each experience,
otherwise it’s not renewing. I’ve done a lot of shows, but if the next one is not an
adventure, it’s not important for me and I refuse to do it.”8
When contemporary curators, following in the steps of Szeemann, break
free from institutions, they sometimes lose their sense of history in the process.
Whatever their shortcomings, institutions do have a sense (sometimes a surfeit) of
history. And without history, “the new” becomes a trap, a sequential recapitulation
of past approaches with no forward movement. It is a terrible thing to be perpetually
stuck in the present, and this is a major occupational hazard for curators.
Speaking about his curating of the Seville Biennale in 2004, Szeemann said,
“It’s not about presenting the best there is, but about discovering where the unpre-
dictable path of art will go in the immanent future.” But moving the ball up the field
requires a tremendous amount of legwork. “The unpredictable path of art” becomes
much less so when curators rely on the Claude Rains method, rounding up the usual
suspects from the same well-worn list of artists that everyone else in the world is
using.
It is difficult, in retrospect, to fully appreciate the risks that both Szeemann
and Hopps took to change the way curators worked. One should never underesti-
mate the value of a monthly paycheck. By giving up a secure position as director of
a stable art institution and striking out on his own as an “independent curator,”
Szeemann was assuring himself years of penury. There was certainly no assurance
that anyone would hire him as a freelance; anyone who’s chosen this path knows
that freelance means never having to say you’re solvent. Being freelance as a writer
and critic is one thing: the tools of the trade are relatively inexpensive, and one need
only make a living. But making exhibitions is costly, and finding “independent”
money, money without onerous strings attached to it, is especially difficult when one
cannot, in good conscience, present it as an “investment opportunity.” Daniel
Birnbaum points out that “all the dilemmas of corporate sponsorship and branding
in contemporary art today are fully articulated in [When Attitudes Become Form].
Remarkably, according to Szeemann, the exhibition came about only because
‘people from Philip Morris and the PR firm Ruder Finn came to Bern and asked me if

20
 David Levi Strauss

I would do a show of my own. They offered me money and total freedom.’ Indeed,
the exhibition’s catalog seems uncanny in its prescience: ‘As businessmen in tune
with our times, we at Philip Morris are committed to support the experimental,’
writes John A. Murphy, the company’s European president, asserting that his company
experimented with ‘new methods and materials’ in a way fully comparable to the
Conceptual artists in the exhibition. (And yet, showing the other side of this corpo-
rate-funding equation, it was a while before the company supported the arts in
Europe again, perhaps needing time to recover from all the negative press surrounding
the event.)”9 So the founding act of “independent curating” was brought to you by
... Philip Morris! Thirty-three years later, for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02,
Szeemann designed a pavilion covered with sheets of gold, containing a system of
pneumatic tubes and a machine that destroyed money—two one-hundred franc
notes every minute during the 159 days of the exhibition. The sponsor? The Swiss
National Bank, of course.
When Walter Hopps brought the avant-garde to Southern California, he
didn’t have to compete with others to secure the works of Mark Rothko, Clyfford
Still, or Jay DeFeo (for the merry-go-round show in 1953), because no one else wanted
them. In his Hopps obituary, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight pointed out
that “just a few years after Hopps’ first visit to the [Arensbergs’] collection, the [Los
Angeles] City Council decreed that modern art was Communist propaganda and
banned its public display.”10 In fifty years, we’ve progressed from banning art as
Communist propaganda to prosecuting artists as terrorists.11

The Few and Far Between

It’s not that fast horses are rare,

but men who know enough to spot them
are few and far between.
—Han Yü12

The trait that Szeemann and Hopps had most in common was their respect for and
understanding of artists. They never lost sight of the fact that their principal job was
to take what they found in artists’ works and do whatever it took to present it in the
strongest possible way to an interested public. Sometimes this meant combining it
with other work that enhanced or extended it. This was done not to show the artists
anything they didn’t already know, but to show the public. As Lawrence Weiner

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Cautionary Tales

pointed out in an interview in 1994, “Everybody that was in the Attitudes show knew
all about the work of everybody else in the Attitudes show. They wouldn’t have
known them personally, but they knew all the work.... Most artists on both sides of
the Atlantic knew what was being done. European artists had been coming to New
York and U.S. artists went over there.”13 But Attitudes brought it all together in a
way that made a difference.
Both Szeemann and Hopps felt most at home with artists, sometimes literally.
Carolee Schneemann recently described for me the scene in the Kunstverein in
Cologne in 1970, when she and her collaborator in Happenings and Fluxus (having
arrived and discovered there was no money for lodging) moved into their installa-
tions, and Szeemann thought it such a good idea to sleep on site, he brought in a
cot and slept in the museum, to the outrage of the staff and guards. Both Szeemann
and Hopps reserved their harshest criticism for the various bureaucracies that got
between them and the artists. Hopps once described working for bureaucrats when
he was a senior curator at the National Collection of Fine Arts as “like moving
through an atmosphere of Seconal.”14 And Szeemann said in 2001 that “the annoying
thing about such bureaucratic organizations at the [Venice] Biennale is that there are
a lot of people running around who hate artists because they keep running around
wanting to change everything.”15 Changing everything, for Szeemann, was just the
point. “Artists, like curators, work on their own,” he said in 2000, “grappling with
their attempt to make a world in which to survive.... We are lonely people, faced with
superficial politicians, with donors, sponsors, and one must deal with all of this. I
think it is here where the artist finds a way to form his own world and live his
obsessions. For me, this is the real society.”16 The society of the obsessed.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Although Walter Hopps was an early commissioner for the São Paolo Biennal (1965:
Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Richard Irwin, and Larry Poons) and of the Venice
Biennale (1972: Diane Arbus), Harald Szeemann practically invented the role of
nomadic independent curator of huge international shows, putting his indelible
stamp on Documenta and Venice and organizing the Lyon Biennale and the Kwangju
Biennial in Korea in 1997, and the first Seville Biennale in 2004, as well as numerous
other international surveys around the world.

22
 David Levi Strauss

So what Szeemann said about globalization and art should perhaps be

taken seriously. He saw globalization as a euphemism for imperialism, and proclaimed
that “globalization is the great enemy of art.” And in the Carolee Thea interview in
2000, he said, “Globalization is perfect if it brings more justice and equality to the
world ... but it doesn’t. Artists dream of using computer or digital means to have
contact and to bring continents closer. But once you have the information, it’s up to
you what to do with it. Globalization without roots is meaningless in art.”17 And
globalization of the curatorial class can be a way to avoid or “transcend” the political.
Rene Dubos’s old directive to “think globally, but act locally” (first given at
the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972) has been
upended in some recent international shows (like the 14th Sydney Biennale in 2004
and the first 1st Moscow Biennial in 2005). When one thinks locally (within a primarily
Euro-American cultural framework, or within a New York-London-Kassel-Venice-
Basel-Miami framework) but acts globally, the results are bound to be problematic,
and can be disastrous. In 1979, Dubos argued for an ecologically sustainable world
in which “natural and social units maintain or recapture their identity, yet interplay
with each other through a rich system of communications.” At their best, the big
international exhibitions do contribute to this. Okwui Enwezor’s18 Documenta XI
certainly did, and Szeemann knew it. At their worst, they perpetuate the center-to-
periphery hegemony and preclude real cross-cultural communication and change.
Although having artists and writers move around in the world is an obvious good,
real cultural exchange is something that must be nurtured. Walter Hopps said in
1996: “I really believe in—and, obviously, hope for—radical, or arbitrary, presentations,
where cross-cultural and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the
artifacts we have. ... So just in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies
begin to shift some.”19

The Silence of Szeemann & Hopps Is Overrated

‘Art’ is any human activity that aims at producing improbable situations,

and it is the more artful (artistic) the less probable the situation that it produces.
—Vilém Flusser20

Harald Szeemann recognized early and long appreciated the utopian aspects of art.
“The often-evoked ‘autonomy’ is just as much a fruit of subjective evaluation as the
ideal society: it remains a utopia while it informs the desire to experientially visualize
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Cautionary Tales

the unio mystica of opposites in space. Which is to say that without seeing, there is
nothing visionary, but that the visionary should always determine the seeing.” And
he recognized that the bureaucrat could overtake the curer of souls at any point.
“Otherwise, we might just as well return to ‘hanging and placing,’ and divide the
entire process ‘from the vision to the nail’ into detailed little tasks again.”21 He
organized exhibitions in which the improbable could occur, and was willing to risk
the impossible. In reply to a charge that the social utopianism of Joseph Beuys was
never realized, Szeemann said, “The nice thing about utopias is precisely that they
fail. For me failure is a poetic dimension of art.”22 Curating a show in which nothing
could fail was, to Szeemann, a waste of time.
If he and Hopps could still encourage young curators in anything, I suspect
it would be to take greater risks in their work. At a time when all parts of the social
and political spheres (including art institutions) are increasingly managed, breaking
out of this frame, asking significant questions, and setting the terms of resistance is
more and more vitally important. It is important to work against the bias of the world
(commodity, political expediency). For curators of contemporary art, that means finding
and supporting those artists who, as Flusser writes, “have attempted, at the risk of
their lives, to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable,
to render visible that which is hidden.”23

1. Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, Act II, Scene 1, 573-74. Cowper: “What Shakespeare calls
commodity, and we call political expediency.” Appendix 13 of my old edition of Shakespeare’s Complete
Works, edited by G. B. Harrison (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 1639-40, reads: “Shakespeare
frequently used poetic imagery taken from the game of bowls [bowling].… The bowl [bowling ball] was not
a perfect sphere, but so made that one side somewhat protruded. This protrusion was called the bias; it
caused the bowl to take a curving and indirect course.”
2. “When Attitude Becomes Form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann,” Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 55.
3. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, Volume 1 edited by Thomas Boutoux (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003), pp.
416-17. Hopps also named as predecessors exhibition-makers Katherine Dreier, Alfred Barr, James Johnson
Sweeney, René d’Harnoncourt, and Jermayne MacAgy.
4. In 1976, at the Museum of Temporary Art in Washington, D.C., Hopps announced that, for thirty-six hours,
he would hang anything anyone brought in, as long as it would fit through the door. Later, he proposed to
put 100,000 images up on the walls of P.S. 1 in New York, but that project was, sadly, never realized.
5. Mark Spiegler, “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” The Art Newspaper, no. 157, April 2005, p. 32.
6. Carolee Thea, Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators (New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program,
2001), p. 19.
7. Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility: Proceedings from a symposium addressing the
state of current curatorial practice organized by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, October 14-15, 2000,
edited by Paula Marincola (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001), p. 128. Both Szeemann and
Hopps passed Hickey’s test: “The curator’s job, in my view,” he said, “is to tell the truth, to show her or his
hand, and get out of the way” (p. 126).

24
 David Levi Strauss

8. Thea, p. 19 (emphasis added).

9. Birnbaum, p. 58.
10. Christopher Knight, “Walter Hopps, 1932-2005. Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists,” Los
Angeles Times, March 22, 2005.
11. At this writing, the U.S. government continues in its effort to prosecute artist and University at Buffalo
professor Steven Kurtz for obtaining bacterial agents through the mail, even though the agents were harm-
less and intended for use in art pieces by the collaborative Critical Art Ensemble. Kurtz has said he believes
the charges filed against him in 2004 (after agents from the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense swarmed over his house) are part of a
Bush administration campaign to prevent artists from protesting government policies. “I think we’re in a very
unfortunate moment now in U.S. history,” Kurtz has said. “A form of neo-McCarthyism has made a come-
back…. We’re going to see a whole host of politically motivated trials which have nothing to do with crime
but everything to do with artistic expression.” For the latest developments in the Kurtz case, go to caede-
fensefund.org.
12. Epigraph to Nathan Sivin’s Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1968).
13. Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968-2003, edited by Gerti Fietzek and
Gregor Stemmrich (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), p. 315.
14. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps—Art Curator,” Artforum, February 1996.
15. Jan Winkelman, “Failure as a Poetic Dimension: A Conversation with Harald Szeemann,” Metropolis M.
Tijdschrift over Hedendaagse Kunst, No. 3, June 2001.
16. Thea, p. 17 (emphasis added).
17. Thea, p. 18.
18. With his co-curators Carlos Basualdo, Uta Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and
Octavio Zaya.
19. Obrist, p. 430.
20. Vilém Flusser, “Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion,” in Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by
Erik Eisel (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 52.
21. Harald Szeemann, “Does Art Need Directors?” in Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on
Contemporary Art, edited by Carin Kuoni (New York: Independent Curators International, 2001), p. 169.
22. Winkelman.
23. Flusser, p. 54.

David Levi Strauss’s collection of essays on photography and politics, Between the Eyes, with an introduction
by John Berger, has been released in paperback by Aperture, and in a new Italian edition by Postmedia, and
Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics was published by Autonomedia in 1999. He taught at the
Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College from 2001-2005, and now teaches in the MFA program in
studio art at Bard College.

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Cautionary Tales

Kate Fowle

Who cares?
Understanding the Role of the Curator Today

The curator is having an identity crisis. Curating is now an industry, constructing its
own histories as it evolves. At the same time, it is an increasingly multifaceted practice
that gives rise to much speculation as to how it functions and what it entails.
In the opening paragraph of an essay intended as advice to a new generation
of curators, Harald Szeemann suggests we look to the root of the word, which is
curare, meaning “to take care of.” He writes, “After all, the word curator already
contains the concept of care.”1 But what is this seemingly inevitable “concept” that
Szeemann is referring to? It has a number of implications that influence how the role
of the curator is understood.
While the word stemmed from the Latin, in English it evolved to mean
“guardian” or “overseer.” From 1362 “curator” was used to signify people who
cared for (or were in superintendence of) minors or lunatics, and in 1661 it began to
denote “one in charge of a museum, library, zoo or other place of exhibit.”2 In each
case it has hierarchical connotations—a curator is someone who presides over some-
thing—suggesting an inherent relationship between care and control.
This is not uncharted territory. Michel Foucault, for example, has extensively
explored how this and other meanings of care have developed. In his book Madness
and Civilization, he describes the Hôpital Général in Paris as a 17th century institution
that was not a medical establishment, but a house of confinement for those deemed
insane. Rather than being a place of protection and aid, he suggests that it was “a
sort of semi judicial structure, an administrative entity which, along with the already
constituted powers, and outside of the courts, decides, judges and executes.”3
Similarly, the operations of a public gallery or museum could historically be under-
stood to be as much about the administration and governing of culture as about a
concern for its preservation and presentation.
Many public museums were initially funded and run by the government or
state, and curators were therefore civil servants, working in the service of politicians
and bureaucrats. In the United Kingdom, at least, some of the first local art museums
26
 Kate Fowle

were created to bestow care on the people, using art as a pedagogical tool. In a
newspaper report written in May 1892 about the opening of a public museum in
Walsall (a small industrial town in the west Midlands), the journalist quotes extensively
from the mayor’s inaugural speech, which started with an explanation of how societal
developments indicated that the council could no longer be content with restricting
civic duties to “maintaining law and order, and preventing people from dying of star-
vation.” The gallery—filled with paintings and objects borrowed from local digni-
taries—was instigated because it was time to “look after the popular culture of the
masses.” The journalist went on to describe how the mayor was met with great
applause when he suggested that “the manners of the people would become softer
and less uncouth” when they stood before art. He also predicted that the workers
would be “cheered and instructed and lifted to a higher level” as a result of their
experience.4
In this ceremonious display of generosity, exhibition-making is given a
charitable sense of social responsibility. In other circumstances the impetus is more
ideological, with art used as propaganda. This is evident in footage of the 1917
October Revolution in Russia, which documents the trains that were used as mobile
exhibitions, dispatched across the country to give word of the revolution to the
peasants. Here, carriages were adorned with artists’ romanticized visions of the
worker and filled with slogans and images that illustrated a new world order.
While its politics were markedly different, after its assumption to power,
the Nazi Party built museums and used exhibitions to control the dissemination of
culture. Perhaps the most famous example is the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)
exhibition that opened in Munich in 1937, which was initiated as an official condem-
nation of modern art that promoted morals the public was not encouraged to
embrace.5 The magnitude of the Nazi’s convictions only served to reveal the depth
of their anxiety, a condition that is generally recognized as both a source and a
by-product of caring.
Over 650 paintings, sculptures, prints and books that had been confiscated
from thirty-two state-run museums were hung chaotically in the cramped second-
floor confines of the former Institute of Archaeology. Rooms were themed to high-
light how artists had demeaned aspects of society such as religion and women, or
were dedicated to “degenerate” styles, such as Dada, abstraction and Expressionism.
Throughout the exhibition, artworks were interspersed with slogans such as “Nature
as seen by sick minds,” or “An insult to German heroes of the Great War,” as well
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Cautionary Tales

as signs that revealed how much money the previous government had paid for such
abominations. In all probability the majority of visitors were intrigued by the spectacle,
rather than educated on the virtues of racial purity, as was the intention. Either way,
the exhibition went down in history as the first (and probably the only free) block-
buster of modern art—it is generally recorded as the most highly attended show in
the 20th century.
With the charge of researching, acquiring, documenting, and publicly
displaying art, the curator becomes the propagator of taste and knowledge for the
public “good.” It stands to reason, then, that during this process one must also have
the opportunity to further refine oneself. This is the give and take of generosity. In
this respect care takes on a reciprocal value, rather than just being an act of dubious
kindness or concern. The curator becomes a connoisseur as much as an administrator.
His or her role is expanded beyond “overseeing” to encompass what Foucault calls
“the cultivation of the self.”
He explains that from Ancient Greek times, this was practiced between
small social groups that were “bearers of culture,” who understood that the “art of
existence” could have meaning and worth if one followed the principle of taking
“care of oneself.” He describes it as involving the adoption of an approach to life that
used “procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on, developed,
perfected and taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to
relationships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and at times
even to institutions.”6 It could be said that several modern museums, including the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, developed under such conditions, as a socialized
process of self-fulfillment for those who brought it into existence.
Founded in 1929, the museum was privately funded and governed by a
board of trustees who were all connoisseurs, if not professionally active in the field.
Alfred H. Barr Jr. became the first director at the age of 27. His curatorial approach
was influenced by his education at Princeton and Harvard and his travels in Europe
and Russia. In particular, at Harvard he was introduced to the Fogg Method, which
included museology, as well as courses that focused on physical attributes and the
syntax of the work of art, rather than the social and psychological contexts of the
form.
Throughout his tenure, Barr’s motivation was academic, as opposed to
civic or political. He was less concerned with “improving” the public than with
proving the merits of the formal qualities of modern art to critics, collectors, artists

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 Kate Fowle

and philanthropists. Upholding both the self-cultivation and the control in Foucault’s
descriptions of care, Barr used the sanctity of the white cube to produce exhibitions
that elevated the “autonomous object.” Becoming one of the first well known, or
celebrity, curators, he was heralded for major contributions to the study of modern
art and established many artists’ careers in the process. But although Barr respected
and was influenced by artists, architects, and designers, his practice was still one that
promoted his own knowledge and opinions over theirs.
For the most part, it was during the 1950s that there was a significant shift
in these relationships of power in Europe and the United States, with the rise of
artist-led initiatives in establishing venues and forums for art. For example, in New
York a number of artists’ collectives started accumulating around Tenth Street in
Greenwich Village, such as the Hansa Gallery, founded in 1952, by students of Hans
Hoffman, including Jean Follet, Allan Kaprow, and George Segal. What each gallery
had in common was that the curatorial role was taken on by artist committees,
leveling the hierarchical model of exhibition-making.
In London, the Independent Group transformed the audience from a spec-
tator into a participant in the production of culture. Consisting of artists, architects,
and critics—Richard Hamilton, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, to
name a few—the group developed around the Institute of Contemporary Art from
1952, providing a forum for public debate through lectures, dialogues, and exhibitions.
Its project aimed to be anti-elitist and anti-academic, discussing art as part of a
communication network that also included movies, advertising, fashion, and product
design.
Such activities signaled the evolution of the art scene into a dynamic and
contradictory system. Just as curating exhibitions was no longer only the domain of
the museum professional, audiences weren’t a faceless public, devoid of the people
who were the makers of culture. Through the deviances that rapidly developed from
that time on—such as museums acknowledging the voice of the artist, or artist-led
galleries employing exhibition organizers—the function of the curator was potentially
released from charitable responsibilities and the service of power. Open to reinterpre-
tation, the role became more flexible and therefore also more vulnerable.
These were the conditions under which Harald Szeemann began to make
exhibitions. Although he is now generally acknowledged as the first “independent”
curator, he also appropriated the concept of care from the conventional root of the
profession, as we have established. Along with others of his generation, such as

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Cautionary Tales

Walter Hopps, he understood curating as more intricate than presenting art in

relation to the mandate of an institution.
From the mid-50s on, Szeemann and Hopps each developed practices that
have greatly influenced how the curator and exhibition-making are perceived today.7
Both also died early in 2005, signifying closure on an era of major transformation in
cultural production. While their characters and careers were markedly different, they
shared a desire to challenge the bureaucracy of institutions, earning reputations for
actively questioning the form of exhibitions as well as for their sustained engagement
with artists and their work.
In 1969, as director of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, Szeemann initi-
ated Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Processes-Concepts-
Situations-Information, an exhibition that turned the gallery into a studio, with artists
traveling to Bern to produce installations and actions that extended into the city
streets. Recognizing new art forms that were developing under terms such as earth
art, concept art, anti-form and arte povera, the show included projects by nearly
seventy artists, including Joseph Beuys, Michael Heizer, Eva Hesse, Mario Merz, Allen
Ruppersberg and Robert Smithson. Attitudes marked the advent of the contemporary
curatorial drive, what Bruce Altshuler calls “the rise of the curator as creator,” whereby
exhibition organizing became a critical and potentially experimental endeavor.8
Shortly after the show, Szeemann left the Kunsthalle (where the trustees largely
disagreed with his methods) and developed projects for a variety of museums,
galleries and biennials, as well as for quasi-private and non-gallery spaces. From this
point his practice focused on the concept of exhibition-making as an ongoing process
that was separate from the programmatic functions of an institution. Becoming in
effect the precursor to the “frequent-flyer,” “nomadic,” or “itinerant” curator,
Szeemann instigated a number of curatorial models that we now take for granted.
For example, as the director of Documenta 5 in 1972, he challenged the
established premise that the quinquennial take the form of a temporary museum,
introducing instead the concept of the exhibition as a live project, or a hundred-day
event. In this context he organized performances, happenings, and films under
sub-themes that considered works in relation to science fiction, advertising and
utopian design, as well as inviting artists to present their own museums and political
statements. In 1980, as co-commissioner for the Venice Biennale, Szeemann intro-
duced the Aperto9—a themed, international group exhibition for emerging artists—
which transcended the national divisions of the pavilions. This lasting intervention

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 Kate Fowle

into the structure of the Biennale asserted his long-held belief that exhibitions did not
have to be conceptually or qualitatively conclusive, but rather could act as a testing
ground for artists and a barometer for the development of art practice.
Walter Hopps never completed a formal education. He started out working
with musicians in the Los Angeles jazz scene, which influenced his ideas on how to
help artists give a public presence to their work. Then he set up the Ferus Gallery in
1957 with artist Ed Keinholz, which would be the first platform in Los Angeles for
international post-war art, as well as for unknown beat-generation and West Coast
artists such as Wallace Berman, Jay DeFeo, and Georg Herms. Conceived of in the
spirit of an artists’ collective, within a year the gallery had developed into a successful
commercial (although still experimental) enterprise under the leadership of Irvine
Blum, establishing a financially driven momentum that remains a contested aspect
(or perhaps a sub-plot) of exhibition-making.
Known as a perfectionist and nonconformist who refused to submit to the
administrative logic or routine of the institution, Hopps nevertheless worked for a
series of museums and biennials, while sustaining an interest in developing projects
outside the gallery or museum setting. At the time of his death he was an art editor
for the literary arts journal Grand Street, and also served as an adjunct senior curator
at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, as well holding the position of senior
curator of 20th century art at the Menil Collection in Houston.
While it is possible to cite a number of important group shows curated by
Hopps, what is potentially most interesting about his practice is his expansion of the
parameters of solo shows by living artists. He curated Marcel Duchamp’s first retro-
spective in 1963 (arranging two live chess matches for Duchamp as part of the show)
and developed presentations of the work of Joseph Cornell, Barnett Newman, Robert
Rauschenberg, and Kurt Schwitters, to name but a few. In an interview with curator
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hopps said, “To me, a body of work by a given artist has an
inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts you in a certain
psychological state.” His practice involved ongoing research into conducive ways to
present art: “Fine curating of an artist’s work—that is, presenting it in an exhibition—
requires as broad and sensitive understanding of an artist’s work as a curator can
possibly muster. This knowledge needs to go well beyond what is actually put in the
exhibition.”10
This philosophy underpinned his role at the Menil Collection, where he
became the founding director in 1979, at a time when Dominique de Menil wanted

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Cautionary Tales

to extend the feeling of intimacy that she had with her collection into its public
display. Likening the experience to working in a research laboratory—in terms of
how the artworks were commissioned, acquired, and presented—Hopps championed
the potential of museum spaces as places of discovery, surprise, and contemplation.
The actions and attitudes of both Szeeman and Hopps highlight key factors
in curating today: namely, that it provides a platform for artists’ ideas and interests;
it should be responsive to the situations in which it occurs; and it should creatively
address timely artistic, social, cultural or political issues. It could be said that the role
of the curator has shifted from a governing position that presides over taste and
ideas to one that lies amongst art (or object), space, and audience. The motivation is
closer to the experimentation and inquiry of artists’ practices than to the academic
or bureaucratic journey of the traditional curator.
Given that their careers began as the curatorial climate was changing, it is
relevant to note that neither Szeemann nor Hopps called themselves curators at the
outset. Hopps frequently likened his practice to that of a conductor, and Szeemann
often chose to use the title Ausstellungsmacher, or exhibition-maker, describing this
role as one of an “administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager
and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.”11 Indeed, it is only
relatively recently that the use of the word curator in this contemporary context has
gone mainstream; as awareness has grown, so has the proliferation of specialist
articles, interviews, books, symposia, and graduate courses.
These have accumulated for the last decade, forming a critical frame-work
through which exhibitions—as opposed to artworks—are given a kind of autonomy.
Predominantly generated from within the field, the commentaries are indicative of
the continuing self-reflexive aspect of the curatorial role. In working between theory
and practice, the curator is simultaneously initiating, supporting, disseminating, and
evaluating projects. This differs from the production of meaning that has developed
around art, which is mostly generated by schools of art history and critical theory that
exist alongside art practice.
Updating Szeemann’s description of exhibition-maker, we can now add
mediator, facilitator, middleman, and producer to the ever-expanding list of roles.
Instead of comparing the curator to a conductor, as Hopps did, we live in an age
when the curator is compared to a DJ, or any similar master of improvisation who
“samples” and combines works, actions, and ideas. The institution is now not just
the museum, but a whole industry that has grown up around exhibition-making. This

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situation has parallels with that described by Rosalind Krauss in her essay “Sculpture
in the Expanded Field,” first published in October in 1979, when new forms of art
practice (such as those that Szeemann and Hopps supported) were increasingly being
recognized. In the beginning of her text she writes:

Over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: nar-
row corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country
hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the
floor of the desert. Nothing, it would seem, could possibly have given way to such a
motley effort to lay claim to whatever one might mean by the category of sculpture.
Unless, that is, the category can be made to become almost infinitely malleable.12

If we replace the word sculpture with exhibition, this could equally read as a
commentary on recent forms of curatorial practice. Taking this further, we can
replace Krauss’s list of “surprising things” with recent examples of exhibitions, to see
how far the term has been stretched. These could include: twenty-six days of live and
Web-streamed radio broadcasts; artworks that can be touched, used and taken from
the display; a human-scale live jungle installed alongside a laughing-gas chamber;
mobile units, performances, outdoor museums and film screenings sited in the
desert. Of course, such a list could take many forms, but by echoing Krauss we can
readily establish that contemporary exhibitions are now not only dealing with the
presentation of an expanded notion of art, but also extending their own spatial
parameters into conceptual and virtual realms, as well as experimenting with the role
of the public in the “completion” of a project.
Furthermore, as Szeemann and Hopps demonstrated, actively engaging
with art and artists is central to practice, which is an aspect of the role for which
there are no guarantees of immediate or quantifiable outcomes. This requires a kind
of creative “maintenance,” as opposed to Foucault’s “care,” as it involves supporting
the seeds of ideas, sustaining dialogues, forming and reforming opinions, and
continuously updating research. It could also be said that exhibitions are not the first,
or only, concern of the curator. Increasingly the role includes producing commis-
sioned temporary artworks, facilitating residencies, editing artist-books, and organizing
one-time events.
In her essay, Krauss describes how “critical operations,” such as art history
and criticism, have historicized artists’ practices so as to invent a virtually seamless
trajectory for the development of sculpture from its “historically bound” category.

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Cautionary Tales

In contrast, rather than trying to smooth over the “ruptures” that have taken place
in the field, she recognizes that they are a symptom of the breakdown within
changing cultural conditions of the logic of the original definition. As a result, she
charts the theoretical structure of an expanded field of sculpture that acknowledges
the inconsistencies and transgressions.
Within contemporary curating the contradictions are evident to all. There is
a widening divide between two camps—the independent and the institutional—that
supposedly signifies where curatorial allegiances lie in relation to the “historically
bound” aspects of the profession. These categorizations are overly simplistic, giving
rise to restrictive perceptions of the role of the curator, even among those working
in the field. Following Krauss’s lead, we need to complicate the dialectics and
acknowledge the diversity of practices that continue to develop around artists and
their ideas. We need to start thinking in terms of an expanded field of curating.

1. Harald Szeemann, “Does Art Need Directors?” in Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on
Contemporary Art, edited by Carin Kuoni, (New York: Independent Curators International, 2001), p. 167.
2. These definitions are taken from the On-line Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper (www.etymonline.com,
2001). In cross-referencing The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, edited by Robert K. Barnhart (New
York: Harper Resource, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 1995) p. 178-179, more incarnations of the
word are found. From around 1375 “curature” is a person having the care of souls.
3. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard
Howard (New York: Vintage Books Edition, Random House, 1988), p. 40.
4. Walsall Observer May 21, 1892. The article was transcribed and archived by the Walsall Historical Society
and the journalist’s name was not recorded.
5. Max Nordau first developed the theory of degeneracy in 1892 in his book Entartung (Degeneration) where
he used pseudoscientific reasoning to suggest that modern art movements such as Symbolism and
Impressionism were the result of artists experiencing mental pathology and having a diseased visual cortex.
The Nationalist Social Party adopted Nordau’s theories during the Weimar Republic in Germany.
6. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1988), p. 45.
7. Harald Szeemann died February 18, 2005, in the Ticino region of Switzerland, at the age of seventy-one.
Walter Hopps died March 20, 2005, in Los Angeles, at the age of seventy-two.
8. Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1998), p. 236. Of the curator as creator, Altshuler goes on to say: “While there
had been many earlier attempts to subvert the traditional exhibition format, these efforts were made by
artists themselves. … In the late sixties such exhibition forms proliferated, but major innovations would also
be generated by exhibition organizers. Like the work displayed, their exhibitions sought to undercut the stan-
dard way of framing art for the public, the manner and mode of presentation becoming part of the content
presented. In this way they were engaged in the same sort of critical enterprise as the artists, and their exhi-
bitions became works on a par with their components.”
9. The first Aperto section for young artists at the Venice Biennale was arranged by Achille Bonito Oliva and
Harald Szeemann in the Magazzini del Sale. It was at the 48th International Art Exhibition in 1999, when
Szeeman was director, that the Aperto was first presented throughout the historical spaces of the Arsenale,
growing to the hyper-large exhibition that we know today.

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 Kate Fowle

10. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps—art curator,” Artforum, February 1996.
11. Obrist, ibid.
12. Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” was originally published in October 8 (Spring 1979);
reprinted in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture, edited and with an introduction by Hal Foster
(New York: New Press, 1998), p. 31-42.

Thanks to Julian Myers for discussing and commenting on the ideas that are developed in this essay.

Kate Fowle is the Chair of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San
Francisco, and an independent curator and writer. Currently she is working on The Backroom, an ongoing
research project into artists’ source materials, which recently occupied a space in Culver City, L.A., (2005).
Texts and publications include What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, edited by Ted
Purves (SUNY Press, NY, 2005) and Flow: Ari Marcopoulos (MU, Eindhoven, 2006).

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Cautionary Tales

Jean-Hubert Martin

Independent Curatorship

The main task of an independent curator is to conceive and organize exhibitions, which
includes also the editing of catalogs. He is the go-between among the different worlds
of the artists, the exhibition spaces (gallery, museum, etc.), and the public. By showing
art and writing about it, the curator interprets the works and conveys his understanding
to the viewers. Consequently the independent curator can lead the visitor to new
considerations or interpretations about art. This might open up new trends. The curator
must be aware of different types of public: On one hand there are the amateurs who
know the codes of art already; on the other hand there is the visitor who is inexperi-
enced in contemporary art and wants to discover it.
In terms of curating there is a big difference between personal exhibitions
and group exhibitions. In the last case—group exhibitions—the role of an independent
curator is best shown and visible. He gathers artists to give the visitor a sensation and
idea of a common denominator that has to be easily verified in each work. This
common link can either be formal or conceptual. On the other hand a personal
exhibition allows the independent curator to interpret the work of one artist according
to his personal perspective and setting the artists into new associations.
Independent curators work for either private or public institutions. They are
actually sought out because experiencing the newest trends and the last innovations in
the world of art requires gathering an enormous amount of information. Therefore a
lot of travelling is required, and most curators who are tied to one institution are unable
to find enough time for travelling. Information can of course easily be gathered through
publications, i.e., art magazines or the internet, but direct contacts with artists and their
works is essential to understand and to feel the quality and the energy that are inherent
in the works. This applies to relatively conventional works of art, especially those with
a physical or material presence.
The situation is different for more experimental or social works that are
displayed within an urban context. Ephemeral works or interactive works require
much more involvement by intermediaries like independent curators. In this case the

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independent curator has often to look for an institutional partner, not necessarily a
museum, that he can persuade to present the project. He has to identify the right
place, where those who are responsible for the program are not only convinced by
the artistic and aesthetic value of the work, but are also willing to raise the needed
money. Such a situation is most closely comparable to organizing a festival of
performance art.
Actually there is an artistic tendency in producing not just transportable
paintings and sculptures but also ephemeral works in situ. Looking at this evolution
it seems quite clear that more and more artists propose sets of social games, creating
in cities situations of surprise or of self-consciousness and self-reflection. This seems
to be a very attractive movement for many young artists. Thus they escape the neces-
sity of producing objects for the market and they can enjoy a much greater freedom
—at least at the beginning of their career. It is a paradox that the old request of
artists of the 1960s, then in a Marxist context, is happening now through the evolu-
tion of society and multiple sources of financing. A few years ago, there were just a
few regular contemporary art events, which were reserved, de facto, for a well-off
public that was sufficiently interested to make the journey to Venice or Kassel. It is
natural, and a good thing, that this situation should have been turned around, that
art should move to the public. Around the world, the major events are becoming
more numerous, thus providing greater possibilities of access to current creative
activity. With the propagation of exhibition venues (at least one new museum opens
each month) the progressive extension of the contemporary art network over the
entire planet is profoundly transforming the situation and conditions of creative
work. Today a range of artists are able to survive from their work with museums,
exhibitions, grants, artist in residence programs, public art projects, workshops,
lectures, etc. That is what the artists of the 60s required: freedom and independence
from the art market, so that they were no longer obliged to produce their art for sale.
This evolution leads to the fact that the works of living artists are often
ephemeral. The so-called crisis in art really only exists in the mind of those observers
who are still trying to assign art with rules and limits to which the artists themselves
are in fact totally indifferent. Although the creation itself is a result of the artist's indi-
vidual crisis, its social diffusion seems to increase recently. The idea of an avant-
garde, which has long been criticized for turning into the exclusive criterion of an
autonomous microcosm, that has its nose stuck in its own Guinness Book of Records,
is at last in the process of flying apart. The adventure of the world of living art, open

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Cautionary Tales

to cultures as a whole, corresponds to a change in attitude that is perceptible today

among many creative artists. What is appearing now is a profusion of works aimed
at giving an account of the real: its ambiguities, its contradictions and its blind spots.
This current grew up out of observations of a reality in full-scale evolution, and not
out of the dogma of modernity. The generation of today's artists flees weightiness
and monumentality. It tackles humanity's problems with vivacity, energy, and, indeed,
humor; which means that it has avoided any trace of complex about the modernity
from which it has freed itself. What unites the artists of this generation is a rejection
of conventions as undeniable truths, whether denominational and philosophical or
social and political. The critical function of the work of art, which has already been
squeezed into a theoretical straitjacket, cannot stand up to this rebellious, anarchic
thrust. Its role turns out, in general, to be a lot more ambiguous, at the point of
contact between denunciation and glorification.
The education programs of young curators have to react to this evolution—
in a time where the prepossessing dominance of strictly artistic categories has faded
out in favor of more general values deriving from human sciences and anthropology.
One major subject for the education of independent curators should be anthropology.
My suggestion in terms of human sciences would be to teach them anthropology in
a way that allows them to use it in a more active way than just quoting the anthro-
pological and philosophical theories of Claude Levy-Strauss, Marc Augé, James
Clifford, Jean Baudrillard or Michel Foucault in their papers. In using cliché refer-
ences, art critics simply pay homage to the “fathers” instead of really dealing with
the meaning and interrelations with the works. Of course the knowledge of the history
of art is a main condition for a solid background of an independent curator, but it
should be taught in a completely different way. Not as a system of eternal values and
certainties but as a continuous and dynamic flow of permanently changing rela-
tionships to the real. The education has to impart the notion of relative values, for
example it is essential to know how to make connections between the work of art
and its context of space and time.
I do not know so much about the content of individual curatorial training
programs. I suspect that in many cases students are taught more about art theory and
aesthetical matters than organizing, managing, and fundraising. Again, the knowledge
of history of art and art theories is essential and basic for a curatorial career. But one
has to see that the job of the classical art historian has evolved very fast. Initially his role
was to give a place to the artist in an always evolving chronology. This is not usually

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a goal for an artist. Nowadays art historians have become simultaneously promoters of
young artists, managers, and interpreters. Not to mention their participation in
scenography and installations, which means that a creative aspect to the profession
has rapidly come into place.
In our time it has certainly become increasingly important for independent
curators to know many secondary skills about the art market and its business. Today
curators are needed who not only have a good feeling for art but who are able to
establish a trustful relationship with the artists. They must know how to help them
technically not only to realize and incarnate their ideas but also to survive in the
games of the art world. This evolution is quite recent. It did not exist when I started
my career. I was always associated with an art institution, even though I organized
many exhibitions outside its frame. My knowledge is “external,” which I received
from discussions and exchanges with independent curators. My understanding is that
independent curatorship is really a specific job where one has to “sell” his ideas to
institutions or sponsors. The number of ambitious independent curators has risen
over the last several years. Due to the multiple points of views and conceptions on
contemporary art and due to the lack of sufficient staff the museum is often not able
to curate every planned exhibition appropriately. That is why an increasing number
of museums demand experts in a specific field and ask for independent curators. It
is more efficient for a museum which plans an exhibition with a specific theme to ask
a freelance curator who is already specialized in this topic than to require a staff-cura-
tor to get acquainted with it. Though there is an increasing demand on independent
curators, the rising amount of independent curators leads to an intense and often
even fierce competition that results to low wages.
The success of the work of an independent curator depends on the “good
will” of institutions and sponsors. Imagining and supporting art events outside insti-
tutions suggest at the first glance freedom of action in planning an exhibition but no
material and technical support. The infrastructure, the know-how and technical
support of a museum often makes the realization of a project a lot easier. Most radical
events may happen within institutions where the director can from time to time insert
a very risky intervention in his program. This is sometimes easier than convincing a
sponsor to produce a totally radical event in art. In this case the sponsor itself must
have already been convinced about the trends of contemporary art and must be
familiar to the contemporary art world. The independent curator should not be afraid
of radicalism which might be inherent to a work of art. On the contrary he has to be

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Cautionary Tales

open for any discussion that might come up if he sponsors a social or political critical
work of art.
The scene of contemporary art is full of conflicts of interests, especially since
museums have become interested in young artists and endorsing them. In Europe
this phenomena is not that new as one might expect. Many museums of the 19th
century were collecting living art, i.e., contemporary art of their time, to support local
or local born artists. With the rise of modernism in the end of the 19th century the
interest and understanding of the museum for contemporary art was interrupted for
at most one century. In France especially museums did not risk purchasing modern
art for a long time. This attitude was even supported by collectors or art dealers, who
themselves championed burgeoning artists. They believed in the theory of
Kahnweiler who claimed that only the art market, which meant exclusively collectors
and gallerists, had to deal with living art and not public institutions. In his opinion
museums should only purchase works of artists that had proven that their works had
still an intellectual and financial value for the following generations of collectors, who
judge works with the distance of time. He believed in a “filter effect” of time. Works
of living art are mostly supported by collectors, who are more or less the same age
as the artists. It is after the disappearance of this generation that important falls or
rises in value occur.
This raises the question: Is the museum supposed to be an institution to
establish aesthetical and artistic value compared to the market value or rather should it
be a place for the promotion of new coming artists? Obviously doing both at the same
time is a difficult challenge. Promoting new artists on the one hand and keeping an
historical critical point of view on the other hand is not very easy, but I have always tried
to go for such a challenge. To be successful an independent curator needs a good
critical approach to tastes and trends in art, a good critical background. Therefore my
proposal for the curatorial program would be to draw the attention of students to the
incredibly fast change of taste and trends, in other words to the fashion in art through
the 20th century. The students should deal with questions like: What was highlighted
at each period? What was purchased by different museums at the same time? One
should also study the evolution of the collections of the big museums of modern art in
the last century: When were the masterpieces of today purchased? What were the
masterpieces fifty or eighty years ago? Which works were shown in the galleries and
which ones hidden in storage at different periods of time? Students have to understand
history of art as a continuous and dynamic flowing process of realities.

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 Jean-Hubert Martin

But even if the museums now are much more open to new trends in
contemporary art than in the 19th century, it still seems to be very difficult to
combine the work of independent curators with the code of ethics edicted by ICOM,
i.e., the curator cannot be active as a private collector in the field of his competence
in the museum.
Through lack of courage or taste for risk, many museums have not yet
taken the measure of the freedom they are being offered. Most of the criticism
directed at my exhibition Magiciens de la Terre resulted from this audacious demon-
stration of the degree to which the art world, which saw itself as being so free, or
even libertarian, had been building up geographical boundaries. The bigger the
museum, the more it is closed up within its limits and contradictions.
Promoting artists independently is very close to marketing and selling art.
There are independent curators who receive works from the artists in exchange for
their help or services. This was a common practice with critics until the 60s. The
power switched from the critics to the independent curators in the 70s. Writing
about works of art, interpreting them, gives them an intellectual, ideological, and
spiritual value. This can be conveyed through written explanations although the
display of the works in a show can help a lot for its understanding. It is usually what
the art dealer is not able to deliver and where he needs academic support. In the 60s
artists were looking for famous critics whose names were a “guarantee.” Since the
70s they have been more interested in the support of well-known curators and in their
inclusion in certain exhibitions.
Advising collections is a difficult field, too. The work for an independent
curator in this field depends on the attitude of the collector. If the collector is deeply
involved in arts and knows about the movements he is interested in he might only need
some assistance, an expert who has a broader specific knowledge and who is able to
put the works of art in a special context that the collector may not have considered.
The independent curator has the role of a “scout,” who is looking for pieces of art
according to the collector's line. If the collector directs his attention to “successful” and
already well-known artists, the independent curator has to seek artists who have the
most chances to get a quick added value in the art market. For this part the independ-
ent curator also needs good connections to art dealers. He has to build up a trustful
relationship in order to get the “right” pieces in time. The independent curator has to
be part of the game of the art market, which makes it very difficult for him to hold the
distance that allows him a considered and long-run foreseeing judgement.

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Cautionary Tales

The independent curator is the link between the creator and the public. To
make access for the public possible, he needs to set up the right conditions to realize
artistic projects. That means he has to find the right institution to show the artist's
work and he has to clear the financial situation. If the artist does not make a visual
object, for instance if he creates purely conceptual works of art, it is the job of an
independent curator to deliver all possible comments and interpretations to help the
public understand the work and to get a feeling for it.
The independent curator should discuss the project with the artist to avoid
a sort of utopian project, whose realization stays half way from its goal and leads to
disappointment, or hermetic works without a consistent theory in the background.
Young artists often have a big fantasy about their ideas, what their works are
supposed to convey, and about the possible imagined reception by the public. They
always credit the viewer with much more than his normal capacity. It is the task of
the independent curator to make them aware of which sensations their work might
communicate and the best display of the elements in an exhibition so the idea of the
work is supported at its best. Conversations with artists require diplomacy because
some artists may refuse any interference in their artistic decisions, so that there may
be no flexibility and room for discussion. Others might be more open to a discussion.
Of course these two attitudes do not take into account the talent and the quality of
the artist.
A big change in curatorship happened throughout the 60s and 70s. Curators
started to withdraw from institutional rules governing the format of the work of art and
began to concentrate on the integrity of an artist's project in the artistic program of the
museum, even if it might challenge the institution's programmatic direction—although
not in the same intense way that again today the question is regularly raised. But it is
important to make a clear distinction between utopian projects that have to be shown
as such with possible realization in the future (when the needed technology is currently
not available or too expensive) and feasible projects. Artists have to be warned some-
times of too exaggerated excesses of free imagination. If the project is not feasible as
conceived, it is again the task of the independent curator to find together with the artist
a way to realize it. This process needs elevated sensitivity because there is nothing
worse in an exhibition than uncompleted projects, when the idea of a work of art had
to be changed from the original idea just because the required technology was not
available to the artist. A work of art should only be shown after the independent
curator and the artist have explored all possible ways to realize it. Not only the

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technical, but also the political, and financial conditions have to be cleared and
applied to the realization of the project. These comments are not only relevant for the
independent curator but also for curators who are working for an institution. An
important turning point in this direction was the exhibition by Harald Szeemann Live In
Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form in Bern 1969. Artists were allocated a more
or less open space and they made the show. The role of the curator was to help to
realize the project with his full support.
One of the most important roles of an independent curator is to help
unknown artists get settled in the art scene in finding the right places and conditions
to make the display of the work possible. In this case finding money outside existing
institutions is always very difficult. Convincing possible sponsors to contribute is among
the best qualities an independent curator has to possess. Again, diplomatic skills and
passion are needed.
A talent in communication is also one of the main requirements for good
independent curatorship. The independent curator must be able to deal with all
possible media of communication. To convince the specialized media of the excel-
lence of an artist he is endorsing might be one of his hardest jobs. Again this is a risky
field. The interpretation and explanation he may give of the work are essential for
the diffusion of the ideas conveyed by the work not only for art lovers but also for a
larger public. He must find a balance between the intentions and statements of the
artists and his own ideas and interpretation that might differ.
Whether these explanations of the work should be available in a written or
oral form lies by the artist in agreement with the independent curator. Some artists may
refuse any pedagogical material next to their work—a highly respectable decision. In
this case it is the work of an independent curator to display the work of art in the exhi-
bition in a way that provokes the most efficient sensations from it. The independent
curator must use the instrument of “visual pedagogy” instead of “discursive pedagogy.”
Curators sometimes spend a dreadful lot of time explaining what art is and
why this or that new work, which does not correspond to the traditional canon of
art, or should actually be considered as such. It is astonishing that they do not devote
more time to understanding why so many items of today's material culture are not
recognized as art. In every field of knowledge evolution results from self-criticism and
from questioning not only the paradigms of the discipline but also the boundaries set
by the taxonomy. The necessity of defining an autonomy of art has led to an
endogamy of the relation system in art.

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Cautionary Tales

Curators should not only concentrate on the culture of our times and
radius, i.e., western culture, but also on the culture of non-western societies. I see an
essential duty of curatorial work in discovering the diversity of aesthetic expressions
of, in our eyes, exotic cultures. Globalization forces the opening up of the closed circle
of western contemporary art. This has partially been done during the last fifteen
years by including artists coming from other countries in international exhibitions, for
example in the Havana Biennales since 1986 or in the exhibition Africa Explores: 20th
century African Art at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 1991.
These artists may be seen as an alibi, because in most cases they belong to the post-
modern movement and they are plugged into the usual western art network. A real
understanding of and a dialogue with other cultures can only be achieved through a
fundamental questioning of the history of art the way it has been written by the
west. The hierarchy of values of techniques and artistic practices must be questioned.
It has always been the system of values of western culture, which for us has decided
between art and craft, between major and minor genres, between authentic and
folkloristic. The scale of values needs to be reevaluated in a post-colonial perspective.
But there are many obstacles that prevent seeing the western art system in relative
terms and rewriting the history of art.
The European culpability towards colonialism leads to a fear of everything
different coming from a foreign culture, in the name of preventing exoticism, always
seen only in its negative side, i.e., the instrumentalization of the other for the exclusive
superficial pleasure of a few rich amateurs. The number of clichés conveyed in this
regard is considerable. The way exoticism is criticized corresponds to television: we
are all TV consumers and tourists, it all depends what we make of it.
Another major barrier is our inability to see western culture in relative terms,
especially in modernism. As long as the Hegelian theory, which is the basis of
modernist and post theory, rules the understanding of art and is projected—in a very
neo-colonial way—on foreign cultures, there will be no chance to establish a real dia-
logue with them. Equality could be more easily sought for cultures than for politics
or economy. A geo-cultural approach shows how inconsistent the art “system” is.
Most of the artworks of the past displayed in museums belong to religion, magic, and
funeral rites. Why is it that because of colonialist exploitation, projection of modernism
on others and diffusion of Christianity, authentic artistic value is denied to any visual
expression of religion today? Given this absurd paradox, visual art is in this regard the
most reactionary discipline in western culture.

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This narrow minded thinking forgets that first of all it should be the presence
of the work of art that conveys a sensation for its aesthetical value. The definition of
the term of “exoticism” depends on the perspective of perception. So the notion of
“exoticism” can be extended to the western hemisphere and reverse the usual
viewpoint: the western view is no longer focused on, but it is complimented by, the
perspective held by non-western cultures on the occidental world.
Artists and museums have for too long taken advantage of the geographical
or intellectual remoteness of certain formal types of expression. Many intellectuals
who would consider themselves to be above any accusation of racism are far from
accepting the idea of equality among different artistic values. The art market prefers
artists who are familiar with the methods and strategies of the western art market,
it has no interest for exotic cultures, except for the countries that promise an economic
upturn, like China or Russia. How many curators are travelling to Africa to discover
living artists on-site? Not to mention art dealers.
Passion, curiosity, and honesty must always be the main interests of a curator
who wants to convey his enthusiasm to other people. A curator should try to interpret
our world and to understand it in its whole diversity. Therefore independent thinking—
independent curatorship—is required.

Now based in Paris, museum director and exhibition organizer Jean-Hubert Martin served as General Director
of the museum kunst palast in Düsseldorf from 2000-2006. He has received great esteem and recognition
internationally, in particular with the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989 and the way he had drawn
together exhibits from all over the world and for the first time presented non-western art on equal terms, and
also for his work on the biennales at Lyon (2000), São Paulo (1996), Johannesburg (1995), and Sydney (1993
and 1982), and as a conceiver and host of other remarkable exhibitions. His previous positions include
Curator at the Musée National d'art Moderne, Paris; Director, Kunsthalle, Bern; Director, Musée National
d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Artistic Director, Château d'Oiron; and Director, Musée
National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, Paris.

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Cautionary Tales

Boris Groys

The Curator as Iconoclast

The work of the curator consists of placing artworks in the exhibition space. This is
what differentiates the curator from the artist, as the artist has the privilege to exhibit
objects that have not already been elevated to the status of artworks. In fact, they
gain this status precisely through their placement in the exhibition space. Duchamp
exhibiting a urinal is not a curator but an artist, because his decision to present the
urinal in the framework of an exhibition has made this urinal a work of art. This
opportunity is denied to the curator. He can of course exhibit a urinal, but only if it
is Duchamp's urinal—that is, a urinal that has already obtained its art status. The
curator can easily exhibit an unsigned urinal, one without art status, but it will merely
be regarded as an example of a certain period of European design, serve as “contex-
tualization” for exhibited artworks, or fulfill some other subordinate function. In no
way can this urinal obtain art status—and after the end of the exhibition it will return
not to the museum, but back where it came from. The curator may exhibit, but he
doesn't have the magical ability to transform non-art into art through the act of display.
That power, according to current cultural conventions, belongs to the artist alone.
It hasn't been always so. Originally art became art through the decisions of
curators, rather than artists. The first art museums came into existence at the turn of
the 19th century and became established in the course of that century as a conse-
quence of revolutions, wars, imperial conquest, and pillage of non-European cultures.
All kinds of “beautiful” functional objects, previously employed for various religious
rituals, dressing the rooms of power, or manifesting private wealth, were collected
and put on display as works of art—that is, as defunctionalized, autonomous objects
of pure contemplation. The curators administering these museums “created” art
through iconoclastic acts directed against traditional icons of religion or power, by
reducing these icons to mere artworks. Art was originally “just” art. This perception
of it as such is situated within the tradition of the European Enlightenment, which
conceived of all religious icons as “simple things”—and art solely as beautiful objects,
as mere artworks. The question then is: Why have curators lost the power to create
art through the act of its exhibition, and why has this power passed to artists?

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 Boris Groys

The answer is obvious: In exhibiting a urinal, Duchamp does not devalue a

sacred icon, as the museum curators did; he rather upgrades a mass-produced object
to an artwork. In this way the exhibition's role in the symbolic economy changes.
Sacred objects were once devalued to produce art; today, in contrast, profane objects
are valorized to become art. What was originally iconoclasm has turned into
iconophilia. But this shift in the symbolic economy had already been put in motion
by the curators and art critics of the 19th century.
Every exhibition tells a story, by directing the viewer through itself in a
particular order; the exhibition space is always a narrative space. The traditional art
museum told the story of art's emergence and subsequent victory. Individual artworks
chronicled this story—and in doing so lost their old religious or representative signif-
icance and gained new meaning. Once museums had emerged as the new place of
worship, artists began to work specifically for the museum. Historically significant
objects no longer needed to be devalued in order to serve as art. Instead, brand new,
profane objects became recognized as artworks because they allegedly embodied the
new artistic value. These objects didn't have a prehistory, nor had they been legit-
imized by religion or power. At most they could be regarded as signs of a “simple,
everyday life” with indeterminate value. Their inscription into art history meant
valorization for these objects, not devaluation. Museums had been transformed from
places of Enlightenment-inspired iconoclasm into places of romantic iconophilia.
Exhibiting an object as art no longer signified its profanation, but its sacralization.
Duchamp simply took this change to its final conclusion when he laid bare the
iconophilic mechanism of valorization of mere things by labeling them works of art.
Over the years modern artists began to assert their art's total autonomy—
and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well: Every integration
of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular
narrative, is iconoclastic—even if the story is that of a triumph of this image, its trans-
figuration or its glorification. According to the tradition of modern art, an image
must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in silent
contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should
be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative babble must
stop. Even affirmative discourse and a favorable display are regarded as distorting the
message of the artwork itself. So modern artists began to hate and condemn curators,
because the curators never could completely rid themselves of their iconoclastic
heritage. They couldn't but place, contextualize, and narrativize works of art—which

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Cautionary Tales

necessarily led to the relativization of those works of art. Curating's ineradicable and
inevitable iconoclasm has never made artists happy; museums have been compared
to graveyards, and curators to undertakers. With such insults (disguised as institutional
critique), artists won the general public over to their side, because the general
public didn't know all the history; it didn't even want to hear it. The public wishes to
be confronted directly with individual artworks and exposed to their unmediated
impact. It steadfastly believes in the autonomous meaning of the individual artwork,
which is supposedly being manifested in front of its eyes. The curator's every media-
tion is suspect: he is seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer,
insidiously manipulating the viewer's perception with the intent of disempowering
the public. That's why, for the general public, the art market is more enjoyable
than any museum. Artworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextu-
alized, uncurated—so they get the apparently unadulterated chance to demonstrate
their inherent value. Consequently the art market is an extreme example of what
Marx termed commodity fetishism, meaning a belief in the inherent value of an
object, its value being its intrinsic quality. Thus began a time of degradation and
distress for curators—the time of modern art. Curators have managed their degradation
surprisingly well, though, by successfully internalizing it.
Even today we hear from many curators that they are working toward a
single objective: making individual artworks appear in the most favorable light. Or,
to put it differently, that the best curating is nil-curating, noncurating. From this
perspective, the solution seems to be to let the artwork alone, enabling the viewer
to confront it directly. However, not even the renowned white cube is always good
enough for this purpose. The viewer is often advised to completely abstract himself
from the work's spatial surroundings, and to immerse himself fully in self- and world-
denying contemplation. Under these conditions alone—beyond any kind of curating,
that is—can the encounter with an artwork be regarded as authentic and genuinely
successful. That such contemplation cannot go ahead without the artwork's being
exhibited, however, remains an indisputable fact. Giorgio Agamben writes that “the
image is a being, that in its essence is appearance, visibility, or semblance.”1 But this
definition of artwork's essence does not suffice to guarantee the visibility of a
concrete artwork. A work of art can't in fact present itself by virtue of its own
definition and force the viewer into contemplation—artworks lack vitality, energy,
and health. They seem to be genuinely sick and helpless; a spectator has to be led to
the artwork, as hospital workers might take a visitor to see a bedridden patient. It is

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 Boris Groys

no coincidence that the word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure.” Curating

is curing. The process of curating cures the image's powerlessness, its incapacity to
present itself. The artwork needs external help; it needs an exhibition and a curator
to become visible. The medicine that makes the sick image appear healthy—makes
the image literally appear, and in the best light—is the exhibition. In this respect,
since iconophilia is dependent upon the image appearing healthy and strong, the
curatorial practice is, to a certain degree, the servant of iconophilia.
But at the same time, curatorial practice undermines iconophilia, for its
medical artifice cannot remain entirely concealed from the viewer. In this respect,
curating remains unintentionally iconoclastic even as it is programmatically
iconophilic. Indeed, curating acts as a supplement or a pharmacon (in Derrida's
usage2), in that it cures the image even as it makes it unwell. Curating cannot escape
being simultaneously iconophilic and iconoclastic. Yet this opens the question: Which
is the right kind of curatorial practice? Since curatorial practice can never totally
conceal itself, the main objective of curating must be to visualize itself, by making its
practice explicitly visible. The will for visualization is in fact what constitutes and
drives art. Since it takes place within the context of art, curatorial practice cannot
elude the logic of visibility.
The visualization of curating demands a simultaneous mobilization of its
iconoclastic potential. Of course, contemporary iconoclasm can and should be aimed
primarily not at religious icons but at art itself. By placing an artwork in a controlled
environment; in the context of other carefully chosen objects; and above all in the
framework of a specific story, a narrative, the curator is making an iconoclastic
gesture. If this gesture is made explicit enough, curating returns to its secular begin-
nings, withstanding the transformation of art into art-as-religion, and becomes an
expression of art-atheism. The fetishization of art is taking place outside the museum,
meaning outside the zone in which the curator has traditionally exercised authority.
These days, artworks become iconic not as a result of their display in the museum
but of their circulation in the art market and in mass media. Under these circum-
stances, the curating of an artwork signifies its return to history, the transformation
of the autonomous artwork back into an illustration, an illustration whose value is
not contained within itself but is extrinsic, attached to an historical narrative.
Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name is Red features a group of artists searching
for a place for art within an iconoclastic culture, namely that of 16th century Islamic
Turkey. The group is comprised of illustrators commissioned by the powerful to

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Cautionary Tales

ornament their books with exquisite miniatures; subsequently, these books are
placed in governmental or private collections. Not only are these artists increasingly
being persecuted by radical Islamic (iconoclastic) adversaries who want to ban all
images, they are also in competition with the occidental painters of the Renaissance,
primarily Venetians, who openly affirm their own iconophilia. Yet the novel's heroes
can't share this iconophilia, because they don't believe in the autonomy of images.
And so they try to find a way to take a consistently honest iconoclastic stance without
abandoning the terrain of art. A Turkish sultan, whose theory of art would actually
serve as good advice for contemporary curatorial practice, shows them the way.
The sultan says the following: “An illustration that does not complement a
story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in the
absent story, we will naturally begin believing in the picture itself. This would be no
different than the worship of the idols in the Kaaba that went on before Our Prophet,
peace and blessings be upon him, had destroyed them.... If I believed, heaven forbid,
the way these infidels do, that the Prophet Jesus was also the Lord God himself ...
only then might I accept the depiction of mankind in full detail and exhibit such
images. You do understand that, eventually, we would then unthinkingly begin
worshipping any picture that is hung on the wall, don't you?”3
Strong iconoclastic tendencies and currents were naturally to be found in
the Christian Occident as well—in 20th century modern art in particular; indeed,
most modern art was created through iconoclasm. As a matter of fact, the avant-
garde staged a martyrdom of the image, which replaced the Christian image of
martyrdom. It put traditional painting through all sorts of tortures, which recall first
and foremost the tortures to which the saints were subjected as depicted in paintings
from the Middle Ages. Thus the image is—symbolically and literally—sawed, cut,
fragmented, drilled, pierced, dragged through the dirt, and left to the mercy of
ridicule. No coincidence, then, that the historical avant-garde consistently employed
the language of iconoclasm: avant-garde artists speak of demolishing traditions,
breaking with conventions, destroying their artistic heritage, and annihilating old
values. But this is definitely not a matter of sadistic lust for the abuse of innocent
images, nor is there any guarantee that new images or new values will emerge as a
consequence of all this demolition and annihilation. Quite the contrary: images of
demolition of old icons become new icons for the new values. The iconoclastic
gesture is instituted here as an artistic method, less for the annihilation of old icons
than for the production of new images—or, if you want, new icons and new idols.

50
 Boris Groys

Actually, the iconoclastic gesture, if understood as the act of destruction of

old idols, was never a manifestation of an atheist or skeptical position. The destruction
of old idols only takes place in the name of other, newer gods. Specifically, icono-
clasm wants to prove that the old gods have become powerless and can no longer
protect their earthly temples and images. Thus the iconoclast takes religion's claim to
power seriously, in that his destructive actions disprove the power of the old gods in
order to affirm the power of his own. Traditional iconoclasm functions as a mechanism
for the reevaluation of values, destroying old values and idols in order to institute
new ones. Christianity appropriated and neutralized this traditional iconoclastic
gesture, because in the Christian tradition the image of destruction and destitution—
Christ on the cross—is transformed quasi-automatically into an image of the triumph
of that which has been destroyed. Our iconographic imagination, which has long
been honed by the Christian tradition, does not hesitate to recognize victory in the
image of defeat. In fact, here the defeat is a victory from the start. Modern art has
benefited significantly from the adoption of iconoclasm as a mode of production.
Indeed, throughout the era of Modernism, every time an iconoclastic image
has been produced, hung on the wall, or presented in an exhibition space, it has
become an idol. The reason is clear: modern art has struggled particularly hard
against the image's illustrative use and its narrative function. The result of this struggle
illustrates the sultan's premonition. Modern art wanted to purify the image of every-
thing exterior to it, to render the image autonomous and self-sufficient, but in so
doing it only affirmed the dominant iconophilia. Iconoclasm has become subordinate
to iconophilia: the image's symbolic martyrdom only strengthens belief in it.
The subtler iconoclastic strategy proposed by the sultan—turning the
image back into an illustration—is in fact much more effective. We have known at
least since Magritte that when we look at an image of a pipe, we are not regarding
a real pipe but one that has been painted. The pipe as such isn't there, isn't present;
instead, it is being depicted as absent. In spite of this knowledge, we are still
inclined to believe that when we look at an artwork, we directly and instantaneous-
ly confront “art.” We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction
between art and non-art is generally understood as a distinction between objects
inhabited and animated by art, and those from which art is absent. This is how
works of art become art's idols—that is, analogous to religious images, which are
also believed to be inhabited or animated by gods.

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Cautionary Tales

On the other hand, to practice art-atheism would mean understanding

artworks not as incarnations, but as mere documents, illustrations, or signifiers of art.
While they may refer to art, these are nevertheless not the genuine article. To a
greater or lesser extent, this strategy has been pursued by many artists since the
1960s. Artistic projects, performances, and actions have regularly been documented,
and by means of this documentation represented in exhibition spaces and museums.
However, such documentation simply refers to art without itself being art. This type
of documentation is often presented in the framework of an art installation for the
purpose of narrating a certain project or action. Traditionally executed paintings, art
objects, photographs, and videos can also be utilized in the framework of such instal-
lations. In this case, admittedly, artworks lose their usual status as art. Instead they
become documents, illustrations of the story told by the installation. One could say
that today's art audience increasingly encounters art documentation, which provides
information about the artwork itself, be it art project or art action, but in doing so
confirms the absence of the artwork.
But even if “illustrativity” and “narrativity” have managed to find their way
into the halls of art, by no means does this entry signify the automatic triumph of art-
atheism. Even if the artist becomes faithless, he or she doesn't lose the magical
ability to transform the simplest thing into art, just as a Catholic priest's loss of faith
doesn't render the rituals he performs ineffective. Meanwhile, the installation itself
has been blessed with art status: it has become accepted as an art form and increas-
ingly assumes a leading role in contemporary art. Though the individual images and
objects lose their autonomous status, the entire installation gains it back. When
Marcel Broodthaers presented his Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles at
the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf in 1973, he placed the label “This is not a work of art”
next to each of the presented objects in the installation. The installation as a whole,
though, is legitimately considered to be an artwork.
Here the figure of the independent curator, increasingly central to contem-
porary art, comes into play. When it comes down to it, the independent curator is
doing everything the contemporary artist does. The independent curator travels the
world and organizes exhibitions that are comparable to artistic installations, because
they are the results of individual curatorial projects, decisions, and actions. Artworks
presented in these exhibitions/installations take on the role of documentation of a
curatorial project. Yet such curatorial projects are in no way iconophilic; they don't
aim to glorify art's autonomous value.

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 Boris Groys

Utopia Station is a good example. Curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich

Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, this exhibition was presented at the 50th Venice
Biennale in 2003. Critical and public discussion of it focused on whether the concept
of utopia is still relevant in this day and age, whether what was being put forward as
a utopian vision by the curators could really be regarded as such, and so on. Yet the
fact that a curatorial project that was clearly iconoclastic could be presented at one
of the oldest international art exhibitions seems to me far more important than the
above considerations. Utopia Station was iconoclastic because it employed artworks
as illustrations, as documents of the search for a social utopia, without emphasizing
their autonomous value. It subscribed to the radical, iconoclastic approach of the
Russian avant-garde, which considered art to be documentation of the search for the
“new man” and a “new life.” Most important, though, Utopia Station was a
curatorial and not an artistic project (even if one the curators, Tiravanija, is an artist).
This meant that the iconoclastic gesture could not be accompanied—and thus inval-
idated—by the attribution of artistic value. Nevertheless, it can still be assumed that
even in this case the concept of utopia was abused, because it was aestheticized and
situated in an elitist art context. And it can be equally said that art was abused as
well: it served as an illustration for the curator's vision of utopia. In both cases, the
spectator has to confront an abuse, be it through art or by art. Here, though, abuse
is just another word for iconoclasm.
The independent curator is a radically secularized artist. He is an artist
because he does everything artists do. But the independent curator is an artist who
has lost the artist's aura, one who no longer has magical powers at his disposal, who
cannot endow objects with art's status. He doesn't use objects—art objects included—
for art's sake, but rather abuses them, makes them profane. Yet it is precisely this
practice that makes the figure of the independent curator so attractive and so
essential to the art of today. The contemporary curator is heir apparent to the modern
artist, although he doesn't suffer under his predecessor's magical abnormalities. He
is an artist, but also atheistic and “normal” through and through. The curator is an
agent of art's profanation, its secularization, its profane abuse. It can of course be
stated that the independent curator, like the museum curator before him, cannot but
depend on the art market—even do the groundwork for it. An artwork's value
increases when it is presented in a museum or through its frequent appearance in
the diverse temporary exhibitions organized by independent curators, and so, as
before, the dominant iconophilia prevails. This can be held to be self-evident—or not.

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Cautionary Tales

The market value of an artwork doesn't correspond exactly to its narrative

or its historical value. The traditional “museum value” of an artwork is never the
same as its value on the art market. A work of art can please, impress, excite the
desire to possess it—all this while not having a specific historical relevance, and
therefore remaining irrelevant to the museum's narrative. And, turning this around,
many artworks that may seem incomprehensible, boring, and depressing to the
general public find their place in the museum, because they are “historically new” or
at the very least “relevant” to a particular period, and therefore can be put to the
task of illustrating a certain kind of art history. The widespread opinion that an
artwork in a museum is “dead” can be understood as meaning that it loses its status
as an idol there; pagan idols were venerated for being “alive.” The museum's
iconoclastic gesture consists precisely of the transformation of “living” idols into
“dead” illustrations for art history. It can therefore be said that the traditional museum
curator has always subjected images to the same double abuse as the independent
curator has. On one hand, images in the museum are aestheticized and transformed
into art; on the other, they are downgraded to illustrations of art history and thereby
dispossessed of their art status.
This double abuse of images, this doubled iconoclastic gesture, is only
recently being made explicit, because instead of narrating the canon of art history,
independent curators are beginning to tell each other their own contradictory stories.
In addition, these stories are being told by means of temporary exhibitions (which
carry their own time limitations) and recorded by incomplete and frequently even
incomprehensible documentation. The exhibition catalog for a curatorial project that
already presents a double abuse can only produce a further abuse. But nevertheless,
artworks become visible only as a result of this multiple abuse. Images don't emerge
into the clearing of Being on their own accord, in order for their original visibility to
be muddied by the “art business,” as Heidegger describes it in The Origin of the
Work of Art. It is far more that this very abuse is what makes them visible.

1. Giorgio Agamben, Propfanierungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), p. 53.

2. Jacques Derrida, La dissemination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 108f.
3. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001), pp. 109-110.

Translated by Elena Sorokina.

54
 Boris Groys

Boris Groys, Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and
Global Professor at New York University, is one of the greatest experts and theoretical scholars in the reflec-
tion of modern art. Member of the Association International des Critiques d'Art (AICA) since 1991. He has
written and edited numerous books, including Dnevnik filosofa (russ.) [Diary of a Philosopher] (Paris, 1989);
Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (Munich, 1988); Die Kunst der Installation [with Ilya Kabakov] (Munich, 1996); and
Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Munich, 2000). Groys organized The Art Judgment Show,
a televised talk show on the state of art, in 2001.

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Cautionary Tales

Geeta Kapur

Curating: In the Public Sphere

In the Wake of the 1960s: Curators and Avant-garde Practice

A curated show may render an individual artwork less “itself,” less than it is in the
studio or within the more dedicated aesthetic framework of a monographic show or
in the discreet display of an art-historical museum. More controversially, the curator
may deliberately render the artwork incomplete and construct (deconstruct) meanings
with reference to a conceptual paradigm, or, on the other hand, a spectatorial
schema in which it is seen as only an instance. In this case, the curator can be said to
be acting against the interest of the artist in order to act in favor of some new
relational premise between works and with the beholders. I favor looking at an
exhibition as an itinerary, and an argument, where the curatorially determined
itinerary and the expositional argument are intertwined and unfold in time to a
walking rhythm, and where the installed exhibition, a synchronous structure supported
by a mise-en-scène, is staged by the curator.
The role of the curator as the creative director of an exhibition emerged in
the late 60s.1 It developed rapidly by incorporating the artistic and intellectual preoc-
cupations of the time. A glance at some examples of the 60s art movements shows
how changed art forms demand a corresponding style of exposition within the
gallery, how curatorial innovations occur with reference to structures, models,
ideologies devised for specific tendencies. Minimalism, for example, suggested that
the spectatorial body has an axial privilege, that it provides a phenomenological
understanding of the artwork. Translated into curatorial practice, it required an
astute positioning of the artwork in the spatial discourse of the exhibition, and it
required that the curator find ways to restrain the exhibition process at the very point
where the controlled theater of the encounter turns into spectacle.
The 60s critique of the consumer society in late capitalism—what Guy
Debord called the “society of the spectacle”—translated into a renewed understanding
of historical materialism and triggered a response in the discourse on art whereby the
growing reification of the art object was put under scrutiny. Arte Povera offered new

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 Geeta Kapur

forms of material investment in objects that were then outside of the exchange nexus
and signaled subversive messages in favor of inversion and redundancy. The Fluxus
movement swooped across standard taxonomies and value hierarchies in art, upturning
exhibition procedures right down to the scale, devices and containers for display. At
the same time, “happenings” (already preceded by the action-oriented art of the
Gutai artists in 50s Japan) erupted in the art scene, privileging improvisation and
transience, followed in the 70s by a more structured performance art led by feminists.
The 60s breakthrough was crucial in reintroducing radical forms of material
and symbolic entropy into art; in consequence, exhibition-making canons were
destabilized, and democratic initiatives put pressure on the very institution of art. The
landmark exhibition of that period, by the “master” curator, Harald Szeemann, took
place in 1969. It was tellingly called Live in Your Head: When Attitude Become Form:
Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information.2 Szeemann favored flux, ferment,
and a process-oriented sociability rather than an object fixation in the making and
showing of artworks, and he emphasized a radical individualism (“inner bearing”)
and a utopian romance by and on behalf of the artist. He set the stage for the curator
as collaborator and co-producer of artworks and exhibitions alike, and he would be
for decades to come an avant-garde figure in his own right.
The following decades saw the rise of architectural-scale installations, site-
specific projects, interactive community workshops, and an anarchic spillage into
social spaces by artists and curators working to build an alternative infrastructure to
the gallery system.3 The idea of the art laboratory was afloat, and the ideological
issue of art in the public domain became prominent in the discourse.
The democratic impulse also took another route precisely in the late 60s,4
extending the emerging practice of Conceptualism through a corresponding curatorial
reflexivity. Conceptual art, intent on unmaking the art object, privileged intellectual
economy and an almost unprecedented form of austerity regarding the means and
ends of art. The white cube was emptied out and made neutral, even at times
redundant for and by Conceptual art. This discreet, deliberately anti-experiential
space served two paradoxical ends: to permit access to texts (documentation) in a
commonplace way; and to instill the philosophic indeterminacy of esoteric messages
and everyday conundrums in clinical conditions. This double encounter was designated
as “art” that has finally done away with its aura.
The developments sketched briefly above are condensed in my example of
Catherine David’s DocumentaX at Kassel (1997). David created a new discursive

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Cautionary Tales

space for cuaratorship in which the collaborative model was reshaped by a form of
curatorial command—for example, in the way she laid out what she called the parcours,
the itinerary, and through it an argument for the exposition, using the city as the
mise-en-scène. A selection of key avant-garde moves from the 60s to the present
was restaged to testify for what she saw as critical art practice with a corresponding
poetics and a related, politically inspired discourse.5 David’s range of choices first
defined her position within the contemporary; then, deploying the privilege of
curatorial detachment, she “exceeded” the artists’ intent. Arching over the actual
artworks on display was something like a problematic, a metadiscourse on what
critical contemporaneity in art might mean today. This made the exhibition a philo-
sophic case in point, an exegesis as much as a phenomenological experience—and
the “Hundred Days Hundred Guests” program of lectures, which drew in multidisci-
plinary and worldwide extrapolation on contemporary forms of criticality, was part of
that exegesis.

The 1980s: Curating in a Heterogeneous World

Here, now, I step outside the Euroamerican zone and into the world where curatorial
practices have developed contingent, even indeed exigent, styles, often in contrast to
those sanctioned by (western) art history. The rise of the curator as a key category in
the exposition of art happens, coincidentally, in tandem with the third-world assertions
of alterity, including a revolutionary passage in the 60s and a more conciliatory form of
multiculturalism since. Standard discourse on contemporary art, destabilized by the
onset of post-colonial post-modernism, was relativized for good in the 80s.
Consequently, the curatorial project today entails an almost mandatory inclusiveness
based on difference.
Jean-Hubert Martin’s controversial exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the
Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1989)6 serves as a trigger for this part of the
argument, situating Europe’s perennial interest in the exotic within the new transcul-
turist permissiveness of the postmodern. In Magiciens, Martin gave something like a
ritual status to contemporary avant-garde art of the west, relating this to the allegedly
magic-driven artworks from “other” cultures. Correspondingly, he contemporized
the “sacred” works from the margins in conjunction with the declaredly secular
works from the west. This relativizing exercise, meant to revise the debate about the
“primitive” and the modern, was also intended, presumably, to produce a conviviality
between races and genres.

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Magiciens was based on an (ethnographic) anachronism, a categorization

in which the diachronic tension between primitive and modern, traditional and
avant-garde—an important tension—was fudged by the generous aesthetic and
supposed equation of synchronous viewing, only to resurface as other (objection-
able) criteria. My criticism is that the paradigm for contemporary art was based on
the binary of the indigenous and the avant-garde, on seeing these categories (yet
again) in geographical terms: the avant-garde mapped over the northern zone, the
indigenous across the south, encouraging further demarcations that maintain the
center-periphery model. Weighed as a balance of potentialities, this schema attributes
individual agency to western artists, timeless consanguinity to others. Predictably,
therefore, examples of transformative art practices in non-western societies—metro-
politan art practices of long standing—were barely included. Few protagonists were
located within the highly differentiated societies outside the west and shown to have
agency that is properly historical: where a self-conscious breakthrough in language
and politics takes place, and where that is seen to make a conceptual contribution to
the western claim on the avant-garde.
And yet, I would say, Magiciens was a provocation worth its while.
Certainly, a part of the credit for the way these ideas have been thrashed out and
tested in discourse and in regional exhibitions ever since must go to its bold topog-
raphy across continents. The important thing is that this argument has been taken to
the sites in question—in terms of history and geography—where the semiotic grid of
signs and meanings can be shown to be embedded in the material conditions of their
production. And the politics of the artistic moves that result from this plotting have
to be read by the curator diachronically, given that the societies in question recognize
their own historicity.
In 1996, the Asia Society in New York mounted an important exhibition
titled Contemporary Art of Asia: Tradition/Tensions,7 with a range of artworks promi-
nent among which were installations with an explicit materiality, site-specific and
performative interventions and documentary inputs with political annotations. It
presented artists with a rich understanding of a situational phenomenology that
locates their work and demands a spectatorial comprehension at the cutting edge
between ritual protocol and political transgression. The curator, Apinan
Poshyananda, presented the exhibition as both contrastive and complementary to
western “models.” Without being ideologized as such, it had a built-in pedagogy
with regard to other types of viewing protocol. For example, it proposed that the

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Cautionary Tales

sacred, even when placed in parenthesis, sets up a customary etiquette whereby the
phenomenology of the exhibition is restructured. Notions of invocation/circumambu-
lation, of intimacy/distance, replace the “detached” encounter of western aesthetics.
This culturally replete aesthetic, this experiential rendering of the esoteric
and the political privileged by the first phase of Asian art exhibitions, was upturned
in Cities on the Move (1997-99), a way-out and widely toured exhibition curated by
Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist.8 The curators took as a starting point the capitalist
globalization that is furiously under way in Asian countries and produced an intelligent
parody of tradition as well as its conversion into commodity. The exhibition was
conceived as a configuration of volatile signs that put entire cultures on offer for
display and consumption, much as the accelerated market economies of East and
South-East Asia promise to sustain their populaces through unruly globalization.
The two bracketing exhibitions in the foregoing discussion, Magiciens de la
Terre and Cities on the Move, are examples of how curators can devise means whereby
we are asked to imbibe the art experience as a swirling sea of free-floating signifiers,
of how extrapolated signs are orchestrated into spectatorial affect to make up an
extravagant, somewhat delirious exhibition. Such an approach can be said to have
the backing of new art history (shading into cultural studies), in which the semiotic
component is brought to the fore and the method of aesthetic deconstruction takes
its cue (not on the basis of high art but) from the survival tactics of popular art—a
tactic involving continual hybridization. This cultural and therefore aesthetic hybridity
has come to stay as one of the favored curatorial approaches to exhibition-making.
I have argued that since the 80s key drives for curatorial initiative have
come from exhibitions in and of the regions constituting the third world. At these
sites, a range of artworks from within a chosen region are brought face-to-face with
each other in order to highlight internal difference and thus to redefine received
categories of ethnography and art history, ritual and theatre, material object, and
concept. With overtly national-regional frames, these events have had a responsibility
to fulfill and this, I believe, helps (rather than negates) a reckoning of the aesthetic
presumed in western discourse to be autonomous. The foremost example is, of
course, post-Mao Chinese avant-garde art: its multiple presentations in China and
abroad have made it necessary to read the avant-garde intent extrapolated in
alternative artistic domains in terms of the ruptures they create on the ground, the
political implication of which are available in context.

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 Geeta Kapur

Southern Biennales: 1990s Countup

Extending the discussion on new forums for exhibition outside the western academy
and the museum of modern art, I now refer to the exponential growth of the biennials
located in the south-south circuit, since these offer quite heterodox curatorial ideas.
Following the achievement of grand status by the São Paulo Biennale
(begun in the 1950s), the wager for an alternative site was placed in 1986 by La
Bienal de Habana (the Havana Biennale). Dedicated to third-world art (primarily from
South and Central America, Africa, and Asia), the Havana Biennale projected the
promise of a radical, political art into the present. No longer secure in terms of its
revolutionary optimism, systematically impoverished by U.S. sanctions, outside the
citadels of academic art history, beyond the hub of the Euroamerican art market, and
forced to work with the most meager resources, Havana took on a vanguard role on
behalf of contemporary third-world art. All the southern biennials, though each has
a different agenda, owe a debt to Havana for demonstrating the potential of a
decentralized art world, with alternative avant-gardes that do not need to affix a
“neo.” The ideological import of such an avant-garde, placed in any case off-center
in respect to western canons, is noticeably tendentious.
Curatorially, the configuration of artworks in the Havana Biennale (I refer to
its second edition, in 1989) tended to be theatrical, given that these works often
came from cultures with a magic- and ritual-dominated aesthetic. But the material
reality of the works’ production was annotated by the simultaneous inclusion of
works addressing actual politics, at least in the complex terrain of South American
societies—works pointedly referring to national dictatorships and radical, subaltern
movements of dissent and insurgency. These annotations were visual and textual,
internal and external to the exhibition; they could also be assumed to radiate from
the acute prism of the Cuban crisis and refract the terms of the global dialogue on
art. Cuba is a country under siege, and its stake in cultural manifestations can be
nothing less than contestatory.
Across the globe to Australia: when the Asia-Pacific Triennial was inaugu-
rated in 1993 by the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, the exhibition followed a
principle already in place with Australian museums and institutional and independent
curators, who consider it mandatory to put a gloss on the objects of a mixed white
and aboriginal society. Consequently, in the intellectual and curatorial exercise of the
Triennial, categories of the secular and the sacred had to be rethought—not with the
André Malraux-Magiciens kind of assumption of aesthetic immanence, but in terms

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of the way the societies in question face these issues within a democratically organized
polity. Indeed, the task was to see the way this secularization of tradition impinges
on the question of citizenship in the politics of a nation. In terms of the exhibition,
the secular hybrid, addressing the particular politics of a named nation, requires
curatorial strategies to enable the general public to read it not only in terms of the
social problematic that underlies it, but also in coeval terms with other, more familiar
international art forms in the contemporary.
The point I make is this: while these multiplying biennials sometimes seem
like reckless initiatives, they should be seriously scrutinized for their ironies, their
follies and their worth.9 Southern biennials meet with a high-handed critique—
institutional fastidiousness, quality control, cultural snobbery, even open mockery—
from western curators who nevertheless conduct curatorial activities at these new
sites, claiming with hegemonic impunity that an international high-profile—read
western—curator is essential to put the city and region in the fray on the international
art map. Such biennials have sometimes been called the poor man’s museum (so is
the Venice Biennale the rich man’s casino?), and there is some truth here. The bien-
nial phenomenon, never beyond serving vested interests (biennials being a mixture of
state spectacle, cultural hegemony, market interests, and tourist commerce), is at the
same time a means of creating, through this recurring form of institutionalization,
professionally charged conduits of communication in the cities and countries where
biennials occur: erecting bridges between the state and private finance, between
public spaces and elite enclaves, between the artists and other practitioners, including
dedicated young cadres in the cultural community. The biennial can be an occasion
to engage in a cognitive mapping of the culture of a region, a country, a city; at the
same time, it can develop a focus on international art on home ground, the pedagogic
effects of which process are enormous. This is of course especially true in countries
that have no museum practice worth the name when it comes to modern and
contemporary art, where the opportunities to engage with international art are
scarce, and where the only “institutions” developing at breakneck pace are the art
market and the auction house.10
The point for the new biennials is to radicalize the discourse on contemporary
art toward a more contestatory position by constantly revising our understanding of the
very “institution of art.” Glossing the more facile skepticism that the new biennials
invoke, I would like to insert the problematic into a larger polemical field, asking that we
examine not just this or that biennial for its immediate certificate of excellence, but the

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entire relay of site, production and discourse in contemporary art from various
vantage points on the globe.

Transnational Public Spheres

The first, second, and third worlds that defined the historical battles of the 20th
century are now condensed on the principle of the new Empire that has been fully
triumphant since 1989. The total interdependency among regions and nations in the
economic and political spheres of global capitalism, and the heterogeneity introduced
by the exchange created from the compulsions of mass migration and the consequent
deterritorialization of peoples and cultures, are contrasted with the collusion of codes
through the ubiquity of electronic-digital communication. A corresponding, transcul-
tural aesthetic is not easily tracked and should be seen to be liminal, perhaps: liminal
in the sense of exile, a condition in which large bodies of world citizens now subsist
within and outside their communities and nations.
How is this liminality positioned in exhibition practices? At the simplest
level, the inclusion of third-world (and now also second/socialist-world) artists in
international exhibitions poses the diasporic in a mediatory role. Appointing translation
as a key term, the transcultural aesthetic is supposed to stand in for the process of
negotiation/confrontation between peoples. Transculturalism is not, however, a matter
of free choice; it is a condition of global exchange: materially and politically coercive,
if also potentially liberatory. The aesthetic that ensues requires us to come to terms
with the ethical issues of violence, power, governance and citizenship implied in the
new situation. It is necessary, therefore, to embed the debate in what political theorists
call transnational public spheres—the product of contrary developments such as the
emergence of post-colonial civil societies on the one hand, and of capitalist global-
ization on the other.
A select number of international critic-curators now write the practice of
curating into discourse on the public sphere. I take one example to make my point:
the 2002 Documenta 11, curated by Okwui Enwezor, demonstrated a new pedagogy
for mapping the post-colonial global.11 He built upon a premise he had already
established in his previous exhibitions, such as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale
(1997), titled Trade Routes: History and Geography; and a widely toured exhibition in
2001-02 titled The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in
Africa, 1945-1994. This premise states that no discussion of critical/radical art can
take place without reference to the political parameters of antagonism and redemption

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Cautionary Tales

that come out of the decolonization process. Thus Enwezor draws on post-colonial
cultural theory (in turn drawing on elements from anthropology, psychoanalysis, and
a transformed Marxism) to set up new paradigms for examining representational
ethics in the sphere of the symbolic—in particular, its documentary component. It
also, at the same time, opens up the imaginary, thus recouping new subjectivities
that claim “sovereignty” from a post-colonial status. It is Enwezor’s project to
determine a vantage point from which to project the subject-position of the formerly
colonized, now the post-colonial citizen empowered through struggle. It is also his
wager that the discourse now exists outside the national—the “original” ground
where the struggle is in actual fact waged. Indeed, his faith in further transformation
rests on the formation of a global citizenry with a voice in the matter of governance
precisely through transnational public spheres that nurture a human and civil-rights
discourse against state power. This, in Enwezor’s belief, forms the utopian potential
that emerges from and confronts the new Empire. Thus, with Documenta 11 he set
up a new curatorial proposition: a worldwide itinerary and a cross-disciplinary
argument through a series of four discursive “platforms” that were translocated to
the fifth platform, the exhibition at Kassel, where widely varying worldviews were
visually sequenced into a narrative that spelled political change.

The National (as Interregnum)

My inclination is to deflect this argument12 back to the region-nation. The site of
production and exhibition is related to the form of address, and while diasporic
dilemmas in the transnational arena widen the political base of the global issues
tackled by art, they create another convergence. These issues are addressed to the
first world—often enough in a confrontational mode—with the region and nation
serving as geopolitical context. My take on these deliberately posed imponderables
of identity and address is that one should move back and forth between a speculative
transculturalism and a declared partisanship that asks how art situates itself in the still
highly differentiated national economies/political societies that bear the name of
countries; and how, from those sites, it reckons with divergent forces at work within
globalization. More pointedly, what are the countercultural tendencies generated in
the contested and contesting sites of the nations where recognizable protagonists,
with well-entrenched political positions, attempt to build democratic structures of
governance, institutions for a functioning civil society, and a public sphere—in oppo-
sition to, say, a neo-liberal (anti-poor) economy and/or a (covertly) authoritarian

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state? How do these societies organize themselves in opposition to the treacherous

rule of capital and its U.S.-driven agenda, executed through monstrous wars and
consumerist dystopias?
Billed under a country banner, the aura of national affiliation still works.13
But my own experience as a critic-curator from India leads me to go beyond the
sentiment, to claim that a selection of artists from a particular country/context,
properly conceptualized under a theme and a problematic, can in the consequent
exposition address “universal” issues of global contemporaneity (which has always
been assumed to have been the case with selections of Euroamerican artists). This
substantial partisanship, which goes beyond a counterbalancing polemic, should add
both to art-historical knowledge and to political agendas within the discursive
extension of international art.14 Thus, for example, I want to be able to work my way
through the historical trajectory and political aspiration reflected in the public sphere
in India; to see how it reflects a vision (flawed, or even failed, as it might be) for a
civil, democratic society, and indeed how it plays a part in determining the way the
larger post-colonial, transnational public spheres are structured.
I do not want to isolate and valorize location within what is an irreversibly
globalized world, but I do suggest that if contemporaneity is continually co-produced
across cultures; if place, region, nation, state, and the politics of all these contextu-
alizing categories of history (proper) are in a condition of flux everywhere in the
world, we can presume past universals—regarding culture, for instance—to have
been superseded, exposing the major, often lethal, tensions between peoples and
regions. It is the task of specific art loci in southern countries to focus on their peculiar
forms of political society that are especially volatile, and that mark a set of cultural
conjunctures conducive to another kind of meaning production—in art and in history,
separately and alike.

In Conclusion
It used to be said that knowledge is produced in the west, and that cultural artifacts
abound in the non-west. I am inclined to invert this with a degree of caprice necessary
for bold prognostications: The site for fresh discourse on the problematic of contem-
poraneity may be elsewhere/now here; excellence in practice is probably still a
prerogative of western artists, in that the resource and knowledge of the modern
tradition is theirs on command. But before this starts to sound like a familiar polemic
of “us and them,” I want to restore the picture of art’s sovereignty within and

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without the institution of art, and thereby also the degree of entropy that makes the
creative process and the sites of its occurrence unpredictable. The question, then, is
how critic-curators can present contemporary art so as to redeem the hidden, the
contextual, and also the reflexively extrapolated meanings on behalf of the artwork
that is always situated, but also always liminal to the established order of things—
both at once—and thus peculiarly placed to question, to be made to question via
specially designed expository practices, the hegemonic tendencies of national and
global, ethnic and imperialist ideologies.
My argument weaves through a series of instances to suggest how the
contemporary curator’s approach varies from being a collaborator, co-producing the
artwork via the medium of the exhibition, to being a cultural critic, contextualizing
the work through textual/visual annotation. I suggest further that these alternatives
can develop more agonistic sets of relationships, where the curator stages the
contradictions of the global contemporary and, acting in the manner of a friendly
“enemy,” makes the symbolic space the artworks inhabit more adversarial.

1. See Teresa Gleadowe, “Artist and Curator: Some Questions About Contemporary Curatorial Practice,”
Visual Arts and Culture, Volume 2, Part 1, 2000.
2. When Attitudes Become Form showed the work of sixty-nine artists belonging to diverse tendencies,
including Conceptualism, Arte Povera, Land Art, Anti-Form, etc.: tendencies that had an avant-garde status
at the time. It opened in the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969 and was later shown at the Institute of Contemporary
Art in London. For Szeemann’s introduction, see exhibition catalog When Attitudes Become Form (London:
ICA, 1969).
3. In 1986, Jan Hoet curated a landmark exhibition (under the auspices of the Ghent Museum van
Hedendaagse) called Chambres d’Amis; it spread across fifty private homes made available by the citizens to
artists and visitors in what becomes a transformative act for both the production and the reception of art.
4. Seth Siegelaub, a New York gallery owner and “exhibition organizer,” took the lead from the mid-1960s
until 1971 with a series of exhibitions, like The January Show (1969). His publications-exhibitions presented
Conceptual art in ways that actively supported the dematerialization of the art object and privileged the free
exchange of information.
5. See Poetics-Politics: documenta X - the book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997) for a multi-author
textual compilation that complements and vastly elaborates on the premise of the curator, Catherine David.
6. The exhibition Magiciens de la Terre was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin for the Centre Georges Pompidou
and the Musee national d’art moderne, Paris, in 1989. See exhibition catalog Magiciens de la Terre (Paris:
Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1989).
7. The exhibition was curated by Apinan Poshyananda for the Asia Society in New York and shown in several
cities. See exhibition catalog Contemporary Art of Asia: Tradition/Tensions (New York: Asia Society Galleries,
1996).
8. The exhibition traveled extensively through the world. See exhibition catalog Cities on the Move
(Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997).
9. To name some more biennials (and triennials) that began in the 1990s in the broad region of the south:
the Johannesburg Biennale (started 1995, discontinued after 1997); the Kwangju Biennale (started 1995);

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Dak’Art Biennial of Contemporary African Art, in Dakar (started 1996); the Shanghai Biennale (started 1996);
the Taipei Biennial (started 1998). And so on. Twenty years down the line we had, in the year 2005, for
instance: the 1st Moscow Biennale; the 1st Luanda Biennale, in Angola; the 2nd Yokohama International
Triennale of Contemporary Art; the 2nd Beijing International Art Biennale; the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art
Triennale; the 7th Sharjah Biennale; the 8th Yogyakarta Biennale; the 9th International Istanbul Biennale; the
10th Cairo International Biennale. Among new initiatives, the Singapore Biennale follows in 2006, and there
are more southern biennials in the making: for example, a group of independent critics, curators, and artists
set up a platform in January 2005 to launch the project for a Delhi Biennale that can supersede the now
moribund Delhi Triennale started in 1968.
10. Charles Merewether, art historian, curator, and artistic director of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney (Zones of
Contact), spoke in January 2005 at a New Delhi conference (titled “The Making of International Exhibitions:
Siting Biennales”) about biennials as sites where experiments with unlikely simultaneities in crosscultural art-
works are presented, and also where an interrogation of contemporaneity, as such, is conducted using a
methodology drawn from advanced cultural theory in tune with the rapidly changing political contexts
around the globe. Museums of modern and contemporary art, on the other hand, are bound by institutional,
still conservative frames of western art history and belong within what Charles Esche, co-curator of the 9th
International Istanbul Biennale (2005), speaking at a conference (titled “Biennalicity”) at the time of the 7th
Sharjah Biennale (2005), designated as the bourgeois public sphere. Quoting Chantal Mouffe (The
Democratic Paradox), Esche spoke about the spirit of agonism—a relation between adversaries, friendly
enemies, who share a common symbolic space and contest different forms of its organization. He suggested
that the emerging series of “planetary” biennials can contribute to a reciprocal critique of the two institu-
tions—the museum framed by the (western) bourgeois public sphere, and the biennial, a spectacular event-
like manifestation within transcultural exchange, or what other curators, like Okwui Enwezor, consider to be
the post-colonial transnational public sphere. (Proceedings of both conferences remain unpublished.)
11. See introduction by Enwezor and texts by the Documenta team and other authors, in Documenta
11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002). Preceding the exhibition,
the Documenta 11 team conducted a set of symposia (Platforms 1-4) in Vienna, New Delhi, St.
Lucia/Carribean, and Lagos, each published as a book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002):
Democracy Unrealized; Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and
Reconciliation; Creolité and Creolization; and Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg,
Kinshasa, and Lagos.
12. See Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi:
Tulika Books, 2000), in which I deal with the uneven/anomalous nature of third-world modernisms, and how
this leads on to differently periodized, differently theorized, variously located avant-garde moments, and
thence to styles and strategies of expository presentation.
13. Incidentally, Szeemann was led to say about national pavilions, in an interview with Jan Winkelmann titled
“Failure as a Poetic Dimension. A Conversation with Harald Szeemann” (published in Metropolis M. Tijdschrift
over hedendaagse kunst, No. 3, June 2001): “And of course you had the eternal discussion again about
whether to abolish the national pavilions or not. I find these national presentations of utmost importance.
The outstanding chance for Biennales like those of Venice and São Paulo is that they have these two foun-
dations, the national and the international. Precisely through this combination you can then build bridges,
and that’s where the challenge of the Biennale model lies.” As it happens, the national sections have been
abolished in the São Paulo Biennale of 2006.
14. I was asked by the Tate Modern in London to conceptualize and curate an exposition referring to the
visual culture of an Indian city for what was to become its inaugural, multipart exhibition, Century City: Art
and Culture in Modern Metropolis (2001). The dynamic of art and visual culture at specific points in the 20th
century was sought to be brought into focus by nine city-sections—Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro,
Lagos, Tokyo, New York, Bombay and London. This involved not simply a choice of a decade or of a political
moment, but of a historical conjuncture in the 20th century. Working with the film theorist Ashish
Rajadhyaksha as co-curator, I selected Bombay in the 1990s as a signature 20th century metropolis. (See
Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Bombay/Mumbai: 1992-2001,” Century City: Art and Culture in the
Modern Metropolis, exhibition catalog, edited by Iwona Blazwick (London: Tate Publishing, 2001)). We
focused on its peculiar dynamic, pitching it not simply as a local cultural variation on the theme of the mod-
ern, but a demonstration of the co-production of modernities at different sites, national and metropolitan.
We looked for the consequences of these processes as they force their way into contemporary history: from
policy-driven economic choices to forms (and distortions) in the democratic functioning of urban space, to
the peculiar characteristics of its citizenry and the public sphere it supports. Indeed, far from being merely a
case study of difference, historicization of this kind constitutes the very definition of the 20th century from

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which neither the cultural nor the political imaginary of the white-western, first-world citizen can escape.
While some of the work was specially produced for the exhibition, the contextualizing gained by working at
the exhibition’s spatial design and, more important, the discursive extrapolation on the peculiar form of the
Indian metropolis, guided the curatorial approach.

Geeta Kapur is an independent art critic and curator living in Delhi. Her writings on art and cultural theory
are widely anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (New Delhi, 1978) and When was
Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi, 2000). Her more recent curatorial
work includes a co-curated show, Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001, in the multi-part exhibition, Century City: Art
and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (Tate Modern, London, 2001); and subTerrain (House of World
Cultures, Berlin, 2003). She served on the International Jury of the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. One of the
founder-editors of Journal of Arts & Ideas, she is advisory editor to Third Text and Marg. She has lectured
world-wide and held Fellowships at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Clare Hall, University of
Cambridge; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; the University of Delhi, and the Jawaharlal Nehru
University, Delhi.

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András Szántó

Editing as Metaphor

On November 9, 1895, the British humor magazine Punch published a cartoon by

George du Maurier of a curate breakfasting in the company of his bishop. In the
Anglican Church, a “curate” was a holder of a junior ecclesiastical rank, such as an
assistant to a rector or a vicar. In the cartoon, the bishop declares, “I’m afraid you’ve
got a bad egg, Mr. Jones.” The curate’s exquisitely hedged answer: “Oh, no, my
Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent.”
The cartoon was popular among readers, and the phrase “parts of it are
excellent” caught on. It gave rise to a new expression in the English language of a
“curate’s egg,” which was taken to mean something that is partly good and partly
bad, and therefore not altogether satisfactory. “This book is a bit of a curate’s egg”
is a kind of line you might hear on Masterpiece Theatre. Today, in the art world, the
task of choosing between the parts that are bad and the parts that are excellent falls
to a profession whose members are distantly related to the equivocating cleric in the
cartoon. This profession has sometimes been likened to priesthood. And it, too, has
a complicated relationship with authority.
The word “curator” has been around for more than 600 years. At first, it
referred to an “overseer” or a “guardian,” notably of minors and lunatics. Its root
stems from the Latin “curare,” which means to take care of something. Dictionaries
since the mid-17th century have defined “curator” as an “officer in charge of a
museum, library, etc.” Most of the etymological connotations of the word apply to
curators working today. To curate, above all, is to be curious (“curiositas” is “inquis-
itiveness”). To curate is to nurture and to protect (“curatorio” means “attention”
and “healing”). And to curate is to be well organized (“curo” means “to manage,
administer”). These qualities have enabled curators of private and, later, public
collections to preserve the beautiful and “curious” objects in their keep and arrange
them into configurations that achieve a desired visual or educational effect.
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Today, it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re living in a golden age of the
curator. Never have curators been so profuse in number or so necessary to bringing
order into the affairs of art. When it comes to contemporary art, this job of sense-
making belongs more and more to the so-called “independent curator,” a recent
arrival on the art-world stage whose duties and qualifications are still being clarified.
For independent curators especially, thorny questions follow from the definitions
above: Overseer or guardian of what? Curious in which direction? Protector in whose
name? Organizer in keeping with what sorts of principles? As the art world grows,
and curators accumulate power and visibility, the answers turn fuzzier.

In fact, the term “curator” lumps together various activities and priorities that
can seem quite incompatible. It is probably no less misleading to call anyone who
organizes exhibitions a curator than to call anyone who sells art a dealer. The museum
curator works on the staff of a single institution and is charged with studying, building,
displaying, and caring for its collection. The just mentioned independent curator
organizes temporary exhibitions in museums, galleries, and other venues on a free-
lance basis. A third type is a dealer, who puts together shows with the ultimate
purpose of selling works and realizing a profit. A fourth is a critic, who broadens the
purview of art writing through conceptualizing and facilitating exhibitions. Several of
these roles can blend together in the career path of a single individual. And to them
we may add another figure that has gained notoriety of late: the collector-curator,
who executes a sort of curatorial strategy through his pattern of acquisitions, and
may display his collection in his own exhibition venue. Some might find certain of
these variations on the role of the curator less agreeable than others. But in the vast,
commercialized and professionalized art world of our day, all sorts of explainers and
intermediaries are being inserted between the makers and “consumers” of art.
For anyone hoping to make a life out of organizing exhibitions, it is worth
reflecting on a few dilemmas associated with certain aspects of curating. A persist-
ent challenge for museum curators is maintaining their sense of balance and integri-
ty in the face of organizational and logistical impediments that can derail even the
best-laid plans for building a collection or an exhibition. Museums, like all large insti-
tutions, gravitate toward a state of bureaucratic insularity. Life inside the bubble is
subject to incessant trade-offs and compromises, from the whims of capricious
directors to the poker games being played with collectors to secure loans and bequests.

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Successful curators are virtuosos of the art of institutional politics. The first mistake
an aspiring curator could make, inside or outside a museum, is to expect a life in an
ivory tower, in lofty pursuit of pure aesthetics. Good exhibitions come together
through deft negotiation of artistic priorities and institutional realities.
The connection of dealing and curating raises questions about art and
commerce, words that always imply a tension when placed side by side. Some large
galleries are, for the casual visitor, virtually indistinguishable from museums. They
provide a kind of public service by mounting ambitious, well-documented shows,
sometimes with the help of invited curators. But the blurring of boundaries between
curating and art dealing carries risks. Art dealers are in business to sell art. No
matter how “academic” a gallery’s front room may be, its function is to support
sales—and there is nothing wrong with that. Galleries should be applauded for
funding curatorial projects. The problems happen when the line between the artistic
and the commercial aspects of the enterprise begins to fade. It becomes hard to tell
where the educational effort ends and where the selling begins. Curators who take
on assignments in galleries must be mindful of their autonomy. They need to be
honest with themselves about their role in the art market. The real issue is not
engagement with commerce—all but inevitable in today’s art world—but the market’s
uncanny ability to sway judgment. It’s hard not to be influenced by the market’s
choices about which art is bad and which is excellent. Those rankings, expressed in
the blunt clarity of prices, are most seductive, and usually misleading. Rubber-stamping
the fashionable consensus is a trap curators must assiduously avoid.
It is fair to say, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, that a curator’s work is an
extension of criticism by other means. Some of our most influential curators are also
critics. The question is whether criticism and what is loosely called “theory” can still
provide a sturdy foundation for curatorial practices. Unfortunately, for a number of
reasons, curating has lost some of the energy and inspiration it once received from this
important source. In a perfect world, criticism and curating would function in unison, as
two sides of a coin. But criticism is nowadays hobbled by a lack of intellectual direction,
not to mention a stultifying obscurantism. The waning of the major 20th century philo-
sophical paradigms has left behind a void. No new big and widely assimilated ideas have
emerged to serve as a compass for the art world. The resulting pluralism of today’s art
is undeniably liberating, but also confusing: If anything goes, what should be the role
of the critic or the curator as an arbiter of values? And if there are no widely accepted
benchmarks of merit, how should anyone tell the bad art from the excellent?

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Contemporary art exhibitions all too often manifest this malaise. As I’ll
elaborate later, they are prone to jargon, bloat, and hair-splitting—escape hatches
that help critics avoid normative statements of merit and direction. Today’s “aesthetics
of uncertainty,” to borrow Janet Wolff’s precisely evocative phrase, have introduced
a degree of uncertainty and wishy-washiness into curatorial efforts as well.
What we are beginning to see, in fact, is a 21st century reappraisal of critical
judgment. It’s a shift in attitude that has serious implications for curators. A few years
ago, a group of critics was asked in a survey about which aspects of reviewing they
emphasized in their work. The options included writing well, theorizing, rendering a
personal opinion, contextualizing, and describing the exhibited objects at hand. It
turns out that the dimension of reviewing that critics emphasize the least is “rendering
a personal judgment or opinion.” In other words, the act of judging has become
problematic in a world in which dominant paradigms and more or less universally
held ideas have gone out of fashion. “The days of the chest-thumping oracle critic
are over,” one of the surveyed critics observed.
But if no clear reasons are available to justify distinctions between the bad
art and the excellent, from where should a curator’s choices derive? This is a worrisome
dilemma. One would certainly hope that curatorial discernment rests on sturdier
foundations than fashion, whimsy, personal infatuations, and vendettas, or a vague
sense of what connects to what. Art can come from the gut, but a curator’s work
should begin, at least in part, in the head. It seems to me that along with the pluralism
of today’s art must come a less heavy-handed approach to thinking about art and,
correspondingly, a more nuanced outlook on curating. But this cannot mean that we
abandon the notion that some artworks or artists are better than others. The point
is that curators today have a responsibility to find new, more legitimate ways of
negotiating some kind of consensus about art. It’s okay to say that values are provi-
sional, but you still need a method for figuring out what really matters. Such
agreement ought to be based not on imposed and exclusive ideas about merit, but
on some kind of process that absorbs a wider array of influences and viewpoints.
This is a tall order. On the one hand, you’re supposed to broaden the acceptable
range of perspectives and expressions. On the other hand, you’re supposed to
make justifiable choices. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

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Intelligent curators will always be mindful of the treacherous institutional landscape

in which they work, the awkward and sometimes corrupting tensions between art
and commerce that can undermine their best efforts, and the shifting critical ground
on which their enterprise rests. But the purpose of this essay is to offer practical
advice. Not being a curator, I’ll leave guidance about the technical parts of the job to
others. From here forward, I will focus on the parts of the curator’s enterprise that
bring order and meaning into the affairs of art. I will illustrate the challenges through
a field whose customs I know reasonably well, and whose dilemmas turn out to have
much in common with curating. I’m talking about editors.
The rules of editing are relevant for two reasons. First, because most curators
write—and judging by what they usually write, a refresher about some principles of
editing might be useful. More important, editors are, in a very real sense, curators—
curators of texts and writers—and it stands to reason that insights from one field
would apply in the other. So what can curators learn from editors?
Know a good story: The hallmark of a good editor is the ability to spot a
story. No amount of linguistic virtuosity or editorial zeal can substitute for a plot. Part
of knowing a story is recognizing the form it should take. Some stories want to be
long; others need to stay short. Some demand an air of detachment; others profit
from a personal point of view. There are stories so overloaded with detail that they
risk collapsing under their own weight; these need to be unpacked. Others are so
splintered and granular that it is impossible to see the point; these must be tightened.
It is easy to see how these editorial objectives translate into the design of exhibitions.
We have all visited shows that are too detailed or too short, too opinionated or too
dry. A good curator, like a good editor, knows that such problems are due in part to
how the material is presented to the audience. Storytelling is the shared art of the
curator and the editor. Good storytelling can correct situations when a story has too
many characters or too few. It calls for a sense of rhythm, pacing, and the courage
to send stuff to the cutting-room floor. A good storyteller is, above all, a master of
exposition. She can massage a text until it flows, revealing the plot bit by bit, keeping
the audience hungry, knowing when to add pauses, humor, or surprise, and saving
some of the best for last. Too many exhibitions tell stories that should never be told,
are told too early or too late, or simply are told badly, rambling aimlessly in search of
a plot. My favorite shows are those with a clear narrative structure. Dynamic plotlines
are readily available: documentations of artistic collaboration or competition, narratives
of individual growth or decline, evolutionary chronicles that lead from obscurity to

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cultural triumph, closely observed accounts of the emergence of a particular artistic

group, and so on. If a curator has a grip on the story, the battle is half won.
Aim for concision: “Less is more” is the credo of a good editor. This is rarely
heeded by curators (or writers, for that matter).
Eliminate bloat: As every editor knows, too much text can smother the
message of the author (who is usually his own worst enemy in this respect). Curators
often lavish repetitive or extraneous material on exhibitions. They cram in too much,
I suspect, because they only have one shot at telling the story; opportunities to
assemble a group of artists or a particular group of works don’t come around often.
Some exhibitions, decades in the making, are career-capping feats of research and
organizational virtuosity. It’s understandable when a curator, like a zealous recruit at
a job interview, gets carried away and ends up saying too much. (Think of those
ponderous retrospectives that begin with tentative drawings from the artist’s youth,
linger at length on every stage of his life’s journey, and reverently display unfinished,
sometimes embarrassing pictures from his twilight years.) Bloat can stem from the
well-meaning impulse to be comprehensive, to acknowledge minor players in larger
stories, or to pay respect to diversity. There is always a seemingly valid reason.
Restraint, under these circumstances, is a paramount virtue. Exhibit A, when it comes
to curatorial bloat—and an ironic one, in this age of information overload—is the
mega-blockbuster, with its cinderblock-size catalog. Monuments to megalomania,
these elephantine productions are not so much exhaustive as exhausting. The bottom
line: one lesson editors can teach curators is how to say no.
Avoid hair-splitting: Every writer has come across that most annoying editor:
the kind who asks too many questions, inserts too many commas, queries too many
facts, and frets constantly about “what we’re saying.” The hair-splitter cannot accept
a story simply for what it is. For the hair-splitter, an otherwise fine idea may seem too
general or too narrow, too trendy or not trendy enough, too plainspoken or lacking
a strong voice. Such nitpicking undermines the message without helping the story.
Hair-splitters are obsessed with technique, presentation, and style. Their labors
amount to death by a thousand niggling details. In journalism, their motto is “Why
should the reader care?” Wet blankets in the art world ask, “Is this our kind of
show?” “Does the audience want to see this?” “Why does this belong in a museum?”
“Didn’t another gallery do this five years ago?” Pedantic curators operate more by
fear than instinct. Their caution leads them to conceive exhibitions too rarified to be
of interest to a wide audience. The best editors and curators rise above details and

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make big bets. Hair-splitters freak out when objects deemed unworthy of serious
attention (such as motorcycles) appear in a museum or art gallery. Their aversion to
stretching boundaries can lead to missed opportunities.
Resist forced ideas: There is a rule of thumb in journalism that is encapsu-
lated in the phrase “three makes a trend.” In other words, if a reporter can find three
examples of a phenomenon, it can be written about as a trend. The rule has some
merit. If a writer on deadline can find three examples of anything, there is probably
something going on out there. But sometimes three doesn’t make a trend—not even
close. A good editor has an eye for spotting genuinely relevant developments, and
so it goes for curators. Many alleged art trends are intellectual fabrications foisted
upon art by critics and historians. Others are marketing gimmicks invented by dealers
and collectors (these often come with groovy titles to suggest something even
grander than a trend—a movement). Certain trend-like phenomena, while strictly
speaking real, are too obvious or vacuous to deserve serious consideration. Recent
years, for example, have seen a vogue for large photography, but an exhibition solely
devoted to large photographs would be asinine. Looking back at the 1980s, we see
a graveyard of artistic fads and fashions that came and went in a flash and are hardly
remembered today.
Forced ideas happen in curating when some kind of rationale has to be
invented for putting together a group of artists or objects. The seemingly unavoidable
pressure to dish up extravaganzas devoted to Impressionists has, for example, given
rise to countless museum exhibitions expounding on transparently forced themes.
The thing to remember is that forced ideas, bloat, and the absence of a plot form a
sort of trinity—one compels the other. Curators, much like writers and editors, paper
over the absence of a storyline by heaping more and more stuff into the picture. Bloat
thus aims to obscure the weakness of the trend proposition. How to spot an empty
trend? By an indecipherable title. Provocatively titled group shows tempt you with a
frisson of trend-spotting, but on close inspection, they invariably lack a unifying
theme.
Stamp out jargon: Jargon is like a pox on good writing. It deposits scar
tissue all over the story and leaves permanent damage. It must be eradicated at all
costs. Jargon-besotted writing is indelibly linked to fuzzy curating, and both seem to
resist all attempts to find a cure. The culprits are well known. First came academic
credentializing of writers and artists. Then Modernism imploded, leaving a residue of
uncertainty about art’s purpose and direction. Last but not least, most art writing is

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commissioned directly from writers and rarely put to the test of a popular readership.
Art, to be sure, deserves the support of complex ideas. But the tolerance for gobbledy-
gook in today’s art world is stultifying. Intellectual intimidation has something to do
with it, but this epidemic of incomprehensibility is also linked, oddly enough, to the
commercialization of art. Astronomical prices demand a smokescreen of “theory”
around objects whose monetary value has no material basis in objective reality.
My point is not just that curators should avoid writing or commissioning
bewilderingly complicated texts, but that they need to be careful about putting on
exhibitions that are physical embodiments of abstruse theories. Just sanitizing wall
texts, that most basic form of communication with the audience, would be a major
achievement. Jargon, it is worth noting, is closely related in its pretentiousness and
disorienting effect to colloquialism. (Preoccupation with youth culture is widespread
everywhere in society, and nowhere more so than in contemporary art.) But while
jargon and colloquialism are kissing cousins, they stem from different roots.
Colloquialism is a relatively minor nuisance that feeds on a juvenile urge to be trendy
and cool. Jargon, by contrast, is rooted in fear—the fear of having nothing to say.
Curators have a special responsibility in the struggle against jargon. They are the first
responders. But some are abetting the enemy.

Other insights gleaned from the world of editing, such as “know your grammar” and
“understand that group editing leads to disaster,” have recognizable analogies in a
curator’s life. A basic knowledge of history and the methods of art making is indispen-
sable, and “groupthink”—especially when marketers and fundraisers are involved—is
directly responsible for some of the symptoms of bad curating outlined above.
However, there is an area where the crossover between editing and curating is less
obvious. Editors have clearer principles to fall back on when it comes to maintaining the
integrity of the creative process against institutional and commercial encroachments.
In the American newsroom, this is called the “church and state” problem,
and it is a matter of contention and constant negotiation. And that is a very healthy
thing. Journalism, especially daily journalism, is miles ahead of the art world in main-
taining barriers between the content side and the business side of the enterprise.
Procedures are in place governing everything from accepting gifts to maintaining a fire-
wall between advertisers and writers (some papers have ombudsmen to enforce such
rules). To be sure, the barriers between content and business are tumbling in many

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precincts of journalism, but the basic rules of conduct are much clearer for everyone
involved. Curators and the institutions that employ them still have a lot of fuzzy areas
to sort out in the realm of professional ethics.
The ethical norms governing the art world have, by and large, resisted
codification. They are recognized and imposed mainly through a process of trial and
error. On the whole, curators are left to their own devices when it comes to making
arrangements with donors, collectors, other museums, and commercial entities.
Meltdowns like the “Sensation” controversy at the Brooklyn Museum of Art or the
recent dustup at the Getty Museum are the inevitable result of this lack of clarity.
These crises inflict a great deal of damage, sometimes even paralysis, especially when
pumped up by a scandal-hungry press. And when they do happen, they can no
longer be dealt with quietly, behind the scenes. Transparency is now the rule even
for society’s most sacrosanct institutions. The last piece of advice I would offer, there-
fore, to curators embarking on their careers is to make it their priority to develop
clear and consistent operating guidelines for themselves and their profession. They
will help you when the going gets tough.
It is unlikely that these principles would fit into a slim rulebook, suitable for
carrying around in a purse or vest pocket. As in all matters ethical, much will depend
on a curator’s own judgment and common sense. The essence of professionalism is
a constant negotiation of what is or is not acceptable for a project, an institution, or
an expert field. Gray areas will always remain. It is important to remember that the
art world is not a holy sanctuary that floats above everyday reality, exempt from its
rules; nor is it a corrupt and cynical sham that rewards only those with sharp elbows
and winning looks. In the end, here as elsewhere, those who do well are the ones
who stay honest, do their homework, remember their friends, and keep their feet on
the ground.
So what should young curators expect of their profession? Well, I guess you
could say it is a bit of a curate’s egg. Parts of a curator’s life will always be good, but
it will never be altogether satisfactory. Other jobs reward the same skill and prepara-
tion with more prestige or money. Dealing with artists, collectors, museums, and the
myriad details of mounting exhibitions will lead to headaches. Even so, within the art
world, things are looking up. In a time when artists are producing new work in
unprecedented numbers, launching a myriad museum and gallery shows and a rash
of annuals, biennials, and arts fairs; and when criticism no longer provides a proper
road map for navigating this jungle of amplified activity, curators—especially the

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independent, unaffiliated, globetrotting kind—stand to achieve greater prominence.

We may be at a turning point. The century-long reign of the gallery-critic
system appears to be drawing to a close. The first versions of art history are no longer
being written exclusively through gallery shows and reviews. In the pluralized, glob-
alized, de-centered art world of our moment, the crucial dynamics are being deter-
mined by aggregators—auctions, art fairs, and biennials. The reason is simple: the art
world and art market have become so huge, stretching across so many disciplines,
cities, and continents, that taking it all in morsel by morsel, gallery show by gallery
show, critical review by critical review, no longer makes sense. Wider and deeper
webs of connections have to be proposed for this vastness to cohere into a manage-
able, fathomable whole. Money, the universal equalizer, will continue to claim the
spotlight. But when it comes to substance—to helping us comprehend it all—curators
will discover a new mandate to shape the story of art.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the American Academy in Rome, where sections of this essay
were written.

András Szántó writes frequently on the worlds of art, media, and cultural affairs. He is a member of the
senior faculty of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. He is a Senior Advisor to the Wealth & Giving
Forum, Director of the NEA Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University, and a Visiting Scholar at New
York University. Among his previous appointments, he was a Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting Critic at
the American Academy in Rome and Director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia, where
he oversaw numerous studies on arts and media, including The Visual Art Critic: A Survey of Art Critics at
General-Interest News Publications in America. His reporting and commentary have appeared in The New
York Times, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Newsday, Interiors, Architecture,
Print, I.D., The Art Newspaper, International Herald Tribune, Variety, and other newspapers and periodicals.

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Why Curators Matter

Perspectivism does not result in the relativism that holds that any view is as good as
any other; it…generates the expectation that new views and values are bound to
become necessary as it produces the willingness to develop and to accept such new
schemes…
Alexander Nehamas1

In Giorgio Vasari’s Florence, Nicolas Poussin’s Rome, and Denis Diderot’s and Charles
Baudelaire’s Paris, there were no curators. Nor were curators found in the sophisti-
cated traditional visual cultures of China, India, or the Islamic world. But Roger Fry
was a curator. He organized in London a pioneering exhibition of French Post-
Impressionism. The anarchist art writer Félix Fénénon played an important role in
Henri Matisse’s career. Clement Greenberg worked as a curator from December 1958
until February 1960, advising French and Company about what contemporary artists
to exhibit.2 And Arthur Danto has curated several exhibitions, including a recent
show responding to 9/11 at apexart. Curators are creations of, and very distinctive
products of, the modern bourgeois market in art.
Once there are many exciting living artists, gifted curators are needed to
locate and present them persuasively to the public. And sometimes curators support
scholarship by staging exhibitions, which test important theories of contemporary
art. Robert Rauschenberg’s early silkscreen paintings were used by Douglas Crimp to
stage an influential theory of post-Modernism. And so the 1991 exhibition at the
Whitney, which demonstrated the obvious implausibility of Crimp’s claims, was
revelatory.3 Curators also play an important role in defining and revising taste in older
art. Thanks in part to intelligent championship by Alfred Barr and John Elderfield,
Henri Matisse has a deservedly exalted position in the American art world. Roberto
Longhi’s famously influential exhibition in Milan, in 1951, was vital to the revival
of Caravaggio’s reputation. Recent feminist scholars have devoted a great deal of
attention to Artemisia Gentileschi, and so the large survey at the Metropolitan in

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2002, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque
Italy, played an important role in introducing these scholarly concerns to the public.
In one significant way, curators can potentially have more influence than art
historians. Only a minority of Americans study art history, and only a relatively small
percentage of college students go beyond the introductory survey courses. But every-
one who visits museums sees the curators’ interpretations. And so, because art
museums are extremely popular public spaces, strong exhibitions have great educa-
tional potential. Successful curators are mediators, standing between artists and their
public. They have wide art world contacts, a point of view, and the skill needed to
present their visual analysis in effective, crowd-pleasing exhibitions.
In citing my own reviews as evidence in this essay, I merely offer one critic's
perspective. As my epigraph from Alexander Nehamas suggests, other perspectives
are available. Many of my claims are highly controversial. And like every critic, I can
be highly subjective. Now and then I support friends whose art is not taken seriously
by the mainstream media or criticize artists almost everyone else admires. Such
personal judgments can readily inspire controversy, which is, I think, a good thing. If
curators do not express strong opinions, they merely tell us what we already know.
Salander O’Reilly Gallery in New York City consistently presents exhibitions of
modernist and contemporary art that challenge received ideas about taste. Seeing its
recent displays of Graham Nickson, Paul Resika, and Stone Roberts, to mention just
three of its artists who interest me, should inspire serious reflection about the usual
academic narratives of modernism.4
When you are a young curator dealing with contemporary art, then you need
to find some artist or group of artists that you care about and present them. And you
should discover a style of visual thinking that you believe deserves attention. There is no
need to worry about being objective, for there are many opposing critical forces at work
within our Darwinian art world. If your artists are bores and your ways of thinking dull,
then soon enough they will be discarded. Most often, critics and curators respond most
easily to art made by near contemporaries. And so as you become middle-aged, it is
important to look at younger artists, for otherwise you will never broaden your early
tastes. There is something pathetic about aging commentators who fail to do that, as
in the case of Harold Rosenberg, who endlessly praised Willem de Kooning—and told
us that since the golden age of his youth, the art world had gone to hell. The American
art world depends upon the generally shared belief that very exciting new artists will
continue to emerge. Young curators need, then, to be of their time.

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In our art world, where museums need large audiences to pay their bills,
there is an obvious tension between satisfying the larger public and pleasing critical
reviewers. The blockbuster show Russia! (fall 2005 at the Guggenheim in New York)
attracted enormous crowds with a very problematic selection of pictures.5 Along
with some fascinating icons and a number of important Constructivist paintings, the
display included a great deal of socialist-realism kitsch. To see the important paint-
ings, you needed to walk past a great deal of dull art. Better, I think, for a curator to
be admired by his or her peers than to achieve this kind of inherently problematic
public success. Just as historians tend to focus attention on the most famous artists,
and not their forgotten rivals, so with curators’ shows one most remembers the success
stories, not the failures. The very effective presentation of Robert Ryman by Robert
Storr at the Museum of Modern Art in 1993 effectively consolidated Ryman’s repu-
tation.6 A large Kunsthalle exhibit of Alex Katz in 1998 played a similar role.7 And a
show at the Metropolitan the same year devoted to Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, who until
then was too little known in America, was a revelation.8
But many ambitious exhibitions fail, and the study of them can be extremely
instructive. The large claims made for R. B. Kitaj did not survive his large museum
exhibition at the Hirshhorn in 1982.9 And a very large show of Ellsworth Kelly’s paint-
ings at the Guggenheim in 1996 demonstrated that he is a gifted but limited artist.10
When serious claims are made for mid-career artists, museum exhibitions permit
reality-testing. Cai Gou-Qiang is much admired, but his show at Mass MoCa in the
fall of 2004 was a noisy disaster.11 Jim Hodges, by contrast, was an artist whose
Cleveland exhibition in 2005 revealed real strengths.12 His art, one learned, was subtle
and varied. Until you see a body of an artist’s works, you cannot predict whether a
large exhibition will be a success.
Survey shows linking together artists in novel ways may be suggestive, but
are often problematic.13 When, in 1981 at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary
Art, a Los Angeles curator linked Andy Warhol with Leroy Neiman, the famous illus-
trator who is not taken seriously in the art world, that show did not elevate
Neiman.14 By contrast, an exhibit in 1999 at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth,
Texas, that pitted Matisse against Picasso effectively demonstrated how the rivalry of
these artists fueled their careers.15 In the late 1980s and early 1990s many group
shows were devoted to abstract painting. In 1991, for example, John Good Gallery
in New York presented Demetrio Paparoni’s La metafisica della luce and Sidney Janis
Gallery, also in New York, hosted Conceptual Abstraction, curated by Carroll Janis.

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Some of the artists in these shows went on to have important careers, but on the
whole these attempts to demonstrate that contemporary abstraction was a significant
movement failed completely.16 One obvious problem was that no one had an
interesting theory of this painting. Another difficulty was that such exhibitions
seemed to extend Greenberg’s basic way of thinking at a time when most critics felt
very strongly that formalism had finally been exhausted.
Curating is an exercise in visual rhetoric. What the art writer does in texts,
projecting an interpretation and so getting us to see in a new way, the curator does
with the works of art themselves.17 Just as a writer assembles a group of illustrations
to display the development of art, or indicate visual affinities, a curator achieves the
same effect by putting together an exhibition. And so, to pursue this parallel, just as
such a writer’s arguments can fail to match your visual experience, so the same may
happen when a curator’s claims do not inspire conviction. An enormous exhibit in
2000 at the Los Angeles Museum of Art tried, and failed, to identify an interesting
shared sensibility of California artists.18 When curators make large claims for marginal
artists, critics need to be wary. Patti Smith is a wonderful rock performer but not, as
her show at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 demonstrated, a convincing
visual artist.19 Similarly, Jean Cocteau—whose show also was at the Warhol, in
2001—was a fascinating writer and personality, but not an artist whose drawings
deserve a museum retrospective.20
Often there is a concern about curators’ conflicts of interest. When a critic
champions an artist or a group of artists, inevitably he or she promotes these figures.
A show in a small gallery can help initiate an artist’s career, and a large museum retro-
spective will surely promote sales. And so artists, who are grateful for attention, often
give art to their supporters. If you are a young critic or curator, then it is natural to
accept gifts or to purchase at low prices works of art you admire. Serious gifts from
more senior artists are another matter. Once art has exchange value, then giving it to
a curator is like handing over cash. I once watched a curator accept a painting from an
artist whose show he had just presented at a great New York museum. That, I think, is
bribery. Some collectors seek advice from curators in shameless ways. Because
American museums depend so heavily upon private funding, there is real pressure upon
curators to do favors for super-rich collectors. My hunch is that this is an especial
problem in provincial cities, where a few personalities can dominate the scene.
Traditionally, some very rich people have supported the arts generously. One hopes that
a collector who is grateful for good advice will support the curator’s museum, but that

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may not happen. Curators should be aware that nowadays very many collectors treat
art as a form of speculative investment, and will quickly sell to make a profit.21
These qualifications aside, moralizing about the art world usually seems to
me misplaced. Art world politics is not the same thing as real world politics, where
moralizing is entirely appropriate. Like everyone except those happy few who are
lucky enough to have trust funds, curators need to make a living. And in the art-world
system of exchange, in which we all take up roles, curators, like critics, dealers and
artists, need to support themselves.22 You cannot really be entirely objective in this
situation, for the price of admission to the community is the desire to influence
commentary. And so there is no reason not to act on your taste, however subjective
it may seem. After all, when you are dead, posterity will judge your claims. If you
produce great shows, no one will worry about how they were financed. But if your
exhibitions are forgotten, then no one will care.
If you become a curator, especially a high-profile curator, it is best that
you have a thick skin. When the Carnegie Internationals or the Whitney Biennials
present just fifty or eighty artists, arguing that these are the most challenging living
figures, inevitably such choices provoke envy. Many tens of thousands of artists
have been left out, and, naturally, they will be resentful. My experience is that
these shows are very hard to review for just this reason. One is readily aware that
the announced theme does not adequately describe the art on display.23 What
really is on display is the curator’s taste. And when the Museum of Modern Art puts
on a grand show of one senior artist, inevitably his or her peers ask why they have
not been shown. Shows devoted to masterpieces by Matisse or Picasso are relatively
uncontroversial, but once we get to living artists, large exhibitions inevitably will be
controversial.
I am a great admirer of Sean Scully, whose central goal, extending the
tradition of Abstract Expressionism, is highly controversial.24 I know one curator
who never took Scully seriously until an extremely influential patron gave a major
gift to his museum. This person’s newly proclaimed interest in Scully depressed me.
Better, I believe, to have real opinions than to merely align yourself with what is
going on. Recently Elizabeth Murray and Gerhard Richter have had major retro-
spectives at the Museum of Modern Art. But not everyone thinks that they are
great artists. I find them interesting but not canonical figures. Many other critics
would of course take violent exception to these claims. One important function of
large museum exhibits is to allow us to judge for ourselves.

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The critic I feel closest to is Arthur Danto. We admire some of the same
artists, but also often have real disagreements about taste. Danto dislikes Poussin,
whom I have written a book about, and admires passionately some living artists who
bore me.25 I love our disagreements, for how dull art-world life would be if we
always agreed with our friends. One famous New York curator, who regularly
engages in public confrontations with his critics, is unable to admit what ought to be
obvious: that in the contemporary art world there often are serious and entirely legit-
imate debates about taste. Critical judgments tend to be delivered in a dogmatic
way, but when we get to art after Abstract Expressionism, the canon has not been
established. In their recent large survey history, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain
Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, collectively the most influential living American critics, do
not include Chuck Close, Sam Francis or Robert Mangold.26 Their perspective has of
course been immediately challenged.
Having made the best case possible for the artists he admires, the curator
would do best to retire from the scene, knowing that if his claims are challenging,
they will provoke controversy. Much can be learned about the role of curators as
advocates by considering the career of Clement Greenberg. Often one reads complaints
about his power over curators. But unlike political dictators, Greenberg was just a
writer whose opinions curators could take or leave. If you did not believe that Jackson
Pollock was a great artist, or that Jules Olitski was his heir, no harm came to you if
you expressed that dissent. A dictator has real power, but a curator has only the
power given by his or her audience. When William Rubin presented Greenberg’s basic
way of thinking as curator at the Museum of Modern Art, nothing prevented critics
from dissenting. Indeed, that museum now has rejected Rubin’s vision of art history.
A curator can offer a perspective, but only the art-world consensus can
validate any one person’s point of view. In the end, an artist’s reputation depends
upon this consensus, which is to say that no single curator or group of curators
dominate our art world. Frank Stella had many powerful champions, and he himself
published a challenging book defending his view of history.27 But after his second
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, it was clear that he had outstayed his
welcome, an impression reinforced by his more recent gallery shows.28 Perhaps,
however, some skilled curator will revive Stella’s art, which certainly remains of great
sociological interest.
Curators like Rubin have especial power when tastes are changing. After
Abstract Expressionism, there was great interest in figuring out what would come

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next. Leon Golub, who was a very challenging painter, had some distinguished
champions. But his last retrospective, very near the end of his long life, was at the
Brooklyn Museum, and not in Manhattan.29 He remains, then, still a relatively marginal
figure. Jasper Johns came to attention at roughly the same moment as Golub. He has
always had his critics, but by contrast, his status among the great artists of his
generation seems relatively secure. The post-Abstract Expressionists championed by
Greenberg and Michael Fried have failed to find more than a modest place in history.
Anthony Caro, so highly praised in the 1960s, now inspires highly critical responses.30
And not even the eloquent championship of John Elderfield has entirely saved Morris
Louis.31 The other painters Fried praised so highly, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski,
now seem minor. But perhaps that will inspire some young curator to reevaluate their
art. Some young abstract artists identify themselves as Olitski’s followers, but as yet,
they have not persuaded the art world to pay much attention to them.32
Revivals of taste sponsored by curators are often very interesting. The recent
apotheosis of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson is a fascinating demonstration
of how dramatically taste can shift.33 In the Abstract Expressionist era, Sam Francis
was controversial. After making some great early works of art, he produced too
many paintings and works on paper, some frankly bad. A poorly edited posthumous
retrospective failed to provide a convincing revisionist vision of his career.34 Richard
Diebenkorn, the other great California painter of Francis’s generation, also has a
relatively marginal place in the story of American art. But his recent retrospective was
much more successful.35 A show need not be large to have a significant effect, as
two highly successful exhibits at C&M Arts in Manhattan in 2002 demonstrated. Ed
Ruscha’s Birds, Fish and Offspring introduced a significant small group of paintings to
the larger public.36 And Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years showed that Koons is a
figure to reckon with.37
Great curators must take risks. An exhibit of Matisse’s art circa 1910, like a
Poussin retrospective, is wonderful, but uncontroversial. As much as I enjoy seeing
masterpieces, I often am more interested in challenging exhibitions that don’t neces-
sarily attract large audiences. A curator at a grand museum can relatively easily
secure loans of masterpieces. By contrast, someone employed at a small museum or
an alternative space must be more ingenious. That is why I have a special pleasure in
great shows done by hole-in-the-wall galleries. Inspired by Holland Cotter’s review in
the New York Times, I went to an exhibition in 2004 at Gigantic Art Space, a small
New York alternative space. I reviewed Dtroit, a show about art made in the city of

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Detroit,38 in which the curator Trevor Schoonmaker provided a revelatory portrait of

art from a decaying city. And in 2005, I praised highly a show in a tiny Chelsea gallery
by Charlotte Beckett, a former student of mine who is studying for her MFA at
Hunter College.39 But just as I approach a review of a book based upon a recent
doctoral thesis done by a marginal scholar differently from one of a publication by a
senior professor who occupies an endowed chair at Princeton, so I tend to be charitable
about such exhibitions.
Minority artists seem especially difficult for curators to present in fair,
uncondescending ways. Thaddeus Mosley, a senior African-American sculptor who
lives and works in Pittsburgh, is a provincial figure who deserves credit for developing
a significant body of art in a highly unsympathetic environment.40 Charles “Teenie”
Harris, a different case, was a great black Pittsburgh photographer who only recently
has achieved the recognition he deserves.41 Relatively marginal museums also have
to work harder, as recently did the Brooklyn Museum when it showed Jean-Michel
Basquiat. I loved this exhibition, which for me was revelatory.42 And perhaps it was
appropriate that a gifted African-American New Yorker was shown in his home
borough. But had this show been in the Museum of Modern Art, I would have been
more critical. One gallery that consistently puts on visually compelling displays is
PaceWildenstein in New York. What most interests me is not the ability to display
obvious masterpieces, but what these shows can do for problematic art. Just as a
gifted editor can make writers seem more intelligent then we really are, so a very
smart curator can make some merely good paintings look great.
Florence was the best place for painters, Vasari wrote in 1550, because
artists there “must know how to make money, seeing that the territory…is not so
wide or abundant as to enable her to support at little cost all who live there, as can
be done in countries that are rich enough.”43 He offers a perfect description of New
York today, for great art is created only in highly competitive environments. If you, a
young curator, are offered a choice between being chief curator of contemporary art
at a provincial institution—say, the Cleveland Museum of Art—or, rather, working
for some hole in the wall in Brooklyn or on the sixth floor in Chelsea, do not hesitate
for a moment. Take the New York job. There is a striking difference between the level
of skill found in Manhattan curators (and critics) and those in the larger culture, at
least once you get outside the more important museums. We provincial critics tend
to not publicly discuss this situation, for doing so alienates our colleagues and
neighbors. In New York there are so many collectors, critics, and curators that the
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stakes are high. If you are not extremely talented, you will not survive long. Everyone
complains about the New York Times’s critics, but they all are polished professionals
with challenging points of view. By contrast, most art writers in provincial cities like
Cleveland, where I teach, or Pittsburgh, where I live, are amateurish journalists. These
cities rarely produce good artists who stay in town, and their curators tend to be
trained elsewhere. Reviewing frankly incompetent provincial exhibitions, like shooting
fish in a barrel, soon becomes frankly dispiriting.44
Compared to present-day critics, Diderot and Baudelaire lived in what now
seem very constricted art worlds. Notwithstanding all of their obvious practical prob-
lems, our curators are comparatively lucky. If I could wave a wand and change in just
one way their practice, I would seek more accessible catalog essays. Nowadays these
publications generally fall into two categories: Old-master shows present elaborate
footnoted essays, experts debating before their graduate students. And displays of
contemporary art employ inaccessible theorizing. Present-day academic art writing
tends to be theory-bound, in ways that make it determinedly user-unfriendly. I
admired greatly an exhibition of contemporary African Diaspora art in St. Louis in the
fall of 2003.45 But the fat catalog was frankly impenetrable. 3 x Abstraction: New
Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin, at the
Drawing Center, in New York, in 2005, was a revelatory exhibition. But the expen-
sive, fully illustrated catalog presented very obscure, essentially irrelevant debates. If
I, a tenured professor paid to teach smart students how to decipher these texts, find
this writing frankly tedious, then what can the larger public make of it?
Contemporary art needs to be made as accessible as possible. The publications of
Arthur Danto are an important model, for his very serious writing is always lucid. He
is the great philosopher of art of our day, and so his arguments should be taken
seriously by aspiring curators. Danto curated a show at the Bergen Kunstmuseum in
1998, presenting in the catalog his theory of our post-historical era.46 I hope that
younger curators will read and emulate Danto’s prose.
Writing as a critic, I would love that my commentaries matter. But when I
study the recent history of the art world, then I realize that this hope is a delusion.
Greenberg mattered for, as I have said, he had taste and a view of modernism, which
became enormously influential. But since his day, things have changed. The writing
of Danto, the only American critic who has equivalent intellectual prestige, does not
have much effect on the art world. According to him, we live in a pluralistic era,
which means that Robert Mangold, Sean Scully, Cindy Sherman, Mark Tansey and
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many other artists he admires co-exist. Unlike Greenberg, Danto does not offer an
historical analysis or make judgments about taste which influence curators. And as
for the rest of we art writers, our claims certainly do not have much effect on art
world practice. Now it is the judgments of curators and collectors that influence what
art is displayed, sold and admired. What the display of contemporary art became big
business, this marginalization of critics became inevitable.
I have curated several provincial exhibitions, and one in New York.47 In
Pittsburgh, I worked with a local group, the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, to present
its annual show.48 And in Cleveland, I co-curated an exhibition in collaboration with
Cathleen Chaffee.49 Art writers can learn a great deal by curating, if only because it
inspires humility. Just as very few of the enormous number of contemporary works
of art retain their interest for very long, so few shows have much staying power.
Writing as a critic, I am aware of certain tensions between critics and curators. A
positive review in the New York Times or the Village Voice can be a great help to a
young artist or one of the smaller museums. But otherwise, compared with curators,
most critics do not have much effect upon the art world. Everyone wants to be
reviewed, but only rarely do museums cultivate critics. Regularly when I do reviews,
some museums and galleries—the Whitney and the Gardner Museum in Boston, for
example—refuse to provide catalogs. These institutions really ought to support critics,
for our reviews provide essential publicity. Curators mostly are poorly paid, but critics
of course make even less, which is why we support ourselves with day jobs.
I have tried to explain why curators matter to the larger public. But I should
also mention, in conclusion, my personal reason for caring about their labors. In the
1980s I was making the transition from teaching philosophy to writing art criticism.
Then I saw the exhibitions devoted to Manet, in 1983, and Caravaggio, in 1985, at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.50 Bringing the paintings together made it natural
to reflect upon Manet’s and Caravaggio’s stylistic development, the claims for their
place in the canon, and the conflicting interpretations of their art. And the magnifi-
cent catalogs, with full bibliographies, made it easy to study the literature. Thanks to
these exhibitions, I was inspired to become an art historian.

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1. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche. Life as Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard
University Press, 1985), p. 72.
2. See Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4. Modernism with a Vengeance,
1957-1969 , Edited by John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 324.
3. See my “Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-1964,” The Burlington Magazine, March
1991, pp. 218-9.
4. See my "Michael Steiner," Modern Painters, July-August 2006, pp. 109-10.
5. My analysis draws upon the critical review by Margarita Tupitsyn, Artforum, November 2005, pp. 247, 289.
6. See my “Robert Ryman at Museum of Modern Art, New Art,” The Burlington Magazine, December 1993,
pp. 854-5.
7. See my “Alex Katz at PS 1,” The Burlington Magazine, July 1998, pp. 504-6.
8. See my “Sylvain Laveissière. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.” CAA On-
line reviews, October 1998.
9. See my “Morandi at the Guggenheim, Lichtenstein at the Whitney, Kitaj at the Hirshhorn,” Artscribe 33,
1982, pp. 61-3.
10. See my “Ellsworth Kelly, Guggenheim Museum,” The Burlington Magazine, January 1997. p. 68.
11. See my “Cai Gou-Qiang at Mass MoCA,” Artforum, February 2005, pp. 176-7.
12. See my “Jim Hodges at MOCA,” Artforum, April 2005, pp. 192-93.
13. I recall with amusement a Soho show in the 1980s, “Morandi and his Contemporaries.” It showed one
Morandi watercolor and some very modest paintings by other artists.
14. This, at any rate, seems the judgment of Warhol’s recent commentators. I did not see this exhibition; see
Robert Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol,” reprinted in The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, ed. Alan R.
Pratt (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 146-58.
15. My review of first of these shows is “Picasso/Matisse. Fort Worth,” Modern Painters, Summer 1999,
pp. 92-93.
16. My review “Afterlight. Exhibiting Abstract Painting in the Era of Its Belatedness,” Arts, March 1992,
pp. 60-1, was too charitable.
17. This parallel is discussed in my Writing About Visual Art (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), Chapters 4 and 5.
18. See my “Made in California 1999-2000,” LA County Museum of Art and Paul McCarthy, Museum of
Contemporary Art, The Burlington Magazine, February 2001, pp. 122-23.
19. See my “Patti Smith, Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh,” Artforum, December 2002, p. 142.
20. See my “Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh,” Artforum, February 2001, p. 156.
21. A shrewd guide to art marketing is provided by Richard Polsky, who divides contemporary artists into
three categories: buy, hold, and sell. See his http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/polsky.asp.
22. My Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, l987) argues that Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew
provides a very congenital description of this situation.
23. See my “Pittsburgh. 1985 Carnegie International,” The Burlington Magazine, January 1986, p. 63;
“Carnegie International,” Arts, February 1992, p. 69; “New York. Whitney Biennial,” The Burlington
Magazine, June 1995, pp. 409-10; “Carnegie International,” Artforum, January 1996, pp. 88-9; “New York,
Whitney Biennial and other shows,” The Burlington Magazine, May 1997, pp. 350-2; “1999 Carnegie
International. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh,” The Burlington Magazine, February 2000, pp. 128-129;
“New York. Whitney Biennial,” The Burlington Magazine, June 2002, pp. 382-3.
24. See my Sean Scully (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004).
25. See my Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park and London:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
26. See their Art Since 1900. Volume 2. 1945 to the Present (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004).
27. My response with David Reed was “Tradition, ‘Ecclecticism’ and Community. Baroque Art and Abstract
Painting,” Arts, January 1991, pp. 44-9. See also my “’Going for Baroque’, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore,”
The Burlington Magazine, January 1996, p. 59, a review of a show presenting Stella’s claim that his abstract
paintings are linked to baroque art.
28. See my “Frank Stella at Paul Kasmin Gallery,” tema celeste 90, April 2002, p. 82.
29. See my “Leon Golub,” tema celeste, September-October 2001, p. 82.
30. See my “New York, Recent Exhibitions,” The Burlington Magazine, January 2003, p. 56-57.
31. See my “New York, Museum of Modern Art. Morris Louis 1912-1962,” The Burlington Magazine,
December 1986, pp. 926-7.
32. See my catalog essay “New New Painting and the History of American-Style Abstraction,” The New New
Painters (Flint Institute of Arts, 1999), pp. 9-11.
33. See Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (New Haven:

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Cautionary Tales

Yale University Press, (revised edition) 2004).

34. See my “Sam Francis. Los Angeles,” The Burlington Magazine, June 1999, pp. 382-3.
35. See my “Whitney. Richard Diebenkorn,” The Burlington Magazine, December 1997, pp. 900-901.
36. Ed Ruscha, Birds, Fish and Offspring (C&M Arts, 2002).
37. Jeff Koons, Highlight of 25 Years (C&M Arts, 2004).
38. See my “Dtroit,” ArtUS 3, June-August 2004, p. 43.
39. See my “Charlette Beckett,” ArtUS 8, May-June 2005, p. 49.
40. See my “Thaddeus Mosley, Carnegie Museum of Art,” Artforum, December 1997, p. 122.
41. See my “The Photographs of Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, Westmoreland Museum of American Art,”
Artforum, May 2001, p. 180.
42. See my “Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum,” ArtUS 9, July-September 2005, p. 22-23.
43. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (New
York and Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 1996), Volume 1, 584.
44. See, for example, my “Dan Tranberg, the Bonfoey Company,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer, March 23, 2002, C4.
45. See my “A Fiction of Authenticity,” Contemporary Art Center St. Louis, Artforum, March 2004, p. 188.
46. See his catalog essay Bergen Kunstmuseum ved Arthur Danto (Bergen, 1998).
47. My New York show, Seven American Abstract Artists, RuggerioHenis Gallery, New York, November 1988,
was one of those group shows of abstract art I criticize earlier.
48. Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Annual Exhibition, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, August 2001. With
catalog essay. See also my “New York Art, Pittsburgh Art, Art,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 37, 3,
Fall 2003, pp. 97-104.
49. With Cathleen Chaffee, Wish You Were Here: The Art of Adventure, (Cleveland: Cleveland Institute of
Art, 2003), with my catalog essay, “Wish you were here: Artistic Adventures in Reality,” pp. 9-13.
50. See my Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1991), Chapters 3 and 10.

I thank Cathleen Chaffee for reading a draft of this essay.

David Carrier is Champney Family Professor, a position divided between Case Western Reserve University and
the Cleveland Institute of Art. He was been a Lecturer at Princeton University, a Getty Scholar, and a Clark
Fellow. For 2006-2007 he is a Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He has published books on
the methodology of art history, Poussin’s paintings, Baudelaire’s art criticism, and the abstract artist Sean
Scully. His most recent book is Museum Skepticism (Duke University Press). He has lectured extensively in the
United States, China, India, and New Zealand. And he was published art criticism in Artforum, ArtUS, The
Burlington Magazine, and tema celeste.

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Dave Hickey

Beau Monde, Upon Reflection

Two years ago, I accepted Site Santa Fe's invitation to curate an international biennial
exhibition in New Mexico. It would have been cowardly not to accept, I thought,
after thirty years of taking issue with other curators’ exhibitions. Also, I wanted to do
it. Criticism and curating are radically distinct activities and I welcomed the change.
Art critics toil on the consumer side of the art world, trying to make sense of what
they are shown. Curators reign on the supply side, assembling works of art that other
people might make sense of. As a longtime critic, I thought it would be fun, just
once, to plan the party rather than reporting on the guest-list. I felt empowered to
do so by the fact that exhibitions of serious art and critical essays about serious art
do, in fact, have one thing in common: They are not themselves serious art. They are
both highly conventionalized popular art forms. Like popular songs and residential
architecture, art exhibitions are virtually identical in their parts, in their construction
and manner of address. Critical essays are equally similar. One differs from another
only in refinement and detail. Whatever profundity they might aspire to, they derive
from the serious art they engage.
The audience for such works of popular art, then, has an experience that
is only microscopically different from experiences he or she has had before. As a
consequence, this audience, inured by the conventions of the genre, is predisposed
to overlook the subtle arguments and theoretical superstructures that inform such
work. What they will take away from the experience, invariably, is the tone of the
performance—the ambient atmosphere conveyed by the accumulation of small deci-
sions. With this in mind, I resolved at the outset to concern myself as a curator with
refinement and detail—to touch everything with high spirits and a light heart—and
let good art take care of the rest.
So, this is the way it went. I decided to call this exhibition Beau Monde for
various reasons. First, because, many years ago, I wrote a book about beauty and
have ever since been dubbed as the “beauty guy” by the popular press. It seemed
best to beard this seedy lion in its den. Second, the show was scheduled to open on
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Bastille Day, when the French celebrate the death of an antique beau monde. This
seemed an appropriate birthday for a new beau monde. Finally, the expression beau
monde refers literally to a beautiful world and figuratively to an elite social milieu.
Like any good democrat, I wished to conflate these meanings and create a beautiful,
non-exclusionary social milieu—a beau monde generally, rather than le beau monde
specifically. Also, I wished to comment obliquely on the international art world,
which, at present, is a beau monde not much concerned with the beaux-arts.
In truth, I didn't think about it. Beau Monde seemed a light hearted and
high-spirited title. It felt right so I picked it and moved on to the next rats-nest of
details. All of the preceding “becauses,” in fact, are after the fact, as are most of the
“becauses” that follow. They amount to a teleological unpacking of cumulative deci-
sions made quickly, in sequence and on the spot. In practice, I tried to select good
works of art from all of the artists I selected, and I selected ninety percent of these
artists in five minutes on a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles,
writing their names down on a yellow pad: my “dream team.” The list was expressive
of my own tastes, whims, intellectual concerns, tactical instincts, and art historical
consciousness at the moment. These are now embodied in the exhibition, and, even
though sorting one reason out from another is blatantly artificial and probably irrel-
evant, I have tried to do a little sorting in the paragraphs that follow, simply because
nothing comes from nowhere.
I can see in retrospect, for instance, that I instinctively chose to do a self-
consciously “art historical” exhibition because it's what I know, because international
exhibitions are art historical occasions, and because most exhibitions of this sort
are willfully disdainful of anything so parochial as art history. They aspire to a more
totalizing “historical consciousness.” As a practicing critic, I am congenitally skeptical
of totalizing historical concepts, so I decided that in this exhibition I would momen-
tarily abandon the quest for “truth” and strive for distinction—that I would, in short,
try my very best not to be boring. Not being boring, thankfully, requires little in the
way of totalizing historical consciousness, but it does require a modicum of art
historical awareness.
Igor Stravinski always argued that an artist without tradition is doomed to
plagiarism, and what he meant by this, I think, is that, without some historical aware-
ness, the precedents for what we do are indistinguishable from the art we practice.
We know precedents whether we know that we know them or not, so unless we are
acutely conscious of the accumulating tradition in which we work, unless we learn

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what we know, we plagiarize. Presented with the task of selecting an international

exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I took Stravinski's cautionary observation to
heart. I began asking myself how, specifically, my own exhibition would distinguish
itself from other international biennials, and how, specifically, my exhibition would
distinguish itself from its site in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My answer to each of these
questions turned out to be the same answer: I would privilege the cosmopolitan.
Over the years, international biennials have become quintessential cosmo-
politan occasions perversely devoted to marketing ideas of regional identity and local
exceptionality in the normative global language of post-minimalist artistic practice.
Over a somewhat longer period, Santa Fe has evolved into a quintessential cosmo-
politan vacation community that is also devoted to marketing fantasies of local
exceptionality in the international idiom of resort iconography. Both of these historical
traditions presume that one place differs from another in its essence—in its essential
content and circumstances—and that this essence can be communicated in an inter-
national language.
My quarrel with these rationales is twofold. First, the idea of global society
as a collection of virtually autonomous provincial enclaves seems fantastical on its
face. Second, the idea that the autonomous content of these provincial enclaves
might be communicated in a single international idiom seems equally fantastical, and
contradictory to the first idea—positing, as it does, some Platonic, international
community of “understanding.” The cautionary historical residue of this second
proposition—the idea of a “global style”—was demonstrated for me in Robert
Rosenblum's shrewd and elegant exhibition, 1900, which opened at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000. In 1900, Rosenblum surveyed the last
previous moment of international stylistic hegemony—at the turn of the 20th century,
when post-impressionism rather than post-minimalism was the dominant idiom.
What Rosenblum's exhibition made legible, at least to me, was the extent
to which externally imposed styles deaden practice. On the walls of the Guggenheim,
the crippling artifice of by-the-book Japanese and Scandinavian post-impressionism
contrasted radically with French post-impressionism that freely appropriated from
Japanese and Northern European sources. The lesson of this (which, of course, we
already know) is that it is always safest to assume that places differ from one another
not so much in the things that are done as in the way things are done. Style, then,
is, irrevocably, cultural content. As a curator, accepting this precept requires adopting
a cosmopolitan rather than a global model of art practice. One must presume that,

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like politics and economics, all aesthetics are local, competitive, and impure—that art
created in and for local venues acquires cosmopolitan attributes for local competitive
advantage. This has been the case, I think, since Dürer went to Italy to become a
better German artist, since Bassano cribbed the Germans for leverage in Venice, and,
even today, outside the stylistic hegemony of institutional culture, it continues to be
the case. In a cosmopolitan world of contiguous neighborhoods with porous bound-
aries, those neighborhoods whose artists and tradesmen most readily appropriate
and adapt exotic attributes tend to predominate.
To take the case in point, the very richness of Santa Fe as a place derives
from a stunning variety of cosmopolitan accommodations. Nothing, in fact, could be
more eccentrically cosmopolitan than the area's porous and accommodating “spiri-
tual climate,” which allows the city of Santa Fe to function peacefully as a kind of
transcendental souk in which Catholics, Navajos, Buddhists, Zunis, Baptists, Jews,
Sikhs, Vegans, and nuclear physicists vie for competitive spiritual advantage. “Santa
Fe Style” itself derives from an unstable blend of romantic primitivism, native design,
international-style modernism, and Hacienda Victorian décor. The same conditions
have prevailed in the great art centers of the late 20th century. Far from manifesting
autonomous integrity, the art produced in New York, Cologne, Tokyo, London, and
Los Angeles during this period is defined by its acquisitive impurity. One may, of
course, disapprove of this mongrelization on the grounds that it simultaneously
subverts the autonomy of place, the autonomy of culture, and the autonomy of the
artist. The hypocrisies inherent in espousing an internationally administrated global
provincialism, however, argue against doing so.
Through this thought process (much slowed down and gentrified by my
description of it), it became obvious to me that I could honor my own interests and
the tradition of international exhibitions (while distinguishing my exhibition from
both its predecessors and its site) by simply emphasizing the suppressed cosmopolitan
aspect of an international exhibition in the city of Santa Fe. I could do this by prioritizing
the impurity and complexity of both the occasion and the city rather than focusing
on their separate, utopian aspirations to simplicity and purity. With this in mind, I set
out to select works of art that visibly expressed the influence and confluence of diverse
cultural resources. In the process, two operating strategies presented themselves. First,
rather than asking the post-minimalist question, “How rough can it get and still
remain meaningful?” I found myself asking the cosmopolitan question: “How smooth
can it get and still resist rationalization?” This, because, in a post-industrial world in

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which everything is presumed to be temporary, nothing need look temporary, nor

look the same. Secondly, in order to maintain a substrata of coherence while still
privileging exuberance, I found myself selecting works that complemented one
another as colors do, pairing works that define a category of practice while sharing
no attributes beyond those that define the category. Gradually, the works began
arranging themselves in larger constellations of concern.
Thus, I had no sooner embarked upon the purportedly earnest activity of
curating, haphazardly creating networks of visual confluence and cross-reference,
than it became clear to me that, by distinguishing my exhibition from the biennial
tradition, I was also expanding its traditional mandate. Biennial exhibitions have
always been designed to privilege the regional, ethnic and gender diversity of the
artists exhibited. They have been so successful in doing this, in fact, that, in the present
moment, one can hardly do otherwise. Such exhibitions, however, have also tended
to privilege art made in the dominant post-minimal style by artists of a single, mid-
career generation. In the process of solving my cosmopolitan acrostic, proceeding
through the field logic of complements and constellations, I found myself expanding
this narrow generational aperture, selecting work by artists spanning a half-century
of contemporary art history—revealing, in the process, a host of cross-generational
influences and affinities.
Moreover, having opened my field of selection to a multiplicity of cultural
influences, I found that radical stylistic diversity was virtually unavoidable. Somehow,
it seemed, modernist, post-minimalist, and post-conceptual styles of various flavors
and aromas were going to co-exist in the space, and share that space with artists'
works whose penchant for cosmopolitan sociability and historical stylistic development
mirrors high art practice. Traditionally, international exhibitions that celebrate myths
of cultural autonomy have included “outsider” art whose creators may be considered
absolutely autonomous—who, in Peter Schjeldahl's phrase, constitute a “culture of
one.” By privileging the cosmopolitan, I gained access to an entirely different field
of “outsider” practice, which, since it is no more outside than anything else in the
exhibition, fit seamlessly into the ambient chaos.
Amazingly enough, I had the foresight to expect the ambient chaos, simply
on account of my catholic tastes. Thus, I decided early on to accommodate SITE Santa
Fe's building to the art rather than asking the artists to accommodate their work to
the local site, as is usually done. My first act, in fact, when I was contacted about the
possibility of curating this exhibition was to contact Graft Design and solicit their

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complicity. My idea from the first, and Graft's as well, was to make a space that
would make a place for everything—to design a melting pot in which nothing melts.
Our general strategy was to invent a space with rich historical precedents that was
invested with a sense of occasion. Ultimately, we created a building that is part Italian
palazzo and part informal garden. As a palazzo, the Beau Monde building has a formal
approach, a façade, an entry hall, a grand hall, and a chapel; it has a mirrored ball-
room salon, an elevated petit salon, a grand salon, and three withdrawing rooms. As
a garden, it is patterned as a flow-through, peripatetic space with a grand vista that
extends from the entrance, diagonally through the space, and out a new window in
the back of the building; it has various tantalizing invitations in the form of glimpses
and glowing doorways, and an unfolding sequence of visible destinations.
Thus the actual positioning of the works of art had less to do with arranging
objects than with choreographing the ideal viewing territories each work demanded.
Some of the works in the exhibition were designed to be walked by; some of the
work was designed to be walked through, and these were given their transits. Some
works were best to be among and were given their discrete spaces. Most of the
works of art in the exhibition, however, were designed to be approached from a
distance, thus a great deal of the design work went into making these works directly
approachable; the rest went into making the whole space work together and to
complicating this subliminal smoothness by investing each space with its own fictional
ambience. For whatever it's worth, we were able to do this to our own satisfaction,
and virtually no design work was done on site. A few features were added, a few
subtracted, but, basically, we built in Santa Fe what we designed in Los Angeles.
What I had not foreseen was the extent to which shifting the emphasis of
the exhibition toward the cosmopolitan and directing its tone toward the high-spirited
and light hearted would influence the “look” of the show. It soon became apparent,
however, that the high-spirited accommodation of disparate cultural influences in
works of art expresses itself, in practice, as a series of bravura solutions to problems
of arrangement and articulation. Exhibitions that aspire to communicate the psycho-
logical circumstances of cultural identity, I realized, tend to be composed of art that
states problems. The art in Beau Monde aspired to solve problems, on the assumption
that the visible resolution of cultural dissonance has its moral and intellectual conse-
quences, its social allegories, its uses and functions.
Looking at the work after it was selected and before it was installed, I
discovered further that, in works of art, successful cross-cultural engagement (or

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cultural impurity, if you will) manifests itself in two distinct ways. The confluent cultures
either express themselves in the inclusive, intricate complexity of bricolage or in the
simplicity of abstract structures arising at generalized points of cultural intersection.
Cosmopolitan art, I quickly realized, is, almost of necessity, either simpler or more
complex than monocultural production. This, I think, accounts for the unusual division
of works in the exhibition between abstract simplicity and ebullient complexity.
The aspect of cosmopolitan art that I probably understood beforehand, but
had never successfully articulated, is that, in its radical simplicity and ebullient
complexity, it tends to privilege the interpretive penchant of the beholder over his or
her internalized cultural presumptions. This, in turn, tends to privilege the radical
sociability of the work in congress and in situ. As a consequence, if you ask me what
the assembly and display of all this art in a redesigned space in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
might mean, I can only guess. My artist friend, Edward Ruscha, who is represented
in this exhibition, once remarked to me that since both he and I beheld his finished
work at about the same time, we both had an equal shot at guessing what it might
mean. This is even more the case with an exhibition, since the curator's job is not to
create meaning or to impose meaning on works of art, but to create the circum-
stances out of which meaning might arise—circumstances that might prove mean-
ingful to the beholder. Finally, all I can offer is my own assurance that the exhibition,
at its best, resembles my idea of a “beautiful world.” If it is not your idea of a beau-
tiful world, I can only hope that the exhibition articulates options and strategies out
of which other beautiful worlds might be created.

Reprinted with permission of SITE Santa Fe. This essay was first published in Beau Monde: Toward a
Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, the catalog accompanying SITE Santa Fe’s Fourth International Biennial exhibition
of the same title, curated by Dave Hickey (July 14, 2001 – January 6, 2002). Artists in the exhibition included:
Kenneth Anger, Jo Baer, Jeff Burton, James Lee Byars, Pia Fries, Gajin Fujita, Graft Design, Frederick
Hammersley, Marine Hugonnier, Jim Isermann, Ellsworth Kelly, Josiah McElheny, Darryl Montana, Sarah
Morris, Takashi Murakami, Nic Nicosia, Kermit Oliver, Jorge Pardo, Ken Price, Stephen Prina, Bridget Riley, Ed
Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jennifer Steinkamp & Jimmy Johnson, Jessica Stockholder, Jane &
Louise Wilson.

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Re-reading this essay, I am delighted to find it dated. The institutional fashions with
which I take issue in the essay are pretty much defunct today, having been replaced
by indiscriminate fashion-mongering. Identity politics has morphed effortlessly into
global niche marketing, instituting a whole new regime of intellectual vulgarity. I am,
however, happy to have done Beau Monde. The public and my critical colleagues
liked it. The professional biennial bureaucracy was not enchanted, but I liked it
myself. It was a good place to be. There was a fifty foot square white room in the
exhibition with gray wool carpet in which four large ceramic sculptures by Ken Price
faced off with a four canvas ensemble by Ellsworth Kelly (now at the Beyler). That
room was the best thing I have ever done, thanks to Ellsworth and Ken. It was
exquisite and un-photographable. Even today, people come up to me and say,
“Wow, you did that room!” As a curator, that’s what pretty much what you want.
D.H. 8/06

Dave Hickey is a free-lance writer of fiction and cultural criticism. He has served as owner-director of A Clean
Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas, as director of the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City, as
Executive Editor of Art in America Magazine, and as Contributing Editor to The Village Voice. He has written
for most major American cultural publications including The Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America,
Artforum, Interview, Harper's Magazine, Vanity Fair, Nest, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.
His critical essays on art have been collected in two volumes: The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Art
Issues Press, 1993) and Air Guitar, Essays on Art and Democracy (Art Issues Press, 1998).
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Sara Arrhenius

Independent Curating Within Institutions

Without Walls

The first meeting took place in an austere and, for a Swedish art institution, surpris-
ingly official office. Present are representatives of Göteborg’s three art institutions:
Göteborg Museum of Art, Göteborgs Konsthall, and the Hasselblad Center. They are
hosting the Art Biennial, which was started up in the city four years ago; I was invited
in as curator for the exhibition due to be launched in September 2005. We are now
to meet for the first time to discuss the inevitable underpinnings of all exhibition-
making: the institutional framework, the budget, fundraising, staff, marketing. This
is, after all, a collaboration among the three institutions as much as between them
and me; fields of play have to be marked out, roles and rules laid down, before the
game can begin. Göteborg is Sweden’s biggest west-coast city and the second-
largest nationally, with a university, a school of fine arts and a series of cultural insti-
tutions with national standing, including the opera, the city theatre and the museums.
The city’s self-awareness has, among other things, generated a vigorous experimental
music scene, with offshoots into sound art. But there are also strains of the provin-
cialism intrinsic to the second city in a very small country.
For all its ordinariness, this meeting came to feel like a point of intersection
for a number of the questions that inescapably arise when an external curator is invited
to put on an event of this type and scale: How will the relationship between the local
and the international be negotiated and played out? What possibilities are there for
inscribing criticality into a high-profile art event, with its inherent logic of seeking
maximum funding, audience numbers and media visibility? And what kind of rela-
tionship will be set up between the host institution and the guest curator—what
explicit and implicit rules of conduct operate here, and how do they limit curatorial
room to maneuver?
These questions also indirectly engage with a more general critical discus-
sion of the current conditions surrounding exhibition curation. They speak to and
about the new paradigm in cultural politics in Scandinavia, created by changes in the
organization of cultural affairs in Scandinavia over the last decades. The regional
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model for the funding of culture and the arts is obviously a product of the
Scandinavian welfare state; since the 1960s strong state and regional support for the
arts has been the dominant funding structure. Both art institutions and individual
artist production are mainly funded by state and regional support directed to the
cultural producers through various grant systems. Given a small art market, a weak
tradition in corporate sponsorship, and a lack of large, independent cultural founda-
tions offering support for the arts, the policies developed by these funding bodies
have had a substantial influence on cultural activities at large. The last decade has
brought changes in the policies of these funding systems and in national and inter-
national cultural politics, as well as a reformulation of the prospects for and aims of
cultural policy as a whole. The shift is very notable in Scandinavia, where the long
tradition of vigorous national cultural support for the arts and strong national
institutions is slowly being challenged by internationalization and new ways of organ-
izing support for and the distribution and making of culture. This presents cultural
producers with practical questions in daily practice, but on a more general level it also
suggests more fundamental questions about the relationship between the curator,
the institution and the funding organizations.
Among the products and symptoms of this development in cultural politics—
a tendency that I think runs right through the global art system, though my viewpoint
here is focused on the Scandinavian context—are the biennial in its current form,
independent curators, and the new, expanding system for training curators. Using
my specific work with the Biennial in Göteborg as a starting point, I will move on to
a more general discussion of how the biennial as an exhibition format, a telling
touchstone in considering the role of curatorial training programs in contemporary
exhibition making, is predicated on this cultural-political change.
Dominating much of the critical writing on curating, the biennial has without
doubt become a paradigmatic exhibition format. One could without hesitation call it a
new form of institution, a museum without walls traveling the world with its own court
treasurer, benefactor, and master of ceremonies, and played out in an increasingly
globalized art scene. Recent years have seen biennials, festivals, and other recurring
major art events spread like dandelion seeds—every country, region, and city has to
have its own. Art has quite openly become part of a culture-and-entertainment
industry, which in these days of structural rationalization is to replace the heavy
industry that has been downsized and outsourced to another part of the world.
Culture has somewhat surprisingly been given a job to do: it is a medicine for treating

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permanent unemployment and depopulation. It has been charged with creating

identity and attracting skilled labor to regions of population flight, with uplifting
rather dull small towns that can then be given a further facelift by espresso bars,
restaurants, and shopping centers filled with identical chain shops selling clothes and
furnishings.
In Scandinavia there is also a strong tendency to allow contemporary art to
act as a kind of marker for the contemporary in other cultural or social contexts, such
as historical museums or, in quite different settings, shopping centers, new buildings,
and schools. Even if this way of working allows for a broadening of the audience and
mode of address for art, one can see that contemporary art and the curator are playing
a new and not uncomplicated role. Art gets to act as a kind of mediator of the
contemporary that has to comment on a context, like a historical anthropological
collection or a social situation outside the art institution, like an urban area in need
of development. This practice represents a shift in the role of contemporary art that
is of greater importance than one might at first imagine. Without its own historical
context and institutional framework, contemporary art and its audience is left quite
alone. This popular curatorial method in many ways brings the complex role of the
independent curator into focus. Instead of being a specialist within a field of cultural
science, such as contemporary or modern art, or perhaps even in a special genre,
such as painting or drawing, the contemporary curator is a mediator of the contem-
porary, who both sets in motion and creates situations that frame and comment on
the contemporary world in a broader field than just that of art. That this is a role with
potential is something all can agree on. At the same time, I believe it is extremely
important to visualize and discuss the new situations and negotiations to which this
development gives rise. Such a discussion is necessary if the curator—and for that
matter art—is not to become a kind of hostage to culture and to local-political strate-
gies for development.
This shift of the role of art in contemporary society is having a tangible
effect on the conditions which the independent curator has to work, but also on how
educational courses for curators are being conceived and set up. One could say that
the freelancing independent curator’s role has developed in parallel with the rise of
an ever more copious supply of temporary art projects—projects that do not neces-
sarily have ties to national or local institutions, or that have only temporary links with
them. The institutional framework that was previously dominant, at least when more
alternative structures outside national or local institutions were not involved, has

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been replaced by a new, less visible structure. For what we are seeing in the Nordic
region is the visual arts existing in increasingly direct, close interaction with a number
of funding organizations and social institutions without the mediation of the art insti-
tution. If in the Scandinavian sphere the expectation from the public commissioning
body was hitherto to reach out with art to as broad a public as possible with an
educational aim in mind, then culture today has also taken on an identity-creating
role—one that is politically useful, whether in employment policy, infrastructure,
cultural geography, or social policy. This applies not least to the type of activity that
is nowadays called “nation, city or region branding,” in which countries and regions
compete for visibility and appeal, with culture as just one instrument among others.
This represents a shift both in art’s place and in its room to maneuver, and the curator,
independent or not, will encounter it in one way or another and have to work with
or against it.
If the playing field of art has been enlarged, then at the same time it has
become less distinct and been co-opted into an increasingly sophisticated and
opaque network of regional, national and international exchanges and support
systems, in which public and private funding and international, national, and regional
organizations are closely intertwined. And, since new activities beget their own
organizers and administrators, this system goes hand in hand with the development of
an increasingly ramified and professionalized corps of curators, cultural producers,
marketers, cultural administrators and fundraisers. Event-oriented cultural production
that is generated just outside or in some sort of collaboration with established cultural
institutions has created its own world of professions and career trajectories, a develop-
ment that has also led to new educational courses for curators, cultural producers, and
cultural administrators, a relatively new phenomenon in Scandinavia that is undergoing
vigorous growth.
Curatorial training programs are an interesting indicator of our time in the
sense that, unlike traditional higher education in fine arts, they are not directed at
providing specialized knowledge within an academic field that is to be implemented
at an institution with quite definite limits, traditions, and objectives. Instead, courses
are given to people from highly diverse backgrounds—art, cultural history, journalism,
marketing—so that they become a species of mediator of the contemporary, and
of the cultural products that the contemporary world produces. Often, part of
these courses’ identity is that those taking them will in most cases work specifically
as unattached cultural producers, what we call independent curators—a term that

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has quite a vague meaning and usage. The word “independent” seems in most cases
to refer to working outside institutions in a quite concrete sense. At the same time,
the term also seems to carry an aura of freedom, referring to a lack of ties, and to
the possibility of acting without the influence of power relations, traditions, and
pressures. But even with all the attraction implicit in the word, we have to admit that
in many ways it obscures the conditions underlying the work of most independent
curators. Most autonomous art projects rely on their curators’ capacity for localization
and for tying together the various funding options that exist for art and culture projects
today. In actual fact, most independent art projects are a result of collaborations with
various types of institutions: national organizations for promoting art and culture,
corporate supported cultural foundations, international organizations for promoting
cultural exchange. All these institutions have their more or less explicit agendas. But
the boundaries of these organizations are more flexible and harder to define than the
traditional art institution, the museum or the kunsthalle. Given the structural changes
in the art system, new organizations that fall outside the reach of established curatorial
theory and institutional critique have become influential but quite invisible actors.
Drawing on my own experience in building up the Swedish institution for
international exchanges for Swedish artists, International Artists’ Studio Program in
Sweden (IASPIS), I would like to use these new, nationally based but internationally
active organizations for supporting artists from a given region as an indicative example
of this structural change in Scandinavian cultural politics. These institutions could be
described as flexible support-and-lobbying institutions that operate both nationally
and internationally. They are not exhibition producers in the traditional sense, and
their impact and agenda are therefore harder to discern, let alone argue with. Instead
they are subsumed into the infrastructure of art production via grants, support for
productions, opinion formation, and research trips for curators and artists. The
chances of getting support for exhibiting and producing the work of certain artists,
and the discursive activity in the form of, for example, publications, seminars, and
conferences, in a more elusive way, affect what is offered by the large biennials and
how they are put together, along with artists’ access to the international arena.
Together with the expanding biennials and other temporary art projects,
these new organizations that support artists and exhibitions on a national and inter-
national basis form a new kind of institutional network. They have no visible walls,
and with their short history, they are more flexible than the traditional institutions.
This invisibility and mobility have obvious advantages, but they also make it harder to

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focus on and visualize the hidden agendas, the implicit power structures, and the
logic of inclusion and exclusion that are also, unconsciously or not, a part of the
anatomy of these organizations. Institutional critique is a staple of contemporary
curatorial theory these days, and part of the routine of curatorial training programs.
But the mechanisms of these new, invisible institutions without walls are still not
discussed sufficiently within this process, which is mostly directed toward the tradi-
tional objects of institutional critique: the museum and the art market. Today’s
curatorial training programs are very good at teaching their students to master these
new institutions—fundraising, project management, networking; curators are taught
to be skilled actors in the new field of cultural production. But what is often left out
of these programs is critical thinking about the field in which independent curating
is operating. The changing structure of the art system demands a critical authority
that will look more carefully at this cultural-political development and the new
institutions it is generating, and incorporate this thinking into contemporary curatorial
training and practice.
In this essay I have been trying to show how difficult it is to define inde-
pendent curating in opposition to institutional curating and to think of these two
positions in terms of working “inside” or “outside” the institution. I’ve been trying
to relate the blurred boundaries between independent and institutional curating to a
structural change in the cultural landscape where new organizations for culture
production is developing within which curators have to operate. This new institutional
topography changes the way we have up to now defined the art institution and
terms such as “independent” and “institutional.” This new situation makes it urgent
to develop a critical theory and practice that incorporates this cultural-political devel-
opment, and to analyze it so as to develop new curatorial tools. One natural platform
for this body of thinking would be within the curatorial training programs them-
selves, which could become active agents in this process. To establish the possibility
of such theory production, I see it as vital that the training programs not only consist
of shorter, more instrumentally oriented courses, but also that they are set up as
theory producing research institutions. We need to develop tools not only for man-
aging this culture, but also for critical thought about the political agendas underlying
the current situation, for making visible the new structures of cultural institutions that
are organizing the art system, and for making this thinking a part of curatorial practice.
A few months into our work on the Biennial in Göteborg, a decision was
made to hold a meeting with the city’s politicians. A special group had been

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appointed that was to monitor the work on the Biennial. It was emphasized that
there was no intention of influencing the artistic running or of directing the work in
any way; the purpose was informative, so as to be able to prepare for any reactions
from the public. But the somewhat unclear role and identity that characterizes the
visiting curator’s position was never so evident in the work on the Biennial as at that
moment. In Scandinavia, the cultural-political development discussed above has
minimized the distance between cultural producers and funding bodies run by
politicians over the last decade. Temporary projects are often initiated without
negotiating a production structure that guarantees artistic freedom to the curator. In
such projects, responsibility is hard to pin down, as it floats between the institution,
the funding system, and the invited guest curator. As an outsider, a guest curator
does not know a lot about the discussions that have preceded such meetings and
against what background one is acting. How are the contacts between the art insti-
tutions and politicians set up in a small city like this? What freedom does one have
with regard to the commissioning body, and how does one justify the support one
receives in the face of competition from other activities? The question of where these
issues should be raised, discussed and negotiated is seldom an explicit part of the
curatorial process; the economic and institutional backbones of an art exhibition are
usually only visible in the obligatory credit lines. One possible way to strengthen the
artistic independence of the curator would be to make negotiations with funding
structures and the different institutions involved in realizing projects a transparent part
of the curatorial process.
Within the framework of the traditional Scandinavian model for cultural
politics, the institutions’ relationship with political structures is formulated as part of
a permanent institutional organization, one devised and recognized in the implemen-
tation of a general policy on culture affairs. For a temporary art event that moves
among different local communities, political landscapes, and funding structures,
these criteria must be negotiated anew every time, in a constantly changing topo-
graphy of exhibitions, biennials, and art fairs. In this situation, I think it is more crucial
than ever for independent curators not to entertain a self-image of being innocently
independent, but to think of themselves as active agents within a framework, in
which questions of curatorial freedom, the role of funding organizations, culture-
political agendas, and the ideology of the participating organizations are to be
discussed and analyzed as part of the work.

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Funding organizations and political structures wanting to monitor and

interfere in cultural activities is not a new phenomenon. But I do think that the
presence of the group of politicians in the Biennial office can be read as a symptom
of a shift in the understanding of the limits of freedom of expression, and that this
is linked with a change in the way the overall aim of support for cultural activities is
defined in cultural policy in the Scandinavian sphere. Discussions of the limits of freedom
of expression usually attribute it to a growing conservatism or to sensation-seeking
art, depending on which side of the barricades one is standing on. And this model
certainly has some explanatory power. But I think it is also valid to associate this shift
with the changes in the structure of cultural politics. At a time when culture has
become an instrumental tool for giving a certain city visibility, or for developing a
region, the role of art is changing. By extension, I believe that the shift in the way we
understand and use freedom of expression within cultural institutions will also come
to alter the image of such institutions as an arena in which various notions and asser-
tions are set off against one another, discussed, contradicted and analyzed. The concept
of freedom of expression is not a static one; rather, it is in constant transformation
and negotiation with its own time. Reading these transformations from a historical
perspective is, of course, an indispensable part of curatorial training. But the inde-
pendent curator also needs to take an active part in negotiating the definitions and
boundaries of these issues within culture and in society at large, and to make it a part
of daily curatorial practice.
I am sitting on a fast train between Stockholm and Göteborg, together with
other weekly commuters. It strikes me how well the independent curator/cultural
producer/artist fits into the image of the perfect workforce in the new Europe. Ten
years ago, the independent curator seemed to belong to an alternative scene by
choice. To work outside the institution offered possibilities of developing new
strategies for curating and of offering an alternative to the dominant mode of
exhibiting art. Today the independent curator’s situation could be interpreted as a
symptom of a more profound change in the working conditions of people working
in the arts. The independent curator of today is mobile, willing to change, project-
oriented, unattached to any specific place or institution. All of these characteristics
carry a positive charge in the contemporary world and represent innovation and
dynamism. It is precisely for that reason that it is appropriate to risk twisting and
turning this image a bit. When one is always on the way to the next place and
exhibition, one establishes a different relationship with a place and a public than

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when one has a more long-term involvement with an institutional framework. To

question and develop an institution’s structures and ways of working is not a part of
the visiting curator’s duties. That the playing field for the independent, freelance
curator has become larger in recent years goes hand in hand with a dismantling of
the institutions, with temporary projects coming to replace the work of a large
permanent staff.
It is also interesting to try to uncover the concealed meanings that give the
charge to the institutional/independent dichotomy in art and the world of culture.
The institution usually stands for continuity and tradition, but also for inflexibility and
traditionalism. The independent curator usually gets to represent innovation and
the contemporary. The question is: What do we have to gain by charging up this
dichotomy, and are these boundaries really so razor-sharp? There are a number of
possibilities inherent in the new extended field for art and culture. But at the same
time, one must be conscious of the covert or overt agendas that are built into these
situations, and courses for curators should provide students with tools for dealing
with the current political reality, in which these questions are ultimately negotiated.

Sara Arrhenius is a curator and writer. She is the director of Bonniers Konsthall, a new kunsthalle in
Stockholm that opened in September 2006. She was the director of IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio
Program in Sweden) from 2001 to 2004. She was the curator of the third edition of Göteborg International
Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2005. She has been an editor of the art magazine Index and a founding editor
of NU: The Nordic Art Review. Arrhenius has served as a critic at the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens
Nyheter, among other publications, and is a regular contributor to international and Swedish art magazines.
She has published and edited several books, among them Black Box Illuminated, an anthology on the moving
image in contemporary art, and In Dialogue with Annika von Hausswolff, both published by Propexus.

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Young Chul Lee

Curating in a Global Age

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world is experiencing a major cultural
shift, with art activities showing a continual process of change within the global-local
matrix while revealing cultural differences and plurality. In order to make them signifi-
cant in the global age, the production of new localities resembles almost a kind of
survival game, the activities of artists and curators from different locations forming a
daily-changing global scene. This process internally challenges and alters the estab-
lished definition and boundary of art itself, because it tends to be multi-disciplinary,
trans-cultural, and an intervention of visual art that makes a new relationship
between the private and public sphere. Considering overall transitional changes in
the established definition and boundary of art, I attempt to address several points in
regard to the problematic of exhibition making from critical perspectives and the
changing role of the curator based on personal experiences and thoughts as an
independent curator over the last ten years.

As an independent curator
As an independent curator, my experience and knowledge has not been outlined
through art academy and curatorial studies. There were no curatorial programs until
the mid-1990s and there are still no adequate programs in or outside the academic art
system in Korea. This perhaps reflects the situation in other Asian countries. I studied
sociology and aesthetics in the mid-1980s, when the anti-autocratic, anti-capitalist and
the South and North Korea unification movements were intense. From 1989 to 1993,
we formed an art criticism study group, studying various disciplines such as media
study, literary theory, art criticism and theory, commodity aesthetics, and institution
analysis in terms of Marxism and Poststructuralism. We had regular lengthy meetings
among thirty or so young members. This experience was considered much more impor-
tant than the academic system for young students during the 1980s, a period of
drastic student and labor-led movements, when streets and universities were swamped
with police-fired teargas. These autodidactic communities often operated in ways that

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were in marked contrast—hence in a way “counter” to—class-based and hierarchical

communities. These study groups were likewise distinguished by their promotion of
non-hierarchical, non-instrumentalized, or peer-to-peer learning, while at the same
time they engaged in broader issues concerning knowledge production, ownership,
and circulation. At the time, these progressive artists and critics, who prepared
themselves for a fight with the “leviathan in sheep’s clothing” (or market ideology),
had to review their suppositions, alternatives, and strategies in order to speak to the
current times and effect change. Rather than seeing culture as a total system, they
conceived of it as a battleground for active arguments, or as a locus for various praxes
and resistances. The progressive art movement, armed with more sophisticated politico-
cultural strategies, had to embrace all the implications that were preciously rejected and
to show flexibility in adjusting itself to the new situation it confronted.
The 2nd Gwangju Biennale offered the chance for these kinds of issues and
questions to be raised and addressed. When I was working on the Biennale in 1997
(which included working with architects, photographers, and visual artists), my
interest was to explore the comprehensive relationship found between a conceptual
diagram and visual art from Deleuzean and poststructuralist perspectives. The
primary goal of this exploration was to dissolve the confrontational relationship
between the progressive theories of first world and the cultural politics of third
world. Despite the fact that these progressive theories have legitimacy in anti-
modernism movements, it was not clear whether so-called post-modern theories
would be capable of contributing political resistance against eurocentricism or if they
were just another reflection of hegemony of the west. These issues were put on the
table during a symposium in which the participants expressed various viewpoints,
including the opinion that the unified categories of nation, class, sex, culture, and
languages should be rearticulated in the indeterminate, hybrid, interstitial, and
negotiated space. This biennale, which attempted to link several topics in cultural
studies after the 1980s and contemporary works of art, explored a way to deconstruct
a hierarchical dualism that strengthened the regime of modernization. I proposed five
themes to the participating curators: speed/water, space/fire, power/metal,
hybrid/wood, becoming/earth, under the title Unmapping the Earth. The five curators
and I intended to make an unfamiliar pool, a huge visual machine of cultural differences
in the global-local matrix. The thing that interested me, in making a complex exhibition,
was how each curator defined his own space and how we compose “inter space”—
the cutting edge of translation and negotiation among different cultures.

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Curatorial Space
Today, curatorial space appears to form the situational and/or ideological battle-
ground for visual practices, which is in turn related to how this space is produced and
reproduced through social praxis and processes. In Henri Lefebvre’s The Production
of Space, the author draws an important and, moreover, still topical conclusion on
how space is articulated in western culture: “Space is not a container without content,
a Kantian a priori, or an abstract mathematical continuum independent of human
subjectivity and agency.”1 In pre-modern space, things within it are assigned a place
along a predominantly vertical axis. Modern space, on the contrary, is Euclidean,
horizontal, infinitely extensible, and therefore, in principle, boundless. Now we
understand that space is not politically a neutral container (or simply context) within
which social activities take place. In regard to its use, rights, or intervention, space
goes beyond treating the subordinates as passive recipients of “occupying.” Curators
observe and experience the plurality of space through contestation and negotiation
in the curatorial process. Therefore, curatorial space is often called the situational,
relational, contested, differential, interstitial and nomadic space. In the spirit of the
Situationists, Deleuze designates in his A Thousand Plateaus the trajectory of the
same space as a nomadic aesthetics: “It is a space of affects, more than of properties.
It is haptic, rather than optical perception. It is intensive, rather than extensive. It is
based on symptoms and evaluations, rather than measures and properties. …its
orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation: it operates step by
step.”2 Throughout the act of composing a space and exploring inter-relations within
it, a space of affects can be brought to life, and a space becomes a real world, society,
and experiment. The role of the curator does not lie in contemplating the mortality
of values of art or in reflecting on history. In order to arouse becoming, he negoti-
ates, communicates and arbitrates with various kinds of people, including politicians,
city officials, businessmen, collectors, and urban planners. He attempts to find a way
to construct his own set of values in the present tense. We have to challenge our
conventional way of thinking and expand our practice beyond our comfort zones. As
the Situationists emphasized, the achievement of an art exhibition implies going
beyond the boundaries of art, bringing creativity and adventure into the critique and
liberation of every aspect of life; and first of all into challenging the submissive con-
ditioning that prevents people from creating their own adventures, suggesting there
is no world waiting to be created and experimented. The curator proposes questions.
Questions are invented, like anything else. Here, the art of constructing a problem

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is important; you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. Such

questioning attempts to be context-sensitive with a twist and, if necessary, going in and
trying to turn things in another direction. Context-sensitivity is about acknowledging
the character of something and at the same time being able to swing that character
around somehow.3 However, the act of questioning tends to direct us toward the
future or toward the past. We are accustomed to considering history as a means of
thinking. Despite the fact that curating takes its departure point from history and it is
inevitably historicized, it is not historical. Drawing from James Joyce, who said “History
is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up,” history isn’t experimental, but is
just a totality of negative conditions that enables experimenting with something
beyond history. However, history acquires another dimension when it serves as a set
of preconditions to articulate cultural difference or when it is recycled to be re-histori-
cized from anti-institutional or anti-academic perspectives. For instance, since the
1960s, many curators organized a-historical exhibitions as a critique of modernism, and
many biennales take their subject matter from this tradition. Exhibition making is about
constructing the in-between space that carries the burden of the meaning of cultural
difference in the present tense. To borrow Homi Bhabha’s term, it is about creating a
“Third Space.”4 Third Space therefore ensures that cultural signs are not fixed but can
be appropriated and reread. It is where pseudo-cultural diversity can be ruptured and
where only the “inter” space can exist.

Geographical vs. Historical

We are living in a post-Utopian epoch of reformism that seeks change within what exists, instead
of changer la vie. But many transformations are taking place in silence. Part of them came out
of Lampedusan strategy from power establishments, aimed to change so that everything remains
the same. Power today doesn’t strive to confront diversity, but to control it.
—Gerardo Mosquera5

Adding on the previous points, to me exhibition making is not about history as

discourses, but about a continual process of deconstructing history and of articulating
the forgotten, hidden, and excluded elements. An exhibition is becoming itself.
“Becoming is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not of it. In itself it has
neither beginning nor end but only a milieu. It is thus more geographical than histor-
ical.”6 Geography literally means the action of drawing (graphy) on the earth (geo).
Locality which is marked by “now here” is another side of the coin of globalization
marked by “nowhere.” In 2004, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN,

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organized a thought-provoking exhibition, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a

Global Age. This exhibition took an in-depth, multi-disciplinary look at how contem-
porary art and culture are defined and presented in the global context. It was also in
homage to what Szeemann identified in 1969, not only in terms of what artists were
doing but in terms of the methodology and the language of exhibitions. The exhibition
title was taken from Harald Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form, which reflected
the major change in the west that took place in the late 1960s. In most cases, what
is borrowed is the sign, and not the total meaning, from the standpoint of the user.
Transmitting an idea, a model, or a spatial habit causes a message to transform,
allowing it to be somewhat meaningful for receivers in their own context. When
Attitudes Become Form was a very important exhibition that signaled the beginning
of international exhibitions, but also the peak of Eurocentrism. The artists involved in
When Attitudes Become Form were almost exclusively from the United States and
Europe. This exhibition was seminal in that it highlighted shifts in practice that are
still very active today, framed the way institutions and curators worked, and identified
a very specific range of aesthetics. The neutrality of the white cube as we know it in
terms of the museum and gallery space is closely linked to a history of European
essentialism and universalism that goes back to the Enlightenment. Szeemann’s
practice and the artists he was bringing to the fore started to challenge that
assumption of neutrality. There is, I hope, a continuation of that critique in the work
we curators are doing today. Geographically, we are changing our own latitude, and
looking at other latitudes. And we are also giving ourselves latitude with regards to the
way the institution of curating functions. Paulo Herkenhoff, one of the curators of the
exhibition was attracted to Szeemann’s exhibition subtitle Live in Your Head. Looking at
the way art practice has developed over the last ten years, Herkenhoff liked the idea of
substituting “world” for “head”: Live in your world. The world is increasingly
entering artwork as subject and material and more and more artists are trying to
address issues in our world in a responsible way. Focusing on the specificity of places
and the singularity of artists and their practices, How Latitudes Become Forms disrupts
the idea of curatorial practice as tourism, cultural shopping, or the researching of
“token artists” for geopolitical purposes. The etymology and meaning of the word
latitude is a transverse dimension: breadth, width as opposed to length, also occa-
sionally spaciousness. Unlike the old Northern Hemispheric system of compiling
“world surveys,” which occasionally incorporated artists from Latin America or
Africa as long as they lived in metropolitan cities, curating a show such as How

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Latitudes Become Forms required actual traveling and personal engagement by the
curators. It was not a geographic survey attempting to sum up such a multitude of
“local places.” Rather, it was a constellation comprising “localizations” of artistic
practice developed by the individual experience of each curator. It presented not
a homogenization but a poetical semblance of the parcours. If it aims for any
“semblance of a whole,” it is by understanding its own potentiality and limitations
as a contrast to the old western “universalism” or the mechanics of multiculturalist
inclusiveness. It grasps places/latitudes/longitudes without leveling cultural differences.

Curator as Writer
The recent debates on the notion of “Curator as…” speak of a welcome self-reflex-
ivity and plurality of approach. Conventionally, the curator has been expected to be
a mediator and an interpreter of art works. However, with increasing numbers of
exhibitions that rely heavily on contexts, the curator actually functions as an author.
Today, it is easy to see the arrival of “curator as artist/exhibition designer” (Harald
Szeemann’s term) or “curator as producer” (Hans Ulrich Obrist’s term), as a new
group of curators, members of the intellectual community attracting artists with
diverse cultural backgrounds, begins to form as exhibitions are being opened up into
the social sphere. They challenge the traditional boundary of curating by reshaping
the exhibition space and recreating the relationship with the viewer. They are eager
to suggest new ways of engaging with artworks and they attempt to present the
exhibition not as a closed form but as an open space where bureaucratic systems and
conventional ideals can be questioned. In a recent essay for frieze, Robert Storr said,
“I don’t think curators are artists. And if they insist, then they will ultimately be
judged bad curators as well as bad artists.”7 Such a position turns a blind eye
towards the line of flight or conversions that can emerge between the two positions.
By getting tied up in the infinite explanation of the interpretation that there is some-
thing offensive in the curator’s role, such a position ironically ends up reinforcing the
idea of curator-as-king, or as forming the majority party within an established order.
Recent changes in the definition of curatorial practices often come across
in expressions such as “curator as artist” or “curator as producer.” This phenomenon
is sometimes considered a manifestation of artist-envy. These criticisms can be used
as a defense mechanism of a continual preoccupation of dominant power and its
social, psychological, and educational production. The phenomenon of “curator as
artist” should not be understood as an attempt to occupy the privileged position of

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the artist. To me, “curator as artist” comes out of an attempt to invent new devices
that can generate different readings of artists and art works. Therefore the relation
between curator and artist is not about imitation or mimicry. The question should
have nothing to do with the character of this or that exclusive group; it has to do
with the transversal relations that ensure that any effects produced in some particular
way can always be produced by other means. It is a strange business: each of them
finds a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in deper-
sonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to
the intensities running through them. With the curator as artist (such as Harald
Szeemann) or the artist as curator (as in Maurizio Cattelan, who was curator of the
Berlin Biennale), there are attempts at creating new life and discovering new
weapons. It is problematic when an exhibition is reduced to an individual curator,
and the works of art within the exhibition take on goals identical to an individual’s
(thus rendering interpretation important!). This is why Modernist art abounds in
manifestos, in ideologies, in theories of art production, at the same time as in
personal conflicts, in perfecting of perfections, in neurotic toadying, in narcissistic
tribunals. In reality, curating is not an end in itself, precisely because life is not
something personal. Rather, the aim of curating is to carry life into the state of a
non-personal power. The minimum real unit of an art exhibition is not the work, the
idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage
that produces time-space images, speeds, lights, and utterances. The assemblage
is co-functioning, “sympathy,” symbiosis. Sympathy is different from the claims of
the monopoly of being “right.” It is not a vague feeling of respect but the exertion
of bodies’ love or hatred toward each other. The author is first of all a spirit. But the
writer is a body operating with a total nervous system. Here we can distinguish two
types of curators. The curator as author is a subject of an exhibition (or work) but the
curator as writer—someone who is not an author and/or liberated from the politics
of the author system—is not the subject. Harald Szeemann, as the pioneer of inventing
the notion of “master-narrative” in exhibition making, has been admired as well as
criticized. I consider him as an exemplary figure of the curator as writer, because
he was a real man of war in making all the elements of a non-homogeneous set
converge. The multiple is not only what has many parts, but what folds in many
ways. He was original in the way he could make one multiplicity pass into another.

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Co-curator System
Biennales today attempt to create containers for cultural translation and meeting
points, while emphasizing their locality. Here, subject and object lose their stable
status. Hierarchies of the west and non-west disappear, at least on the surface.
Subject and object begin to reveal themselves in relation to others, their conflicts and
contradictions. After the ideologies of modernity (local vs. global, west vs. non-west
and center vs. margin) began to be challenged, the need for solving the problems of
unequal cultural exchanges and cultural translations has become an urgent matter;
in the age of culture on the border, collaboration becomes inevitable. Paralleling
collaboration exercised by the CEO of multi-national corporations, curators have
begun to argue for plural authorship, declaring the value of negotiation and the
social intervention of art. After Manifesta 1’s invention of the co-curator system
(1996) and the 2nd Gwangju Biennale’s adoption of the system (even Harald
Szeemann accepted the suggestion of the co-curator system in 1997), it is no longer
universal to concentrate complete and total power upon one authoritative curator.
James Clifford argues, “the very idea of plural authorship challenges a deep western
identification of any text’s order with the intention of a single author.”8 In art, plural
authorship, which heavily depends on “post-” discourse, contributed to the advent
of “global art” and solidarity among a certain group of curators. However, it is
important to note that the co-curator system should not be understood as plural as
opposed to singular. Despite the fact that the co-curator system is practically necessary,
it should not be confused with the notion of multiplicity in exhibition making.
Multiplicity is not determined by the number of curators, artists or works of art.
Multiplicity does not mean collection of individual components. It indicates some-
thing that is occurring at interstice. For instance, the Lyon Biennale by the Dijon
Consortium in 2003 was very successful as an embodiment of the notion of multi-
plicity. It inspired the viewer to be able to experience interstice phenomenologically.
Most biennales are not successful in realizing multiplicity. In the information era,
we often attempt to repaint art and its audience with the colors of opinions and
communication. Borrowing from Deleuze, it is a spirit of creation that we are lacking,
not of communication. Therefore, the number of curators in exhibition making
does not have to be a primary concern. A single curator can make a multiplicity and
move into another one without depending on curatorial friendship.

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Cautionary Tales

Homogenization of the Biennale

Curators are often blamed and asked to take responsibility for the homogenization
of Biennales. It is true that curators have contributed to this phenomenon to a
certain degree but it is more important to understand the structural causes that
lead to homogenization. Most host cities attempt to be part of the transnational
global culture through biennales and these efforts often result in blurring the
differences among different cultures and contexts. Revealing cultural differences,
as opposed to contributing to national or collective identities, which have authentic
tradition or history, contradicts the ideology of the nation state and the nature of
bureaucracy. International curators who are invited for biennales do not have
immediate power to resolve the gap and struggles between the binary poles. The
formation of biennales depends on whom the curator gets to work with in the host
city or what kind of partnership becomes available. In fact, international biennales
in Asian countries are understood as part of the cultural industries by politicians, city
officials, local people, and even by local artists; they are not interested in transnational,
global contexts or in the issues of contemporary art. Those issues are for a few
specialists. The slogan of viewer participation and education appears to have
changed the format of biennales, however, it is local politics and their expectations,
experience and ethical judgments that influence the contents, direction, and success
of a biennale. They expect the biennale to contribute to the publicity of their city and
local artists in a short period of time despite the fact that the local contemporary art
system is extremely weak. Biennale curators are the ones who understand these
expectations best and are meant to be an agent of “global art” anywhere, while
providing what they are asked for. They adequately deliver what is expected while
creating new cultural issues and networking among major art institutions, emphasizing
viewer participation and relations with the local community. In doing so, they construct
a new international art language. Biennale exhibitions constantly reproduce certain
notions such as hybridity, displacement, difference, marginality, other, representation.
It is hard to deny the fact that the group of biennale curators has been successful in
attacking modernist viewpoints based on historicism, universal aesthetics, and the
hierarchy of an existing system. Their criticism and activities have also generated
confusion and conflict and affected non-western art scenes where the division
between the west and non-west, between the original and the copy and between
the center and the margin was stable. Their activities have gradually been embraced
by major art institutions around the world and they are considered as apostles of

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“global art”; their solidarity signified the symbolic battlefront of global art. Whether
it is voluntarily created or not, the co-curator system, however, tends to strengthen
the inner circle.

Conclusion

A traitor to the world of dominant significations, and to the established order. … The trickster
claims to conquer a territory, or even to introduce a new order. The trickster has plenty of future,
but no becoming whatsoever. The priest, the soothsayer, is a trickster, but the experimenter is a
traitor. The statesman or the courtier is a trickster, but the man of war (not a marshal or a general)
is a traitor. … Many people dream of being traitors. They believe in it, they believe that they are.
But they are just petty tricksters. …What trickster has not said to himself: ‘Oh, at last I am a real
traitor.’ But what traitor does not say to himself at the day’s end: ‘After all, I was nothing but a
trickster.’ For it is difficult to be a traitor; it is to create. One has to lose one’s identity, one’s face,
in it. One has to disappear, to become unknown.
—Gilles Deleuze with Claire Parnet9

In order to avoid being a trickster, a curator has to break down major languages and
apparatuses that always attempt to engulf multiplicity into the system. Then, the
curatorial space will become a sympathetic world for those who are willing to walk
the path of becoming, not power and not counterpart. Maurizio Cattelan and the
curatorial team of the 4th Berlin Biennale created a unique exhibition by making the
best out of the characteristics of the venue: the Jewish Girls’ school and its vernacular
and ruined characteristics. Works of art dissolved into the historical place and created
a new landscape. They were presented as marks of death on a human face whose
life has reached its limits. Curators transformed the artists into unknown singers so
that the author disappears and the works of art become the refrain that is success-
fully repeated to create a particular song. In fact, all minorities are the ones whose
faces are erased. As we walk into them, we enter signs which escape translation. This
biennale does not consider culture as knowledge and does not attempt to invent any
discourses. I believe that exhibition making can be an exciting and different process
by which the world, class, and the majority one belongs to can be betrayed.
Curatorial courses often tend to teach how to join the majority and how to acquire
the status of a star curator. We teach and learn how to adapt the trickster mechanism.

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Cautionary Tales

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), p. 483.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum International Publishing Group
Ltd., 2004), pp. 544-546.
3. Maria Lind, “On the Edge: Art, Architecture, Design,” Lier & Boog - Series of Philosophy of Art and Art
Theory, Volume 16: Exploding Aesthetics.
4. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), Chapter 8.
5. Gerardo Mosquera, "Alien-Own/Own-Alien: Globalization and Cultural Difference," Boundary 2, Volume
29, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp. 163-173.
6. Gilles Deleuze with Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 110.
7. Robert Storr, “Reading Circle,” frieze, issue 93, September, 2005.
8. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 51.
9. Gilles Deleuze with Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 41.

Translated by Jiyoon Moon.

Young Chul Lee is currently associate professor of Kaywon School of Art and Design and the exhibition and
program director at Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea. He was Artistic Director of the 2nd
Gwangju Biennale (1997) and has curated a number of exhibitions including the 2nd Busan Biennale (2000),
D.I.Y. Beyond Instruction at Total Museum, Seoul (2003), Mr. Moon on the moon, Stranger than paradise,
and You are My Sunshine at Total Museum (2004), Wonderful Travel Agency, Borusan Gallery, Istanbul,
Turkey (2004), The 1st Anyang Public Art Project, Anyang, Korea (2005), and The 3rd Echigo-tsmari Art
Triennale, Japan (2006). He has written on art and served on a number of visual art juries. In 2001 he received
The Curator of the Year award from the World Curator Association and in 2004 The Best Curator Selected
by Curators, Art in Culture.

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Additional Reading

Alexander, Victoria D. Sociology of the Arts. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Arthur C. Danto. After the End of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Attar, Hamdi el. Exhibition curating & city promotion in cultural activities under globalization.
Taipei: Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, 2005.

Bauer, Ute Meta. A new spirit in curating? Stuttgart : Kunstlerhaus, 1992.

Benjamin Buchloch, "Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition," a discus-
sion with Francesco Bonami, Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Martha
Rosler, and Yinka Shonibare, mod. James Meyer, intro. Tim Griffin, Artforum 52, no. 3
(November 2003): 155.

Berube, Michael, ed. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Brenson, Michael. "The Curator's Moment" Art journal. 57, no. 4, (1998): 16-27.

Buchloh, B H D and Jean Hubert Martin. "The whole earth show." Art in America. New York
77 (5), May 1989: 150-159, 211-213.

Byvanck, Valentijn, ed. Conventions in Contemporary Art: Lectures and Debates. Rotterdam:
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2002.

Carbonell, Bettina Messias, ed. Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Carrier, David. Danto and his critics: art history, historiography and After the end of art.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1998.

Carrier, David. Principles of art history writing. University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991.

Carrier, David. Writing about visual art. New York: Allworth Press, 2003.

Charlesworth, J. J. "Curating Doubt - Curators are caught between a rock of narcissism and a
hard place of critical paralysis." Art monthly. no. 294, (2006): 101-8.

Cooke, Lynne, ed., Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art No. 3. New York: DIA Art
Foundation, 2004.

Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture. London: Phaidon, 1998.

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Cautionary Tales

Crimp, Douglass. On the Museum's Ruins. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

"Curatorial Practice for the 90s" Flash art. no. 191, (1996): 50-3.

Danto, Arthur Coleman. The wake of art: essays: criticism, philosophy and the ends of taste.
Australia: G+B Arts Int'l, 1998

Drabble, Barnaby, Dorothee Richter and Eva Schmidt, eds. Curating Degree Zero: An
International Curating Symposium. Nurnberg: Verlag Moderne Kunst Nurnberg, 1999.

Fahy, Anne. Collections Management. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Fisher, Jean, ed. Global visions: towards a new internationalism in the visual arts. London: Kala
Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994.

Fowle, Kate and Deborah Smith, eds. To be continued: contemporary art in practice in public
places. London: Batsford, 2002.

Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. New
York: Routledge, 1996.

Greenberg, Reesa. “Identity exhibitions: from Magiciens de la terre to Documenta 11.” Art
Journal, Spring, 2005.

Groys, Boris. Artforum December 1999.

Groys, Boris. The Art Judgment Show. ed. Barbara Vanderlinden Brussels: Roomade, 2001.

Harding, Anna, ed. Curating the Contemporary Art Museum and Beyond. London: Academy
Editions, 1997 (Art + Design Series, no. 52).

Hawthorne, Christopher, Mark Schapiro and Andras Szanto, eds. The new gate keepers: emerg-
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Columbia University, 2003.

Hickey, Dave. "On beauty - Buying the world" Daedalus: proceedings of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. 131, no. 4, (2002): 69-88.

Hickey, Dave. Air guitar: essays on art & democracy. Los Angeles: Art issues Press; New York:
Distributed by D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers), 1997.

Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles: Art issues Press, 1993.

Hiller, Susan and Sarah Martin, eds. The producers: contemporary curators in conversation. 5.
Gateshead: BALTIC, 2002.

Hirsh, Mary Rose. Distrusting art: the conflicted mission of curatorial practice. Dissertation:
Thesis (M.A.)--School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2004.

Hlavajova, Maria and Jill Winder, eds. Who if not we should at least try to imagine the future
of all this? Amsterdam: Artimo, 2004.

120
 Additional Reading

Hoffmann, Jens and Gioni, Massimiliano. "New Voices in Curating" Flash art. no. 222, (2002):
57-61.

Hoffmann, Jens. "New Voices in Curating Part Two" Flash art. no. 228, (2003): 57-61.

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London; New York:
Routledge, 1992.

Hughes, Lindsay. "Do we need new spaces for exhibiting contemporary art? A critique of cura-
torial practice in relation to the viewer's engagement with contemporary art" Journal of Visual
Art Practice 4, no. 1 (2005): 29-38.

Hutchinson, M. "Curating" Art monthly. no. 277, (2004): 44.

Huttner, Per ed. Curatorial Mutiny. Stockholm: Farringer Curatorial Mutiny, 2002.

Jacob, Mary Jane, ed. Culture in Action. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.

Kaptein, Helen. The changing role of the museum curator. Thesis (M. Museum Studies)--Deakin
University, Victoria, 1997.

Kapur, Geeta. “Globalisation and culture.” Third text: Third World perspectives on contempo-
rary art & culture. London No. 39, summer 1997: 21-38.

Kapur, Geeta. When was modernism: essays on contemporary cultural practice in India. New
Delhi: Tulika, 2000.

Kocar, Zoya and Simon Leung, eds. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004.

Kortun, Vasif and Hanru Hou. How latitudes become forms: art in a global age. Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2003.

Krysa, Joasia, ed. Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network
Systems. Brooklyn, NY : Autonomedia, 2006.

Kuoni, Carin, ed. Words of Wisdom: A Curator's Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art. New York:
Independent Curators International, 2001.

Macdonald, Sharon, ed. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Marcus, George E. and Fred R. Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and
Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 1995.

Marincola, Paula, ed. Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility. Philadelphia:

Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001.

Marstine, Janet, ed. New Museum Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Martin, Jean-Hubert ; Zolghadr, Tirdad "Debate: Ethnocentrism" Frieze: contemporary art and
culture. no. 88, (2005): 72-3.

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Cautionary Tales

Martin, Jean-Hubert. "Art in a multi-ethnic society." Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, 20

February-30 April 1995.

Napack, Jonathan. “Alternative visions: in a provocative curatorial gesture, this year's Gwangju
Biennale was largely dedicated to-and determined by-independent artist groups and alternative
spaces - Report From Gwangju - Critical Essay.” Art in America, 90, no. 11, November 2002, p.
94-122.

Newman, Michael and Jon Bird, eds. Rewriting Conceptual Art. London: Reaktion Books, 1999.

Noever, Peter, ed. The Discursive Museum. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001.

O’Neill, P. "Curating Degree Zero Archive" Art monthly. no. 288, (2005): 40-41.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Rehberg, Vivian and Boeri, Stefano. "Moving Interventions: Curating at
Large" Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 2 (2003): 147-160.

Phaidon Press, eds. Fresh Cream. London: Phaidon, 2000.

Pick, John and Malcolm Hey Anderton. Arts Administration. London; New York: E & FN Spon,
1996.

Putnam, James. Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. New York: Thames and Hudson,
2001.

Rectanus, Mark W. Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Rugoff, Ralph. "Rules of the Game," frieze vol. 44 (Jan-Feb 1999): 46-49.

Rugoff, Ralph. You talking to me?: On curating group shows that give you a chance to join the
group. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2003.

Schubert, Karsten. The Curator's Egg: the evolution of the museum concept from the French
Revolution to the present day. London: One-Off Press, 2000.

Selz, Peter Howard and Kristine Stiles, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A
Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Smiers, Joost. Arts Under Pressure: Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of Globalization.
London & NY: Zed Books Ltd., 2003.

Smith, Paul and Carolyn Wilde, eds. A Companion to Art Theory. Oxford; Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Strauss, David Levi. Between dog & wolf: essays on art and politics in the twilight of the millen-
nium. New York: Autonomedia, 1999.

Strauss, David Levi. Between the eyes: essays on photography and politics. New York: Aperture,
2003.

122
 Additional Reading

Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice As Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications Inc, 2005.

The Manual of New Curatorship looks set to define curatorial roles in the 1990s. Museums jour-
nal. 92, no. 10, (October 1992): 50.

The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist (REVOLVER-Archiv fur aktuelle Kunst,
Frankfurt), 2004.

Thea, Carolee, ed. Foci: Interivews with Ten International Curators. New York: apexart, 2001.

Thomas, Catherine, ed. The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice, Banff: Banff
Centre Press, 2002.

Timms, Peter. What's Wrong With Contemporary Art? Sydney: University of New South Wales
Press, 2004.

Townsend, Melanie, ed. Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, Banff: Banff Centre
Press, 2003.

Wade, Gavin, ed. Curating in the 21st Century. Walsall, England: Walsall Local History Centre,
2001.

Weil, Stephen E. Making Museums Matter. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
2002.

White, Peter, ed. Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future. Banff: Banff Centre
Press, 1996.

Witcomb, Andrea. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London; New York:
Routledge, 2003.

Wu, Chin-tao. Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s. London and NY:
Verso, 2002.

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Cautionary Tales

Cover Image Credits

Front cover, top row, left to right:

Magiciens de la Terre installation image courtesy Jean-Hubert Martin; Photo: Jaeques Faujour

Installation view of Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism curated by Dave

Hickey. Foreground (reflected in mirror): Jessica Stockholder, Bird Watching, 2001; Darryl
Montana, Judy's Garden, 2000. Background (through doorway): Pia Fries, quinto, 1994-1995;
James Lee Byars, Eros, 1992; Bridget Riley, Evoe I, 1999-2000. Photo: Herbert Lotz

documenta1 installation image © documenta Archiv Photographer: Gunther Becker

Utopia Station exhibition installation image courtesy Hans Ulrich Obrist

Front cover, bottom row, left to right:

The Art of 9/11 installation of exhibition curated by Arthur Danto at apexart 2005

When Attitudes Become Form (1969) exhibition installation image courtesy Kunsthalle Bern

From Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001 co-curated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha for the
exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, 2001. View in
the Turbine Hall: Sen Kapadia, Pandal (2001, cloth and bamboo site-specific cinema hall
mounted with a hand-painted Bollywood film poster); foreground, Kausik Mukhopadhyay,
15-part, Assisted Ready-Mades: Chairs (2000, mixed media). Photo: Anthony Stokes

Cities on the Move exhibition installation image courtesy Hans Ulrich Obrist

124
 Cover Image Credits

Back cover, left to right, top row:

When Attitudes Become Form (1969) exhibition installation image courtesy Kunsthalle Bern

Something Happened installation of exhibition curated by Sally Berger at apexart 2000

2003 Summer Program installation of exhibition curated by Katy Siegel at apexart 2003

A view of the south wall in Room 3, in “Enartete Kunst,” Munich 1937, “Degenerate Art” the
fate of the Avant-Guarde in Nazi Germany, 1991; Photograph courtesy of Museum
Associates/LACMA

Back cover, left to right, bottom row:

Magiciens de la Terre installation image courtesy Jean-Hubert Martin; Photo: Jaeques Faujour

Mixology installation of exhibition curated by Dave Hickey at apexart 1999

Between the Lines installation of exhibition curated by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt at apexart 2003

From Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001 co-curated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha for the
exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, 2001. View in
the Turbine Hall: Vivan Sundaram, Gun Carriage from the installation Memorial (1993-2000,
photograph, acrylic sheet, iron, glass, steel). Far wall: detail of Atul Dodiya, Missing, detail
(2000, enamel paint on metal roller shutters and laminate boards). Photo: Anthony Stokes

125