For the last 5 years, curators have topped ArtReview’s Power 100 list - an influential ranking of those wielding the most power in the industry. Forget Damien Hirst, or Charles Saatchi for that matter, in 2009, the magazine chose Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of international projects at the Serpentine gallery and this year it’s the turn of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of Documenta. Perhaps a satisfying choice for in a way, Documenta, is where this trend first began.
Originally founded by the architect-artist Arnold Bode in 1955, it was Swiss art historian and curator, Harald Szeemann, who gave the sprawling 100-day exhibition, its current direction after a complete overhaul in 1972, when he transformed it into an event that not only included paintings and sculptures but also installations, ‘happenings’ and performances. Szeemann was Documenta’s youngest artistic director and the first to revolutionise the concept of the exhibition, which under him was no longer bound by walls or medium but instead by concepts, fictions and politics, all determined by the ‘curator’.
Gradually, art fairs and biennales came to contend with museums and the ‘white cubes’ as arbiters of taste. Szeemann’s Museum of Obsessions, for example, an imaginary place that drove his curatorial practice, was an idea that redefined the role of the museum. His ‘museum’ didn’t exist in physical form but served as the conceptual underpinning for his exhibitions. It signified the compulsions that inspire the artist to create.
When Contemporary art rose from the ashes of Modernism in the late 1980s, things changed dramatically. Although the selection of artworks had yet to become a profession, you no longer needed a degree in history of art to curate. The art connoisseur became more a professional than someone with specialised knowledge. Curatorial Studies was formalised, most importantly at the Ecole du Magasin in Grenoble, France in 1987 and by the early 1990s, Master degrees were being offered in the new discipline.
The meaning of the word ‘curator’ began to shift too. Derived from Latin word ‘curare’ meaning ’manager’, ‘guardian’ or ‘trustee’, it was originally applied to religious orders but during the 20th century, it had also been applied to custodians of art collections. As Curatorial Studies took off, its meaning changed again. The ‘curator’ was now an exhibition maker, less concerned with preservation than provocation.
In a sense, the word has lost its meaning. These days, anyone can be a curator. You don’t have to know about art, you just have to have ‘taste’. Curating has become a buzzword and can be applied to anything from making a list, to arranging, selecting and posting images you like on electronic pin-boards, like Pinterest or Tumblr. A curator can be a programmer for a music festival or a stylist creating a capsule collection. The pursuit is no longer about producing actual content or even about working with artists to commission tangible artworks. It’s about making a shortlist, selecting work done by other people and then pretending that this act is a statement in itself.
In his Financial Times article, ‘Life Brought to Art’, Obrist says that “fly-in, fly-out curating nearly always produces superficial results; it’s a practice that goes hand in hand with the fashion for applying the word “curating” to everything that involves simply making a choice – radio playlists, hotel décor, even the food stalls in New York’s High Line Park. Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition; curating follows art.”
It’s interesting - to say the least - that it’s celebrity curator Obrist, who is levelling this charge. Currently working on an ‘oral history of curating’ - the grandiloquently named Institute of the 21st Century - Obrist is transforming his collection of 2,500 hours of recorded conversations with the visionaries of art, architecture and humanities as some kind of all-encompassing ‘history’ of an entire field. Fittingly, this history will take the form of an online archive, an ‘event’ rather than actual physical documentation.
This single act exemplifies the moment we have reached today. It conjures Szeemann’s Museum of Obsessions and reminds me of Yves Klein’s The Void, a 1958 exhibition that contained no actual works of art. Klein was interest in absence then, in the invisible. For his part, Obrist says exhibitions are like ‘magic moments’. They are ephemeral. A little, it seems, like invisible ink - visible for just a few seconds before fading away.
