Curating Exhibitions: An Evolving and Ambiguous Function

The growth of the cultural industry between 1980 and 2000 may have led one to think that curatorship in contemporary art had now become a sinecure. More museums, more art centres, and more events devoted to visual arts production: mathematically, this means more curated exhibitions. With visual arts production growing exponentially, it was a sure bet that the curator would generally become a pivotal and preeminent figure in the current art scene. To exhibit haphazardly, in bulk, with no structure to govern the artistic proposition, would be to risk taking this bulk offering as the very nature of living art. Such profuse and heterogeneous creativity requires a minimum of order, selection, thematic cataloguing. The all too predictable reign of the curator was upon us. It came. And its arrival did not disappoint. In the conception of exhibitions, the curator has become, and remains, a necessity.

Where’s the risk, then? In the possible “derailment” of the curatorial function. When the latter goes beyond the motions of art to create dubious genealogies and configurations in the name of ideas that are not primarily accountable to the reality of living art.