Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).
For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).
Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).
Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.
Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.
Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.
Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.
In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.
This essay is the first of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the second, third, and fourth texts.
The Koons Effect Part 1 Thursday, September 11, 2014
Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert J. Hurst Family Gallery (Lower Gallery), New York
Laura Owens is exasperated by the art of Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“It was a look of horror … or a smile,” said Scott Rothkopf, curator of the exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective and moderator of a panel discussion called “The Koons Effect Part 1,” regarding the responses he received when telling others of his research for a retrospective on the artist. Artists were interested in Koons, to his surprise, and he noted that Pierre Huyghe is fascinated by the “story that didn’t get made,” and Andrea Fraser enjoys Koonsian economics. Tino Sehgal finds Rabbit (1986) to be an iconic work, the curator continued, and Kara Walker responds to the advertisements for art magazines from 1988–89.1 For this panel, Rothkopf invited four American artists to discuss what Koons’s work means to them and how it has affected contemporary art.
A striking feature of the individual panelists was generational: Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980) was bold and unhinged in a way that was rebellious and irreverent but also smart. Laura Owens (b. 1970) and Carol Bove (b. 1971) were approaching the cusp of Zenlike wisdom attained by the senior artist Stephen Prina (b. 1954), though with a noticeable distinction: Bove was accepting and positive of ideas contained in the work of Jeff Koons, (b. 1955), but Owens still resisted those qualities of which she does not approve. Such polarization is emblematic of many opinions of the artist.
In a brief presentation, Bove discussed her interest in the sublime and banal, as well as love and democracy. Her fascination with Koons is paradoxical, proposing that our admiration for him is not unlike how the Democrats elected Ronald Reagan as United States president twice. The art world, Bove said, has a taboo regarding mysticism, ignoring or suppressing “direct communication with the godhead.” Art brings powerful experiences in which you lose yourself, she explained, breaking with administrative consciousness. Like many, Bove came to art as a romantic but became a politician who is on high alert for what she called cheesiness, which differs from tackiness, because the concept behind the latter term is cute and forgivable. For her, Koons uses a “high production value to deliver an ecstatic message,” which a thinking art viewer would feel compelled to resist. Bove wondered if hostility to this message—delivered like a Trojan horse—demonstrates a prejudice against new-age spiritualism and even feminism. The art world has turned from poetry to theory, Bove declared, and “the taboo is self-protecting.”
Prina ruminated on his early experiences with the artist: “Things were wide open when I first saw Koons’s work.” Prina’s first encounter was a 1982 group exhibition called A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which included Koons’s New Sheldon Wet/Dry Tripledecker (1982), one of the few objects in a gallery full of painting and photography, Prina noted. A year later he came across more work by Koons in a group show, LA–NY Exchange, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and a few years after that confronted the Luxury and Degradation series at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles. Prina said he received the same “wow” sensation that he had experienced in a 1976 exhibition of contemporary European artists at the Art Institute of Chicago, when he stumbled upon an installation by Marcel Broodthaers.2 Koons’s infamous Banality show at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery in 1988, Prina recalled, took place a relatively small space, perhaps dangerously so with all the fragile porcelain sculpture. Prina’s main thought after leaving the gallery was: “Does Koons hold his audience in contempt?”
With time already running behind, Rothkopf jumped to the open conversation among the panelists, but Wolfson hijacked the talk’s direction, reading from notes on his smartphone that he took earlier that week, when visiting the Whitney exhibition. (If Owens had been allowed to speak, I would have received a better feel for her point of view. During the open conversation she came off as a curmudgeon, but certainly her ideas have more depth than her reactions tonight.) Wolfson’s observations centered on distortion, scale, material, and image. One particularly interesting note was: “The work has humor in play but is never actually funny.” Regarding Koons’s Hanging Heart (Violet/Gold) (1994–2006), Wolfson wrote: “Seeing oneself not from reflection but from inner mind—this is very advanced art.” Neverthess, he observed that the piece is cold and dead.
The open conversation moved rapidly, quickly jumping from topic to topic. Rothkopf compared Koons’s work to Lladró figurines from Spain, a reference he admitted that people younger than fifty probably don’t understand. (It was hilarious to me.) Owens and Bove discussed the latter artist’s Trojan-horse idea, in which a Koons sculpture embodies a particular message, usually that of acceptance, with which Koons distracts you. Bove argued that the allure of the object that holds your attention while something else slips into your mind. For Owens, the production is compelling and full of attention—it is not a distraction. Wolfson refined an idea about two major tenants of Koons’s work—image and material—for which one typically dominates the other within a single piece. Bove characterized a similar notion of images versus picture/graphic. Regarding a work’s message, Wolfson recognized that, through the art, Koons accepts the universe’s indifference.
Prina had been indifferent to reproductions of several works, such as Cat on a Clothesline (Aqua) (1994–2001), but was impressed by them in person. For some artists, he explained, seeing the rear of the work isn’t necessary, but for Koons all sides of a work are important. I noticed this most strikingly with Rothkopf’s installation of the Banality sculptures at the Whitney, which had ample room in front of and behind the works. Returning to a Bove observation, Prina found it interesting that she chose the terms “cheesy” and “tacky” over “kitsch,” which is how many describe Koons’s appropriation of tchotchkes.
“We’re all in it,” Owens exclaimed, irritated by the pervasive conversation about Koons and money (such as his high auction prices), which many critics and writers bring up. Koons is a person who has to maintain a certain lifestyle level, Wolfson responded, suggesting that we perceive him as a fallen angel. Otherwise, he continued, one gets preoccupied with formal problems, which he said nearly every artist deals with. “Art goes away,” Wolfson proclaimed, “What stays is intention.” The trouble with Koons’s stated intentions, his never-ending mantra of acceptance, perfection, and the like (as he expressed in his lecture at the New School one day earlier), allows for any interpretative framework of judgment of his work—whether praise or condemnation—is acceptable. In a brilliant move, Koons leaves the ball in the viewer’s court, trusting him or her to offer meaning, and whatever you think of his art reflects who you are and what you think—not who Koons is or what he thinks. If the artist or his work angers a person for whatever reason, it’s on that person, not the artist. Koons accepts all viewers no matter what, like a benevolent Heavenly Father, and this is how he deflects criticism so well—repelling instead of absorbing it and having it shape him.
Koons is “the artist we deserve” Owens stated. He is also the poster boy for 1980s art—for Reaganomics, the AIDS crisis, and so on—but, as the panelists agreed, he’s also an emblematic artist for every decade since. And Koons’s production continues on and on. Owens said it’s not enough: “We ask the artist, ‘Can we have more?’” Bove agreed: “It’s gone a little hyper mega.” Wolfson claimed that Koons’s work is passive, hinting that it’s us who get riled up over it, for whatever reason. But the work also collapses, has no clarity, and loses agency. “The structure takes over,” Wolfson said, but I’m not sure what he was getting at.
Jordan Wolfson discusses the unfunny work of Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)
During the audience Q&A, the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch observed that the panel didn’t address the issue of celebrity. Koons was well regarded by other artists from the beginning of his career through the early 1990s, Deitch said, but after the artist’s personal and professional involvement with Ilona Staller, a Hungarian-born Italian politician and pornographic actress known as Cicciolina, his peers turned against him.
Similarly, Rothkopf wondered if Koons has any followers—an odd thought considering the panel’s published aim was to bring together “four artists whose work has variously engaged questions of production, value, affect, taste, and display….” I would argue that many artists share Koons’s various approaches, such as serial production, found objects, and a fascination with mass culture, including Haim Steinbach (b. 1944), whom the panelists briefly discussed. Koons might be exemplary of a certain standard of perfection in his process—it’s often said that his expectations for his sculpture exceed that for aerospace industries and the military—but he is far from being a singular voice his approach to art.
Nevertheless, Owens gets nothing from the show and is even sickened by it; she moaned that Koons makes her hate to be an artist. I wanted to shout, “He’s not the only artist out there, Laura!” In response to a question about irony and sincerity, Rothkopf responded by asking if it’s a better moral position if Koons is ironic instead of sincere, hinting that it isn’t, that the latter position is more nefarious.
This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fifth texts.
The Artist-Curator Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Installation view of Kazimir Malevich’s work in 0.10 (1915)
What happens when artists act as curators, organizing exhibitions for museums, commercial galleries, and other venues? Well, they become curators, if for one show only. Is this new? Is it a trend? What advantages and complications result when an artist takes on a different professional role? The third session for the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” simply titled “The Artist-Curator,” explored these ideas and more.
In some ways, the artist as curator is as old as the curatorial professional itself, which developed in tandem with the rise of the modern public museum. Or so I imagine, since someone had to work in the Louvre and at the British Museum two hundred years ago. As the previous session demonstrated, artists organized exhibitions—usually of their own work—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it seems little research has been conducted on curators from that time.
The current session’s moderator, Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center, named a handful of significant artist-curated exhibitions from the last one hundred years: 0.10 in Russia, which featured works by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Lyubov Popova (1915–16); an exhibition of Surrealist objects in the Parisian gallery of Charles Ratton, a dealer of so-called primitive art (1936); Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox, held in several museums across the United States (1969–70); Richard Hamilton’s TheArtist’s Eye in London (1978); the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, whose inaugural event was a curatorial contribution from Scott Burton (1989); Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable at the Brooklyn Museum (1990); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which features an artist, Michelle Grabner, among the three curators.
Installation view of Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox at the RISD Museum in 1970
A talk by the curator Florence Ostende titled “Exhibitions by Artists: Another Occupation?” added another exhibition to Musteata’s list, the International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1938. Ostende then explained how a demand by the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 for a committee of artists with curatorial responsibilities at MoMA was realized (in part) twenty years later through Artist’s Choice; she also noted two exhibitions by the artist Philippe Parreno, Snow Dancing (1995) and Alien Seasons (2002) as being projects that combined aesthetic and curatorial practices. For an important group show called The Uncanny (1993), the artist Mike Kelley rigorously researched his subject and used art-historical methodology, she said. Ostende also cited Jean-Luc Godard’s self-directed installation of Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem (2006) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and its abandoned predecessor, Collage(s) de France: Archaeology of the Cinema, as well as the Museum of American Art in Berlin, as examples of curatorial projects by creative types.
Acting as curators, Ostende told us, artists can subvert rules, turn things upside down, and present a “carnival that mocks the king.” While that may be generally true, and artists having a voice in an institution as powerful as MoMA is certainly important, it’s wrong to assume an artist curator would by nature resist conservative and safe approaches to exhibitions and challenge established categories and histories. After all, think about how often artists, when invited to give a lecture, follow a standard chronological method of presenting their work. It’s not that artists are inherently more imaginative and have more freedom than professional curators. I would expect an art exhibition organized by a lawyer, a plumber, or a biologist to be just as unconventional, even radically so. (Or not, considering the professional basketball player Shaquille O’Neal’s Size DOES Matter in 2010.) Rather, I would argue, institutional conventions, constraints, and inflexibility are factors that inhibit the organizer of an exhibition.
Ostende dated what she called the “decay of the empowerment of the curator” to the 1990s, which is, oddly enough, the decade in which the art world witnessed the rise of empowered curator, if we are to believe the traditional narrative. Perhaps Ostende referred to scholarly minded, museum-based curators in dusty institutions, not to roving agents such as Harald Szeeman and Walter Hopps or globetrotting stars like Okwui Enwezor and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
In a talk titled “Gossip and Ridicule,” the sculptor Carol Bove positioned the artist’s career as a game to be played but wholeheartedly objected to the growing myth of a career as a single project, most crassly realized through the idea that everything an artist does is an artwork, based on the fact that he or she is an artist. In this situation, Bove said, the artist’s life is colonized by the career. “When the going gets professional,” she remarked, “the weird go away.” Her thoughts were especially provocative considering the erosion taking place between Americans’ work and personal lives, many are increasingly expected to be reachable after hours, in addition to the daily nine-to-five schedule.
Bove also said that “lying”—which I interpreted as withholding the truth rather than deliberate deception—is something that artists are allowed to do. Curators, on the other hand, with their budgets, boards, scholarship, and facts, lack this luxury. Nevertheless, she continued, curators lust after the looseness, personality, and potential for abuse that an artist can give to an artwork. Like Ostende, Bove articulated certain qualities that an artist curator can bring to an exhibition, but I reiterate that if a professional curator wants to organize more interesting exhibitions, he or she should closely examine his or her institutional situation and precipitate ways in which that situation can be changed, in both the short and long term.
Installation view of Carol Bove’s restaging of a 1993 gallery exhibition of work by Felix González-Torres
Bove’s sculpture, comprising wall-mounted shelves with decades-old books and small objects (stones, feathers) or composed of subdued, elegant juxtapositions of sizable pieces of wood, steel, and concrete, could be described as having a curatorial nature. Her intent with these works, however, is making art, but she was recently involved with selections for Felix González-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form (2010–11), a retrospective of work by the late Cuban American artist held at museums in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. The lead curator Elena Filipovic had organized the show at all three venues but, halfway through its duration, invited three artists—Bove, Danh Vo, and Tino Sehgal—to reinstall the works according to their own ideas. At Bove’s venue, the Fondation Beyeler, she restaged González-Torres’s 1991 show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Every Week There Is Something Different, in which he switched out the works once a week. González-Torres was not the first to produce a solo show that resembled a group outing, Bove acknowledged, but he provided a template for it. And the result? “It looks exactly like curating,” she said.
Installation view of The Jewel Thief at the Tang Museum in 2010
For his talk, Ian Berry, curator of Skidmore College’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, declared that authorial roles shift even within a single project. A few years ago he worked with the artist Jessica Stockholder—an artist whose sculpture and installation are as much curated as they are constructed and painted—on The Jewel Thief (2010–11). This group exhibition of abstract painting, half of which came from the museum’s permanent collection and most of which was contemporary, was built from their in-the-studio conversations about the genre; it also emphasized the intersection of art with architecture and decoration. Berry said that he and Stockholder had fun choosing “hot and cold” artists, and works were grouped, hung, and installed in unconventional and playful ways. For her contribution, Stockholder created a multipurpose plywood platform that was used as an event space, a viewing space, and seating. You could say that she literalized the metaphoric “platform” fetishized by so many curators.
Josh Kline said he was asked to discuss ProBio (2013), a group exhibition on art, biology, and technology that he organized for MoMA PS1 last summer, but he hijacked his own talk to sort through the challenges emerging artists face, in particular those who curate. Artists today, he said, must become artist curators—which he explained through his own experiences. Working a day job at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)—where he was director of public programs—Kline perceived himself as a curator who secretly made art. At one point he wondered if he would leave EAI for an institutional job or to open his own space, but was discouraged after the Great Recession began in 2008, when many galleries had either closed or become less experimental.
Installation view of Josh Kline’s work in ProBio (2013) at MoMA PS1
Kline was also suspicious of trajectory of emerging artists in the twenty-first century: gaining visibility at MFA degree shows, getting discovered, participating in group shows, getting a two-person show, and earning that coveted solo show in a gallery before moving onto art fairs and the “biennial circuit.” Prior models of career building didn’t cross his mind as a viable option. “Artist-run spaces,” Kline commented, “were something that happened in the seventies,” and he didn’t identify similar activities in New York—including Apartment Show, Real Fine Arts, Soloway, and Cleopatra’s—with that history. In 2009 he curated the inaugural exhibition (Nobodies New York) at 179 Canal, a space run by the artist, curator, and dealer Margaret Lee, whose initial idea was to throw art parties as an effort to help the landlord find tenants for the building in a bad real-estate market. (Lee’s studio was in the building.) During 179 Canal’s year programming, a scene developed, and other shows, such as Skin So Soft (2011) at Gresham’s Ghost, followed. Several of these artists, including Kline, now show at Lee’s critically acclaimed commercial gallery, 47 Canal.
The young artist-curators that Kline knows have worked as arts administrators, artist’s assistants, and art handlers or on gallery staffs—they have experience that comes from the real world, not expensive MFA programs. Those in his group include their own work in their curated shows, a common practice that some still find controversial or unethical. For ProBio, Kline gathered work by like-minded artists—including his own—exploring the dismembered, distributed, posthuman body through ergonomics, bacteria, depictions of the insides of the body, and use of nonarchival materials. (He also noted that this work differs from art about the body from the 1970s, which he described as dematerialized and antimarket.) Concluding his remarks, Kline finally explained that the title of his presentation, “Conservative Curation,” came from a traditional view of organizing exhibitions based on visits to artist’s studios, the interests of artists, and the “discovery of works that speak to our times.” He also believes that curation is a “tool to be used by artists” to present their work “on their own terms.”
DIS, Emerging Artist, 2013, video with color and sound, 1:04
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about a difference between an artist-curated exhibition and an artist’s installation work? The Kabakovs make a distinction, Ostende replied, but the lines are blurry elsewhere. The answer can be found, I think, not with a silver-bullet answer—which so many seem to want—but rather on a case-by-case basis. Kline does not consider his curatorial work to be art but acknowledges that Lee absorbs works of art by others into her exhibitions. Regarding The Jewel Thief, Berry affirmed that Stockholder was clear about what was and wasn’t her art.
The panelists discussed the curator as the primary creative force in an exhibition, eclipsing the roles of artists. Kline faulted graduates from curatorial-studies programs (like Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies) as those coming up with curator-centered exhibitions. He and his peers, he reemphasized, work in a different way, generating ideas from conversations in the studio. Berry said we learn interesting things from auteur curators, just like we find value in chronologically oriented shows. From the audience João Ribas suggested another curatorial genealogy—the collecting strategies of Alfred Barnes and Isabella Stewart Gardner—which derive from the nineteenth-century model of the connoisseur. This notion was off topic—Barnes and Gardner are not artists.
The panelists, from left: Natalie Musteata, Josh Kline, Ian Berry, Carol Bove, and Florence Ostende
A man in the audience said that he knows an artist who works as an institutional curator, and his dealers are telling him to stop. Another man suggested that artists become curators if they can’t find jobs. Someone asked a question about power, transparency, cronyism, and the decisions that lead to the work on the walls. The level of transparency, Berry replied, depends on the institution. Thankfully someone asked a positive question, about the pleasures of curating, to which Bove happily responded: “I feel like my entire MO is ‘look what I found!’”
As the session concluded, I thought about the anxiety many people have over what is and isn’t art, or what’s art and what’s curatorial work. It’s the intent of the artists, the panelists would probably agree. And it’s not too strenuous to make a distinction between roles. Reading and hearing about the debates covered in this session (and the overall conference) for many years has made me realized that scholars—not artists—are typically the ones who fret about creating categories, which is understandable considering their role as arbiters of history. What is strange is that these same scholars consistently often avoid challenging received wisdom regarding the authorial role of curators. When you break things down with case studies, as this and the other sessions did, you realize that generalizations many hold to be true are proved false again and again.
