Curating Art Now

By Lilian Cameron

Curating Art Now is a timely reflection on the practice of curating and the role of the art curator following a period of rapid change. Curating has a pivotal position in the art world today: it is embedded in the identity and expertise of the museum and plays an ever-increasing role in the commercial art sector too. Current curatorial practice encompasses a wide range of activities, from the care of collections to the presentation of large-scale contemporary biennials. Curating has also migrated into the fields of fashion, music, and lifestyle, where the concept of 'curated content' is applied to everything from sneakers to holidays. Given curating's ubiquity as a term and expansion as a practice, what is the state of the curatorial profession today? Lilian Cameron's lively review considers the recent phenomenon of the artist-as-curator and its impact on the traditional curatorial role; speculates on the future of the global super-curator; assesses the opportunities and challenges presented by digital curating and online exhibitions; and discusses curatorial engagement with questions of diversity, accessibility, and decolonisation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781848224841

Book preview

Front Cover of Curating Art NowHalf Title of Curating Art Now

Hot Topics In The Art World

Published in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Series Editors

Jeffrey Boloten and Juliet Hacking, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London

This series of short, thought-provoking and sometimes controversial books debates key issues of current relevance to art-world professionals working in both the private and public sectors. The texts give wider visibility to some critical areas of professional art-world practice, considering what disruptors are challenging the status quo and how the art world is likely to be transformed over the next decades as a result.

International Series Advisory Board

Georgina Adam, journalist, author and art market Editor-at-Large of The Art Newspaper

Alia Al-Senussi, cultural strategist, patron, academic and lecturer

Touria El Glaoui, Founding Director of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (London – New-York – Marrakech)

Jos Hackforth-Jones, former CEO and Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London

Louise Hamlin, Director of the Art Business Conference (London – New York – Shanghai)

Llucià Homs, Director of Talking Galleries, Barcelona

Zehra Jumabhoy, academic, critic and curator

Julie Lomax, CEO at a-n, The Artists Information Company, UK

Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami

Philip Tinari, Director and CEO of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Book Title of Curating Art Now

First published in 2022 by Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Lund Humphries

Huckletree Shoreditch

Alphabeta Building

18 Finsbury Square

London EC2A 1AH

UK

www.lundhumphries.com

Curating Art Now © Lilian Cameron, 2022

All rights reserved

ISBN (hardback): 978-1-84822-483-4

ISBN (eBook PDF): 978-1-84822-484-1

ISBN (eBook ePub): 978-1-84822-485-8

ISBN (eBook Mobi): 978-1-84822-486-5

A Cataloguing-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images in this book. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers.

Lilian Cameron has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work.

Copy edited by Michela Parkin

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Set in Caslon Pro and Sofia Pro

Printed in Estonia

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Interesting times

1Knowledge and access

2Changing worlds

3Back home to the museum

4Artists’ takeover

5Digital (r)evolutions

Conclusion: Opportunity

Notes

Further Reading

Foreword

In this study, Dr Lilian Cameron, specialist in Curating, Museums and Gallery studies, addresses the state of art curating now – and the particular pressures upon it. Cameron deftly charts the evolution of curation (both in the art institution and independent of it) as a course of study and a profession and, among other themes, traces the emergence of that particular feature of today’s contemporary art world, the star-curator.

As Cameron demonstrates, the term ‘curator’ has a particular resonance in our social media age. It invokes an autonomous, creative labour that transcends the corporate grind and makes leading curators into significant art world influencers. In charting the recent history of contemporary art curating, Cameron traces how the symbolic value attached to curation can overshadow that accorded to the artists and their artworks. The romanticised idea of the star-curator belies the realities of curating both inside and outside the museum, not least the contribution of the many art workers who are involved in staging such an event.

Arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore existing tensions and contradictions in the role, Cameron ably demonstrates that the curation of art is subject to those same issues found elsewhere in the art world, such as a lack of access to validating institutions for those without privileged backgrounds. The extraordinary conditions imposed by the pandemic and the creative responses to them in the art world, Cameron argues, have brought us to the point where change is possible.

Jeffrey Boloten and Juliet Hacking, April 2022

Acknowledgements

All my thanks to Juliet Hacking and Lucy Myers for editorial support in shaping the text. A further thanks to my excellent colleagues and guest lecturers, especially to the following who read draft materials for this book: Eliza Tan, Marcus Verhagen and Amy Mechowski. Thank you to the many talented students I have worked with at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and whose insights have informed my thinking. A final thanks to my family for their support and encouragement and most especially to Byron Villis.

Introduction: Interesting times

In May 2019 the 58th Biennale Arte exhibition opened in Venice, directed by Ralph Rugoff. The Director’s curatorial vision was abbreviated in Rugoff’s title for the exhibition, which was a phrase rather than an abstract statement, addressing the audience directly: May You Live in Interesting Times. Apparently taken from an ancient Chinese proverb but in fact fabricated in the 20th century and used by diplomats and politicians in the west, the title stood, according to Rugoff, for the tumultuous era of ‘fake news’, economic uncertainty and ecological crisis of the 2010s.¹

For many curators, and certainly those involved in the Biennale, 2019 was proving not only interesting, but challenging. The curators of the British, Northern Irish and Welsh pavilions spoke of the urgency of transporting works to Venice prior to the UK leaving the European Union.² The Venezuelan Pavilion did not open in time for the vernissage, on account of political upheaval in that country. Dealer and corporate logos abounded, the visibility of private and commercial sector support indicative of the relative underfunding of the Director’s Exhibition and of the squeeze across the public sector more broadly.³ The Venice Biennale also prompted recurring questions around elitism: the site is prohibitively expensive for both exhibitors and for audiences, many of the latter struggling to stay the necessary length of time in the city to do the show justice. Venice is now also ecologically fragile, a microcosm of global vulnerability to climate change. This was made vividly apparent when a large acqua alta flooded the city, the largest on record since 1966, forcing the Biennale to close temporarily, alongside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana.⁴ Even in mid-2019, the phrase ‘interesting times’ had the sardonic quality of an understatement.

A month later, in December 2019, COVID-19 began to circulate and, in relatively fast succession, museums and galleries shut their doors in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Curators and their colleagues embarked on an intricate exercise of rescheduling shows and renegotiating artwork loans, while making a plethora of digital resources and online exhibitions available to audiences in lieu of real-world viewing. The pandemic was experienced differently in various cities, across art-world sectors and in organisations of different scales. But common to many was an emerging appetite for change, both in curatorial practice as well as institutional structures. This was made urgent and more specific after anti-racism protest highlighted acute disparity between workers of colour and white workers throughout the art world, and between representation of artists of colour and white artists. From social media came calls about how bricks and mortar institutions worked, and who had curatorial power and privilege within them. What followed was a transition in institutional perspective and priorities, in many cases only at the level of optics, but in others progressing to more meaningful change in institutional demographics and curatorial decision-making.

Curators have gained considerable visibility across the art world and even beyond it in recent times. But now the field is going through a period of reckoning as it addresses several important debates. How diverse and inclusive is curating as a field, and how does that inform the art and artists that come to prominence? How possible is it to conduct exploratory, inclusive curatorial work in the challenging economic climate of the early 2020s? What is the extent of a curator’s autonomy within institutions and within the broader financial and societal structures that surround them? And what power dynamics are at work between artists and curators, and where should a curator’s visibility and influence end? Finally, how might digital art and exhibition-making give way to hybrid forms of