Part 2

Work

Thus far our story of curationism has centred on value: how the inherent novelties of the avant-garde, under the translating influence of the curator (or, later, something like the curator), became assets. A contrarian, insouciant and critical attitude toward work is also essential to the avant-garde’s value imparting, and we have certainly seen this not only in radical artists but also in star curators and dilettante celebrity curators, whose ‘labour’ over the choices they make for a variety of exhibitions and product lines can seem either dubious or overarticulated. Musician Santigold’s 2014 collaboration with Stance Socks, to whom she provided three patterns is, for instance, described in elaborate terms in the press release:

Carefully curating this three piece collection of one-of-a-kind socks – Santigold spent the last year creating designs stimulated by music, travel and more. The new collection includes three unique socks titled Brooklyn Go Hard, Gold Links and Kilimanjaro. Santi…found inspiration from her trip to Tanzania where she climbed Kilimanjaro as part of a documentary to raise awareness for the global clean water crisis. Her visit to a Masai village during this trip influenced the mix and match pattern found on her Kilimanjaro sock.

Sometimes you have to climb a mountain to properly curate a sock.

Let us return to the art world. What allies contemporary star curators with the kind of eminent artists they promote is not just strong institutional affiliation and sensitization to audiences. Both factions are also committed to what is known in art-theoretical circles as ‘deskilling’: they make livings doing things many would deem the antithesis of work. The pioneering art-world instance of this is Duchamp’s urinal, its presence in the gallery transforming it into a multiply valuable thing. (Indeed, the current art-market value for one of Duchamp’s urinals is more than US$3 million.)

Outside of the idea – the generation of which, naturally, any conceptualist would cite as vital labour – Duchamp did no crafting on the urinal other than turning it upside down and signing it with a pseudonym, ‘R. Mutt.’ This unusual commitment to deskilling would prove hugely influential to the art of the 1960s and 1970s, which we have discussed only in the context of value and its reinvention and reinstatement by the curator. It is thus important to note additionally that, for instance, releasing gases into the air, as Robert Barry disand, or masturbating underneath a raised gallery floor, as performance artist Vito Acconci did, is not what most would consider ‘real’ work. This was especially true in the 1960s and 1970s, when the traumatized, nose-to-the-grindstone Greatest Generation – a.k.a. those who came of age in Europe and North America during World War II and gave birth to the baby boomers – still dominated the labour force. At the same time, it is also important to restate that, while reprehensible to some, deskilled art, since the mid-1990s and its banner movement, relational aesthetics, has been vital to institutions’ courting of audiences, because it tends to welcome just as many as it alienates. Building on German artist Joseph Beuys’ famous statement ‘Every human being is an artist,’ institutions empower and attract viewers through open, democratic notions of creating. ‘My kid can do that’ has in many senses transformed from dismissal to marketing opportunity. Most major institutions now have activity spaces for children that arguably reflect the ideals of relational aesthetics. Rirkirt Tarivanija, also a curator, is most famous for cooking Thai food and then doling it out to onlookers in galleries and museums. Cooking is no doubt a skill, but a domestic, not a rarified, one. Its function and presence, however gloriously synaesthetic, is widespread. (Ironically, the best-known definition of deskilling, understood in particular by economists, does not carry with it this connotation of heroism and democracy. Rather, it means the cost-cutting phasing-out of professional workers by machines or less-skilled workers. As we have seen with dilettante curators in the last chapter, and as we shall subsequently see with the extension of curatorial work into daily lives, the art-world meaning of deskill is, more and more, resembling this more common, bleaker one.)

It is worthwhile to hark back to Obrist and his aggressive, paranoid commitment to defining his curatorial work as labour and to branding himself as hyper-industrial. Part of that first cohort of contemporary curators who lent value not only to audience-oriented work in the context of the institution, but also to themselves, to the very idea of the contemporary curator as an employed, salaried entity, Obrist was an innovator. To some curators, this makes him heroic. His conscious industriousness functions as a plea. The curator’s quest to engage in a practice of connoisseurship, of thinking and arranging, and to be paid for it, sits alongside the conceptual artist’s fraught efforts at same. How, for instance, do performance artists practice what they do? What do they need studios for? For some this is irrelevant, even offensive: the whole point is that conceptualist practice lies outside of traditional capitalist imperatives. For others, articulating performance art as an unexpected form of work is a way of advocating for it.

For, say, Marina Abramović, who has established an Institute to catalogue and promote her life’s work, such things are central. Ironically, both Abramović and Obrist have been vilified as effective bosses. Abramović was criticized in 2011 for hiring and underpaying performance artists to execute one of her pieces at a Los Angeles MOCA benefit. Performance artist Yvonne Rainer dramatically called Abramović’s harrowing, durational job description ‘reminiscent of Salo, Pasolini’s controversial film of 1975 that dealt with sadism and sexual abuse of a group of adolescents at the hands of a bunch of post-war fascists.’ In 2014, Abramović met with further criticism after her institute posted four ‘volunteer’ positions that clearly required specialized training. Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones were chastised in December 2013 for each taking, in the vein of egregious post-recession American CEOs, 45 percent pay increases at the Serpentine.

Enter the notion of professionalism, a defining aspect of the art world since the curator emerged as institutional powerhouse in the mid-1990s. Funding cuts to the arts affected not just museums and galleries, but academic institutions as well. These institutions did, in many respects, what museums and galleries did. They aggressively courted audiences, in this case donors and students. In North America, critical theory imported from Europe, mainly from France, became trendy in the 1980s and effectively colonized universities in the 1990s, allowing graduates of various humanities departments to specialize, and thus to brand themselves and gain professional toeholds in highly specific, unprecedented ways. Current academic specialists in such subjects as ‘ecocriticism’ and ‘homosociality’ were certainly unheard of before this period.

Since one of the main objectives of critical theory, particularly of poststructuralism, is to explode assumptions about and thereby expand notions of and inquiries into language, tradition and privilege, the academic embrace of critical theory, despite inevitable resistance from tenured traditionalists, acted as an ideal outreach method. Academic staffs, like curatorial staffs, duly expanded. New, genial- and sexy-sounding departments and programs emerged, such as urban studies, cultural studies and gender studies. Detractors called them ‘boutique programs.’ For many this signalled something positive, as it did for museums and galleries embracing contemporary curators in the Szeemannesque mode: institutions were ostensibly newly welcoming, breaking free from stodgy, dead-white-male–focused curricula. More than this, they were applying avant-garde pedagogical approaches. That the avant-garde, as I have argued repeatedly, is intimately tied to capitalist practice, that its cycle of novelties creates its own fetishes, hierarchies and star systems (star academics have much in common with star curators), was, during these salad days of contemporary academe, faintly acknowledged, if at all.

It is unsurprising, then, that 1990s fine-arts and art-history departments, during a time in which the very idea of history, like the canon, was under intense scrutiny as subjective, oppressive, even obsolete, felt extreme pressure to diversify. The institutionalization of once-iconoclastic practices meant artists were under parallel pressures to professionalize by taking graduate degrees. MFA programs, in the past adopted by only a handful of artists, became popular, especially for those working outside painting, drawing and traditional sculpture. One could now do a master’s degree in new media or performance, something that, while not guaranteeing success, offered promises of theoretical grounding, opportunities to experiment and grow, and chances to convene with peers and to network. In the 1970s, experimental fine-arts programs at places like CalArts in Los Angeles or NSCAD in Halifax were – however subsequently influential – nascent and exceptional. By the mid-1990s, it was ironically clear that conceptualist practice in particular was readily abetted by such academic training – given, for one, obvious overlaps between those working in institutions and those working in academe. (Among other things, many universities established art galleries, or renovated existing ones, during this time.) Artists were learning to curate their own educations, and thereby to make ­themselves amenable to curators. Multiple degrees became a way to materialize oneself and one’s work. Today, an MFA is an imperative for a contemporary artist. Because of this, doctoral programs in fine arts are now emerging to trump master’s programs, further professionalizing a field that many thought could not be professionalized any further.

While fine-arts graduate programs have been triumphant, curatorial-studies programs have had mixed results, although their expansion since the 1990s is notable, on par with that of biennials – coming, as they do, from the same curationist impetus. Many curatorial-studies programs are, in fact, reminiscent of Manifesta (or Naoshima) in their lavish commitments to utopianism. This is not unrelated to the important fact that the first cohort of contemporary curators – Hopps, Szeemann, Lippard, Siegelaub et al. – were not, on the whole, formally trained, possessing disparate expertises in a variety of humanities and non-humanities fields, many not art historical (a subject/department that, as opposed to curatorial studies, has been a time-honoured facet of most humanities programs). While the second, mid-1990s cohort of curators, by virtue of the socio-economics of their generation, possess more credentials, they skew toward the multidisciplinary, even the motley. Okwui Enwezor and Christov-Bakargiev emphasized poetry in their educations; Hoffmann, like Szeemann, is trained in theatre and dramaturgy; German curator Nicolaus Schaf­hausen began as an artist; Gioni (who did a stint as an editor for Flash Art) and Obrist began as relative outsiders and essentially progressed by forging key art-world relationships.

So it was that many notable curatorial-studies programs were initiated in the think-tank or symposium model, multidisciplinary dream spaces reflecting contemporary curating’s fanciful everywhereness, and in which aspiring curators could develop their own theoretical or conceptual groundings while communing with groups of similarly aspiring students to, ­ultimately, devise some sort of exhibition or exhibition proposal as a final project reflecting their experience.

In a 2008 essay in the anthology Raising Frankenstein: Curatorial Education and its Discontents, Teresa Gleadowe, instigator and director of the pioneering curatorial-studies master’s program at London’s Royal College of Art from 1992 to 2006, logically positions the emergence of the first curatorial-studies programs alongside 1960s and 1970s conceptualism. In her mind, both are ‘rooted in these years of artistic and institutional upheaval.’ ‘Until [the 1980s],’ she writes, ‘curating had been something one learned, over time, on the job.’ (This is unquestionably true of many cultural professions previously requiring only general knowledge of the humanities, such as journalism.) Gleadowe goes on to itemize the linchpin curatorial-studies programs that stressed this conceptual approach: école du Magasin in Grenoble, France, founded in 1987; the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, in existence since 1968 but revamped as Curatorial and Critical Studies by October magazine critic Hal Foster; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, founded in 1990 with the crucial aid of collector Marieluise Hessel; and de Appel in Amsterdam, dating from 1994.

Gleadowe’s curatorial-studies utopia, like Manifesta’s, is a definitive no place/everyplace. In a contention that embodies the philosophy behind many curatorial-studies programs, she writes that learning ‘on the job’ is not ideal, and prone to staid rhythms:

[It] implies the absorption, over time, of a set of established behaviours, based on tried and tested practices and precedents. Such learning also tends to ‘normalize’ established practice; it treats all procedures as part of the common speech of exhibition making. By emphasizing routines, it minimizes the decision-making involved in each action, the extent to which every decision ‘performs’ certain values and belief systems, certain assumptions about whom the exhibition is for (who is being addressed) and why (for what purpose) the exhibition is being made.

Gleadowe quotes MoMA curator Stuart Comer’s view that programs like the Whitney Independent Study Program foster ‘the construction and maintenance of a critical space resistant to both academic and artistic professionalisation.’ The world’s largest and most prestigious curatorial-studies schools are thus, for Gleadowe, not part of the professionalization of the art world; they are the opposite, resistant to professionalization. Notably, the argument speaks to the classical purposes of humanities learning – that it must be somewhat divorced from usefulness, and not quantified for its practicality alone.

Gleadowe’s argument about curatorial-studies programs is perfectly in line with what we have already seen from contemporary curators. The curator’s deprofessionalization is effected by the creation of programs ostensibly designed to support this deprofessionalization, but which ultimately result in (re)professionalization. Utopia again curdles into dystopia. Gleadowe’s is a textbook tautology: a deskilled approach to work is fostered through a bureaucratic framework, however radical in intention. If her idea of curatorial-studies programs holds water, one wonders why one would take a curatorial-studies degree and not, say, a bachelor’s or MA or MFA. The very existence of curatorial-studies programs – and they continue to proliferate – suggests not only that contemporary curating is a learned profession with its own specificities, but also that curating has become an expanded field in the job market. If Gleadowe is implying that a curatorial-studies degree complements a bachelor’s or master’s degree, she is abetting a credentialist view of the curator, which itself goes against her advocating for the deskilled essence of the job.

The real-life parameters of the ‘job’ are, actually, often ignored when one discusses contemporary curating as a blue-sky vocation only, a discussion that homes in on, as I have done thus far, star curators and the alluring world of ideas, artists and international events they inhabit. A star curator, who in the 2010s is often also a gallery or museum director, is – like the executive director or CEO of a company – responsible for big-picture visioning. They oversee the years-ahead itinerary of a major institution; they massage the logistics of a major exhibition, such as a biennial, that may not be conventionally situated; they green-light a set of major performances and artworks for an exhibition based on budget projections, continuing to vet expenses as they come up; they liaise with important donors and collectors, in concert with artists and galleries, to facilitate the loan, purchase or donation of artworks to an institution’s collection, or for an institution’s exhibition; they give talks, regularly visit artists’ studios (sometimes with collectors or donors in tow) and write about their and others’ exhibitions for significant general and scholarly publications; they travel to exhibitions, fairs and symposia, filling ambassadorial roles and updating their knowledge of contemporary art in situ; and they shape the arrangement and content of their own and, sometimes, their colleagues’ exhibitions. These star curators occupy a small percentage of working curators. Yet it may be this professional expression of curating whose needs are particularly met by Gleadowe’s conception of curatorial-studies programs as, essentially, theory-heavy leadership-and-visioning seminars.

What do most contemporary-art curators actually do? Vancouver curator Karen Love produced a free online Curatorial Toolkit PDF in 2010, co-funded by the Province of British Columbia and the not-for-profit philanthropic organization Legacies Now, which, in the words of its website, ‘leveraged the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to create social and economic benefits in communities throughout British Columbia.’ The Toolkit acts as a useful piece of anti-glamour, showing just how mundane contemporary curating can be. Love stresses curating as, yes, a ‘real job,’ not an unconventional, deskilled one, but one whose skill set would require some vocational training, whether on-the-job or from an internship or practicum. The lack of such vocational training in some curatorial-studies programs is why Love’s document exists, in addition to its desire to articulate standard, best-practice freelance-curatorial fees, which can vary wildly and tend to be low.

Love’s document presents a vision of curators as project managers. The tasks it outlines are many. As a publicly funded document, it is focused on freelance curators working for publicly funded entities, that is, artist-run centres, where budgets and staffs are limited. Love’s tasks can, however, be applied to larger museums and galleries, but here they are likely to be delegated to a team (although, as arts-funding cuts persist, such teams continue to shrink in number).

Love breaks down the on-the-ground practice of putting on a show into several steps. First is researching a concept, which requires having a strong sense of purpose and a strong knowledge base as a curator (this includes possessing a distinct sensibility, style or approach), selecting artists (this includes having established positive, respectful relationships with a variety of artists over time, probably through studio visits and consistent participation in the art scene), writing a proposal (for which Love activates the curator’s classical affiliation with the avant-garde, noting ‘a new curatorial presentation of the work can re-position artwork with a fresh perspective and context’) and researching funding – especially granting – opportunities.

The next step is finding a venue, which includes taking into account location, space configuration and size, and staffing and equipment resources, as well as pitching one’s proposal to a gallery (‘If the gallery declines the proposal, do not take it personally. . . Keep trying! Move on to the next venue on your list.’).

Third, after venue confirmation, is paperwork concerning the logistics of the exhibition: a ‘curator’s contract’ or letter of agreement stipulating information on curator and artist fees, cancellation terms and much more, as well as that staple activity of project managers, generating a ‘critical path’ for the exhibition in order to present a realistic, cogent timeline for all exhibition-related tasks to be completed. (Love’s sample critical path makes sure to break down tasks between curator and gallery, as the latter, typically resource- and cash-strapped, can often compel the curator to take on the brunt of the workload.)

Next is ‘completing the project concept and artist selection,’ which ‘may take many months.’ Here, the curator, either formally or informally, asks artists’ permissions for their work to be shown and embarks on the tricky, time-consuming process of loan requests, which ‘need to be made to public institutions and corporate or individual collectors well in advance (most institutions require a minimum of six to twelve months notice)’ and for which the curator ‘will need to outline [the artist’s] credentials, in addition to the project’s intent.’ Elements for the curator to consider include insurance rates on the loan item, crating and framing costs, security required for the work in the exhibition space, transportation expenses that will be incurred, handling fees and reproduction fees, if any. At the end of this step, the curator should generate a master list of works for the show; Love suggests making a chart keeping track of things such as insurance value, loan-request approvals and credit information.

Then the curator begins with the specifics of budgeting, including enumerating artist fees, their own fees (‘For a single-venue exhibition, the curatorial fee can start at $2,500 and continue upwards to perhaps $15,000 or $20,000. It should be noted that the higher fees are less common and generally provided to well-established curators.’), fees for talks and various public programming, installation fees, costs of travel (including for their own research and to bring artists in to visit the show) and, of course, of installation, which can include architectural elements, the labour fees thereof and security. The curator follows by breaking down logistics and expense details from the master list of works for crating, shipping, insurance and customs brokerage, and also plans visual documentation for the show.

Finally, the curator completes paperwork for artists and potential grants, establishes a plan for outreach and public programming around the exhibition, and devises a media strategy for the show, everything from its design identity to reaching out to media in advance of the opening.

Regarding the mounting of the show, Love notes that ‘the curator will not be responsible directly for all tasks related to the installation’ but, again like a project manager, ‘is responsible for ensuring that the work, and the exhibition itself, is presented to the best of everyone’s abilities and in a manner that is beneficial for the artists and for each work of art.’ Attention to detail is key. Curators must troubleshoot installation needs and be present during installation, carefully supervising the mounting of works based on detailed exhibition plans and the (often demanding and persnickety) requests of artists. The process can be exhausting. Love notes that ‘long hours of work may be required. A positive problem-solving approach, determination and humour, and sometimes a boost of adrenalin, are required!’

As with any project that has taken a long time to complete, alterations and augmentations often occur mere seconds before the opening. The behind-the-scenes frenzy of the art world has not been romanticized or even widely acknowledged as it has been in, say, the dance and theatre worlds, in which the harried, bellowing director/impresario is an archetype, immortalized in such films as Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, or in the fashion world, in which pre-runway chaos is, for non-industry types, full of sexiness and mystique. It was my intention to shadow and then report on the real-life installation circumstances of an exhibition for this book, but no curator I asked was comfortable with the request. The art world’s positioning of the curator as a sleek, put-together spokesperson for exhibitions, and for contemporary art’s triumphant relevance, is no doubt responsible for this conspicuous reticence.

The curator’s job is not done after the opening, with final payments and accounting due, project assessments and reports (especially relevant in light of any grants received), the management of a publication if it has not already been produced, a show’s de-installation, which can be just as complicated and stressful as the installation, and the prospect of an exhibition tour, which has its own set of concerns similar to those outlined above. The very exhaustiveness of Love’s document suggests why touring exhibitions are becoming more and more popular for institutions, even artist-run centres: they come prepackaged, so the labour, notably the staffing, involved is not as intensive; there is a sharing of finances between or among institutions, lessening the significant cost burden that a completely new show would entail; and, once secured, they can be scheduled with relative swiftness and firmness, leaving an institutional curator, who more and more has very little time for field research, something with which to buy time and fulfill mandates.

Love is technical and largely partisan, though a portrait of the contemporary freelance curator emerges, and it is daunting and depressing: underpaid and working with limited budgets and time; lobbying for resources and wearing a number of hats at once; to wit, exhausted and perhaps nearing extinction. With many institutions using what Love calls ‘zero bottom line’ budgets, in which potential revenues, including from shaky streams such as publications, are counted as expenses, freelance curators passionate about seeing their visions carried through often take money from their own fees to make their exhibitions a reality – even though Love, as an advocate for standardized fees (which are not, despite her and others’ efforts, widespread in Canada and many other countries) strongly disapproves.

Do any prominent curatorial-studies programs offer training for what is articulated in Love’s Toolkit, and do any, while doing so, prepare students for the rough road ahead? It is a difficult question to answer given all current programs’ provenances in universities rather than in technical schools or vocational colleges. To reiterate, the humanities in universities have always been designed to be discourse generators and mind enhancers, not career-placement programs. So the short answer is sort of. There is a vocational element to most schools’ programs, despite Gleadowe’s theoretical objections. A cynic might say there has to be, in order to make the programs marketable. CCS Bard, for instance, gives a detailed rundown of its curriculum on its website, and it includes, as of 2014, twenty-four credits in ten required courses, four of which are practicums, and six a summer internship, meaning at least two hundred hours working under an ‘arts professional.’ A final project, in addition to a written thesis, includes a ‘curated component,’ some stipulations of which are ‘budget’ and ‘installation plan.’ Bard is also well-situated in Annandale-on-Hudson, a few hours by train from New York City, where, unsurprisingly, a number of field trips and internships take place.

There are problems with Bard’s approach. Known for its rigour and theoretical grounding – its curriculum page articulates what it ‘assumes’ of a prospective student, and this includes knowledge of art history, cultural production, a broad range of social and cultural histories, as well as a ‘trained sensitivity’ to ‘aesthetic demands’ – Bard still endorses Gleadowe’s blue-sky notion of curatorial education. In a 2011 roundtable discussion on curatorial-studies programs published in Frieze, writer and curator Anthony Huberman, having done a few workshops at Bard, notes that ‘many students’ ‘seem to reject’ doing final projects tailored to ‘the white cube.’ This is no doubt due to what is written on Bard’s curriculum page regarding the thesis proposal, and to its conceptualist and avant-garde underpinnings: ‘Given the program’s understanding that contemporary curatorial practice often engages with unconventional formats, this proposal may put forward an exhibition, book, symposium, online platform, or other project for consideration.’ Huberman notes that ‘what worried me. . .was the importance they gave to the form and structure of the exhibition. It’s fine to experiment with form and structure, but not just for the sake of it. . . [A] show needs to start with the actual content of the art work and what it asks for. A show is interesting not because it experiments with form or structure, but because it finds ways to share the content of a work of art by creating an appropriate frame for that content.’

In a similar roundtable in Raising Frankenstein, Richard Flood, known for his curatorial work with New York’s New Museum, calls the Marieluise Hessel Collection, around which the CCS is effectively built, an ‘artificial wonderland.’ Since the program’s inception in the 1990s, students work with its artworks for various assignments and, Flood implies, are given a false sense of what they might have available in the field. Many of the works are, Flood quips, on permanent loan, meaning they ‘can be removed at the drop of a hat.’ Flood also finds Bard’s focus on a collector’s trove ‘problematic. . .on the level of class.’ ‘It’s probably been written about [i.e., cumulatively, by Bard students],’ he says, ‘more than any holdings of the Medici ever were.’

Bard’s practical qualities might not be practical at all. The school stresses, in Huberman’s view, an idiosyncratic, formal-experimentation-for-the-sake-of-formal-experimentation approach (i.e., a traditionally avant-garde one). And in Flood’s view, it ironically abets the worth and visibility of a wealthy donor’s collection (an element of museum and gallery work, to be sure) while at the same time emphasizing dense critical theory that ostensibly resists the roles class and money play in the art world. It is important to note that Bard’s tuition is one of the highest for curatorial-studies programs, most of which come with standard (i.e., pretty high) fees for graduate humanities work. CCS Bard tuition for the 2013–14 academic year was $37,284. According to Bard’s website, ‘More than 90% of CCS Bard students receive some form of financial aid,’ although it is also stated that ‘most students’ end up receiving funding covering between 25 and 40 percent of tuition, which, given base tuition, still leaves a significant debt load. It might also be pointed out that the de Appel Curatorial Training Programme in Amsterdam, known for its hands-on, vocationally driven approach, costs less than 3,000 euros to attend, but accepts only six students per year.

Pamela M. Lee, Art and Art History professor at Stanford University and author of numerous critical studies on late modernism and 1960s and 1970s conceptualism, affirms a view she expressed at the 2008 Contemporary Art Forum in Faenza, Italy: curatorial-studies programs are ‘the world’s most glamorous vocational schools. . .but a cash cow to older and more established programs in art history.’ She tells me, ‘The vocational dimension of the curatorial program that I kind of tossed off in that statement addresses, in a band-aid-like way, the worry about what it is that one accomplishes when one gets a degree in art history or a related field, visual or cultural studies.’

This statement can be placed alongside the similar-in-tone Standards and Guidelines written by the U.S.’s College Art Association, at which Gleadowe looks askance in her argument supporting deskilling in curatorial studies. Intended as a report, the CAA’s entry on curatorial-studies programs is, by virtue of its practical focus, not rosy. ‘Students and their advisors should be aware of the relatively small size of the art-museum universe,’ it reads. ‘. . . In practical terms, this means that in order to find a position, one must be willing to relocate. Students should also be aware that starting curatorial salaries tend to be low, and advancement within an institution is not guaranteed.’ The entry goes on to note that, for ‘specialized curatorships’ in large museums or director-curator jobs in ‘smaller-city museums,’ a PhD is quickly becoming the norm. (Many art-history doctoral programs offer the option to complete a certificate in curating, which covers vocational basics.) The irony is that the emergence of boutique programs like curatorial studies is a by-product of the same credentialism that now makes PhDs the increasing standard at museums.

‘That a student who emerges from [a curatorial-studies] program might go on to become the next Hans Ulrich Obrist – this is of course a fantasy,’ says Lee. Based in the Bay Area, Lee points to America’s other major curatorial-studies school, San Francisco’s California College of the Arts (CCA), which is known for and styles itself as, much more than Bard, a theory-over-practice program, with freelance curators as their ideal. Lee worries about the expectations of graduates. ‘[Obrist] is the exception to the vast numbers of students that are otherwise coming out of these programs. He is a model that is frankly unattainable now, precisely because of the professionalization of these curatorial schools. He entered the stream when there was a lot more flexibility in terms of where one came from, how one approached these artists and what one’s training was.’

Obrist represents the new feudalism emerging in culture work, in which a select deskilled few from older generations, sometimes dubbed the ‘curatorial class,’ maintain their illustrious positions, leaving open scant vacancies, which, due to low pay and the education and internships now necessary to secure them, are accessible only to the very wealthy. This is already a caricature in the contemporary art world via the figure of the ‘gallerina,’ a young, typically female art-history, museum-studies or curatorial-studies degree-holder who serves as an intern or assistant in a commercial gallery, often for little or no pay, with the aspiration of institutional curatorial work or ‘owning my own gallery someday.’ Although there are few pop-cultural examples of the curator, there are plenty of the gallerina, including the character Marnie Michaels on the television show Girls and the cast of the Bravo reality-television show Gallery Girls.

‘It’s a knot tied around these enormous economic problems,’ says Lee. ‘Because one of the conversations I hear more and more frequently at Stanford does, in fact, have to do with internship culture, which then effectively becomes free labour on the part of the students who can afford it. I don’t know if this is a particularly helpful comparison, but back in the day, when I was in undergrad, I took on internships at various museums and then found I had to take on a crazy work schedule to support these internships. That was certainly not ideal by any means, but by the same token I acknowledged that at least there was gainful employment to be had for my generation of student – a budding scholar, emerging curator, whoever.

‘But now it’s almost pro forma that you would expect to have these kinds of internships in order to further a career coming out of a curatorial-studies program. I think what’s strange about that, though, is that historically the order seems to be flipped. In the past, to get into these kinds of master’s programs you needed the internship. Now it seems the curatorial program is what gains you entry into the internship itself. That’s troublesome because it simply defers the reality that there are not enough positions to go around, unless you happen to be independently wealthy and can make your way in terms of [freelance] curating and so on. It’s very troublesome; I think about art schools in particular, something like [CCA], and [wonder] where these students will end up.’

The advice Lee gives to a hopeful curator is the same advice many curators gave me concerning this question during research for this book: don’t take a curatorial-studies degree, at least not right away. And if you do take one, use it as a professional-development tool rather than a vocational one. ‘After you’ve got your BA, take time off and work in the art world,’ recommends Lee. ‘This might mean working in a gallery or museum – this is a real education in how things get done. Or even if you are an undergraduate and there aren’t programs in your college or university, [try to do paid or unpaid work] at a museum or gallery close by.

‘After you graduate, take time off and get some real professional understanding of what the art world consists of. This fantasy that you’re going to go to an MA program and suddenly somehow understand the institutional culture of the art world is ridiculous. After you’ve had those couple of years in the trenches, go back to graduate school. And if you’re really serious about being a curator – being a curator at the level that most people, I think, assume most curators operate – you will need to get an advanced degree.

‘I think curating programs are like creative-writing or ­critical-studies programs,’ Lee continues. ‘If you can accept those programs in those terms, with limited expectations as to what the professional end will be, then you’ll probably be in a far healthier position when you finish them. You do get a certain kind of experience which is wonderful, and I think that they have virtues as well as enormous liabilities.’ Lee herself is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and says it is very successful because it is attached to an actual institution. Lee also admits that, after learning the nuts-and-bolts of curating through the Whitney isp, she ultimately discovered that she did not want to be a curator.

‘At the level of the curatorial track,” she says, “you do learn how to put on a show, which demands a certain baptism in the realpolitik of the museum world. You do get super, super practical experience. You learn about loan reports. You learn about presenting to a board. You learn all the stuff you’d need to know if you were functioning within a museum world. That means the tedium of all this bureaucratic stuff alongside the quote-unquote fun part of conceptualizing and meeting artists and putting the shows together.

‘I would say that as a model that was very helpful, because you’re getting both sides. The fact is that some curatorial-studies programs do have an element of learning something about the bricks-and-mortar foundation of how shows get put together – but I somehow don’t think they get tied up in the really bureaucratic dimension of curating. Which is frankly huge. It’s an enormous part of it.’

How much curatorial work did you do today? You got dressed, perhaps laying out various options in the manner of an installing curator. Perhaps, for lunch, you went to Chipotle, Subway, Teriyaki Experience or one of any number of food chains that now ask you to select ingredients to compose your meal. (Subway got in early on curationism, calling their ­sandwich-makers ‘sandwich artists’ in an amusing, telling marketing of the artist-curator relationship as parallel to that of the server-customer.) Perhaps you purchased something from an online retailer like Amazon or Everlane, consumer-curatorial work that will result in subsequent emails from the retailer suggesting other products you might like. Perhaps you updated your profile on a dating website or app, further streamlining your identity to attract the right people and repel the wrong ones, curatorial work that will also result in further suggestions of who you might like. Perhaps you spent some time on Facebook, organizing a photo album of your latest trip, or updating your cover photo to something cute and clever, an addition to your own digital exhibition of personal and cultural imagery. Perhaps, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Chat, Google+, or a sex app like Grindr, Scruff or Tinder, you curated connections, making new ones, perhaps hunting by geographical location, and/or favouriting/deleting/ blocking existing ones. Perhaps, finally, you unwound with Netflix, Hulu, Mubi or another film- and TV-watching service incorporating your every selection into further selections tailor-made for your tastes.

Some of you actually got paid to curate. If you work in fashion, you are probably curating in some way every day. As a model scout, you are looking for the next face, perhaps not even fully formed, but, as your eye and industry knowledge can tell you, eminently groomable. As a retail worker, you might arrange displays in addition to organizing racks and suggesting what works best for each client. If you work in a large department store, this job will go to a visual merchandiser – not just a window dresser anymore, for a visual merchandiser can function in all sorts of environments and, actually, very conceptually, and outside the fashion world. In fashion and other lifestyle industries, such as food, the role of the stylist has emerged as a prominent curationist profession. (A friend of mine in fashion recently told me, ‘We didn’t know we needed stylists until you could tell who didn’t have one,’ a smart comment on how curators spin wants into needs, becoming their own best value-imparters in order to seem indispensable.) Stylists, working in an editorial capacity, are, in true curatorial mode, collaborators, liaising with photographers, editors, designers and – especially if a celebrity is involved – the model or models, to determine which looks work best and are most strategic for the season. (Another friend of mine who has done styling cleverly referred to these acts as ones of ‘negotiation.’) And this is just scraping the surface. In any lifestyle industry closely connected with media, you will find entire subsets of workers who are paid to activate their own cognition to select. Likely they are bringing their curated crops up through a hierarchy for ultimate approval, as evinced in the 2009 documentary The September Issue, in which Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour is basically pictured in every scene pointing at things and saying ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

If you work in digital, you are also getting paid to curate. Speaking of crops, perhaps the most common curator of our time is what has become known as the ‘content farmer.’ (Compare and contrast, figuratively, with writer Douglas Coupland’s well-known coinages of the postmodern economy from Generation X, in which he referred to the office cubicle as the ‘veal-fattening pen.’) The content farmer is the dystopian new journalist, producing online content, typically for a large company, based on search data from engines like Google, in an attempt to garner more advertising revenue because of the popularity of the topic. Here, the value impartation is done by others (droves, really) via algorithms. Value is thus proportional to popularity, and audience courting is synonymous with it. There is no better example of the darkest, most tautological aspects of accelerated curationism: rather than the simulated democracy (or, at least, simulated beneficence) of curated works being presented as attractive to a potential audience because they have been chosen exclusively and carefully for their value, the value in these content-farmed works lies not in preciousness but in popularity. It is not a stretch to connect content farming to the increasing art-institutional interest in touring exhibitions. Revenue is scarce, so give the people what they want.

You may do something else in the fields of the cognitive or information economy, producing tweets for a large company, for example, typically for little or no pay. As with the curatorial profession in the art world, digital-curatorial jobs tend to divide feudally, except the elite class in the digital realm is considerably larger and more entrepreneurial. These are often new types of designers. If you are a game designer, you are intimately involved in the curatorial act of audience courting, but you are also – as we saw with banks and other corporations – recruiting gamers as curators, asking them to manage their own experience, interactivity being an increasingly fundamental aspect of gaming. (Such recruitment is also instrumental to app design.) Experience designers are also a new and growing breed sprung from the curationist moment. Writing for the Australian website The Conversation, author, educator and qualitative researcher Faye Miller begins by pegging the following fill-in-the-blank phrase as ‘the unofficial catch cry’ of the twenty-first century: ‘it’s not just a _____, it’s an experience.’ Miller cites the concept of the ‘experience economy’ or ‘exponomy,’ which she traces back to a 1998 article by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in the Harvard Business Review, essentially contending that commodities have more impact when the consumer has an experience, one that is often collaborative and cross-platform. Miller uses the example of ‘a major fashion event [that] would collaborate with the entertainment, media and tourism/hospitality industries to provide an audience with a lasting impression through a multi-sensory experience that is both enjoyable and prosperous.’ To me, someone who deals with culture and its discourses rather than business, the description is redolent of biennials or large-scale conceptual-art projects in which curators are frequently instrumental. Miller, naturally, positions the late Steve Jobs as an incipient experience designer, quoting one of his many curationist quips: ‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.’

Gathering things, connecting them, sharing them with others in a way that positions one as a taste-making host: sounds fun, doesn’t it? This is precisely why everyone is now doing it. Yet it is still not okay to call yourself a curator if you haven’t somehow acquired that professional designation. In a dismissive 2013 posting on the art-and-design site Complex, independent curator Vanessa Castro lists ‘people who definitely shouldn’t have the title “curator” in their Twitter bios,’ noting that ‘the term “curator”. . .has been overused by many people so they can appear as “creative” types when in fact, they actually don’t curate anything. Curators are supposed to be arbiters of taste, people who pick what’s cool and trending in the world, people who have a trained eye for what is best. Most people on Twitter definitely don’t fit this definition.’ (One of Castro’s more charming finds is @SusieBlackmon, ‘Curator of news, information, & #horsebiz re Horses (Western, Thoroughbreds), Western Lifestyle, Western Wear, American West. Microblogger.’)

I do not find Castro’s objections convincing. I agree with her that the title of curator is itself inherently and inevitably curatorial, a way of imparting value to activities as exclusive and specialized work. But, as we have seen, what a curator is ‘supposed to be’ often leads to more interrogations than assertions. Castro’s concerns speak to larger issues: first, to the ironic credentialist anxieties spawned by the cognitive or information economy, which still (as we saw with curatorial-studies programs) looks to old and arguably outdated models to legitimate what are plainly difficult-to-professionalize professions; second, to the old-fashioned way many people continue to understand their online curatorial activity and self-branding, hoping, eventually, to monetize it in a more traditional manner rather than doing it as a matter of course, for free. Such fantasies include a Tumblr turning into a best-selling book or a popular Twitter account leading to a position as a columnist.

Anxiety is one of the key drivers of the curatorial impulse in capitalist society and culture – an anxiety to ensure things are valuable and in turn to define them as somehow productive or useful. Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote, ‘[A]nxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.’ Curation provides this finiteness. In a time in which information, population and ambition continue to accelerate unmanageably, there is an attendant desire to control, contain, organize and, as a result, make elaborate, fretful ontological claims. To reiterate Christov-Bakargiev’s paraphrasing of Paolo Virno, ‘You think you don’t exist if you’re not different from everybody else.’

If curators began to dominate the art world in the 1990s, they began to dominate everything else in the 2000s. This is the precise moment at which the avant-garde idea of culture failed, for throughout the twentieth century in the West, especially after World War II, we read experience aggressively through the Gregorian calendar, in a succession of vibrant, exciting decades: ‘the 1950s,’ ‘the 1960s,’ ‘the 1970s,’ etc. The 1990s, a perfect concluding paragraph to the avant-gardist twentieth century for introducing to the zeitgeist the concept of ‘retro,’ led to the bathetic non-apocalypse of Y2K, and then to the amorphous 2000s, in which most of our cultural innovations, most of what we could claim as completely and utterly ‘new’ in the avant-garde sense, came from the digital realm. Otherwise we were and are, to quote critic John Bentley Mays, living in ‘“the contemporary,” [a] seemingly timeless zone of consumerism and spectacle,’ a general and generalizing era in which, nonetheless, more people than ever before are clamouring for attention.

In the 2000s, digital innovations brought into culture an impulse very similar to the one that birthed the contemporary curator in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the masses of information parsed by upstart curators in the 2000s were not new but old. It was a nervous organizing and hoarding of data from the past that the internet made available in the present. Personal exercises of taste before the 2000s were a form of collector culture and often required pilgrimages and extravagant expense. These were not common activities. Two subcultures might be exemplary. Gay subcultures, which, with their devotion to histories not widely acknowledged and thus, in many senses, curated, sought out, for instance, rare 16mm prints or VHS tapes of Old Hollywood films, of opera-performance recordings, of fan ephemera of cult icons, etc. Audiophile subcultures dug through crates of records in numerous, vast record stores in cities across the world, crowing to friends about their latest finds, and using mail-order catalogues, conventions and auctions, anxious to possess something that might have taken years to acquire.

We all know what happened next: eBay, Napster, larger and cheaper bandwidth, faster download speeds, MySpace and Facebook as new methods of cultural display (supplanting the bookshelf or CD rack), the iPod and its iTunes – ­collection-assimilating entities that encouraged the hybrid, eclectic assortment of works into playlists, another banner word of the aughts that is betrothed to the verb curate. Many have written about the democracy afforded by such things. Lines drawn by the Only Lovers Left Alive–style vampire-snob curators of the Gen X 1990s, when you were either ‘alternative’ or ‘hip-hop’ but couldn’t be both, were erased. Value is now imparted by what, at least on the surface, appears to be outré curation, and it is much more curation than what occurred in the 1990s, which might better be described as categorization. ‘What kind of music do you like?’ has become a tedious, unanswerable question. We hope our identities are more complex than that, and indeed desire them to be.

We have been schooled by the smarty-pants anti-snob snobbery of cultural-studies departments, which have taught us that anything is fair game for ‘critical discourse,’ from porn to the Fast and the Furious franchise. The advent of what has been deemed ‘poptimism,’ surely a concomitant of cultural studies, encouraged a critical appreciation of mainstream, hit-driven music that used to be dismissed outright by music snobs. Rather than initiating a cooling-off period, however, poptimism has merely abetted our curationist tendencies. It’s not just what we like, but how we like it, a constellation of likes that, through social-media comments acting as didactic panels in an exhibition, paint what we hope is a complex picture. Follow our feeds for a few months and you might get a sense of our sensibility.

Shifting tastes and the end of snobbery are well-trod ground for cultural critics of the aughts. Less discussed is all the work that made these cultural texts, past and present, mainstream and obscure, available to everyone. This is largely anonymous work. It is also unpaid. But we count on it being done. Who uploaded the latest episode of your favourite television show to the torrent site you downloaded it from? Who uploaded the leaked track from the forthcoming album you’ve been so looking forward to hearing? More pertinent to this study: who sourced and assembled that blog of complete posters from your favourite commercial designer, or that perfect two-hour-long SoundCloud mix of vintage Chicago house that’s your play-to-impress standby whenever you have guests over?

There are further links between unpaid digital curation and surveillance and outsourcing. Social-media sites now use your curatorial work as free market-research data. Big-data mining, including information on what you searched for and clicked on, is valuable capital, with Google, for instance, ­claiming it can track the spread of the flu virus based on geographically specific word searches. The Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria, hosted the exhibition Like It in 2013, giving Facebook users access to images from their permanent collection and assembling a show based on what got the most likes. The Art Everywhere project, originating in the U.K. and now in American cities, asks people to vote online for their favourite institutional artwork, ‘exhibiting’ the winners on billboards. This is akin to publishers posting potential book covers on social media and making decisions influenced by what is most popular. It is outsourcing disguised as interactivity or ‘engagement.’ It also prompts the question: exactly how definitively curatorial can crowdsourcing be?

Such dangling carrots and their associated feelings of attention and connectivity suggest why people are so willing to do curatorial work for free. This work lends, in however compromised or superficial a form, significant degrees of agency to our lives. Value and work become aggressively conflated. Our music-listening programs basically ask us to be DJs, so why wouldn’t we want to? Similar pro bono efforts happen in other areas of our lives in an appropriation of curationist professions. We are now travel agents, curating our trips based on discount airfare sites (there is no bargain more satisfying than one you feel you’ve uncovered yourself) and star ratings by users who’ve already been there. Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder of the popular room-letting site Airbnb, told the Telegraph in late 2013 that they soon expect to overtake Hilton and Intercontinental to become the world’s largest hotelier. Airbnb currently lists almost 500,000 properties internationally. All are vetted and guaranteed, yet so widely different in mood and client compatibility that traditional modernist hoteliers, with their pricey, anonymous, monolithic promises of hospitality, are struggling to compete.

Interior decorators and wedding planners are two other professions that, while still extant, seem increasingly obsolete. They are very much professions of the 1980s, emergent ­cognitive-economy roles that were supplanted by more aggressive cultural gestures, such as Martha Stewart’s in the 1990s and onward, which created an empire by empowering consumers to refine tastes while under her master watch. With the internet and its swaths of curated wedding photos, never mind instructional blogs, wedding planners have, like younger curators, become project managers rather than conceptualizers.

Witness the lavish wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West at Florence’s Forte di Belvedere in spring 2014. They had a high-priced wedding planner, Sharon Sacks, but one imagines she had little to do with the many putatively unwieldy touches, such as the made-at-the-last-minute Carrara-marble statues that fell apart, or the white bar West didn’t like and manually disassembled, sawing it in half, or the expensive audio system West ordered to be dismantled, saying, according to the New York Post’s Page Six gossip site, ‘You Italians don’t understand my Minimalist style.’ (West, who went to art school, is nothing if not an artist-curator, his whole career an aggressive angling in this direction; for Christmas 2013 he commissioned painter George Condo to paint a Birkin bag for Kardashian based on images from her Instagram account, uniting multiple aesthetics and personae into an object that, because of the unique conditions of its making, is essentially priceless.) The ostensible power afforded even by frivolous acts of curation is thus considerable. There is an argument to be made for the vehement movement behind marriage-equality rights in the last decade as being a fight for the right to curate: not only for access to the same legal exceptions and protections as straight couples, but also for the privilege to engage in the same bourgeois-curatorial rituals.

The popularity of reality television in the aughts spoke to something similar, particularly contest reality television like Survivor, The Amazing Race, American Idol and others, in which a team of judges chooses runners-up and/or a winner, sometimes granting viewers this choice, and/or the appearance of it through Twitter hashtags. The contestants themselves are trained in wily methods of curation, engaging in competitions demonstrating their abilities to throw existing materials together or to complete tasks under extreme time constraints, and present the results to judges as eminently valuable. (Shows like America’s Next Top Model and its clever parody, RuPaul’s Drag Race, as well as Work of Art: The Next Great Artist have all featured challenges involving trash or dumpster diving.) Furthermore, the environments of contest reality television are similar to those of parkour or parcours, conceptual obstacle courses used for physical and mental training of athletes, an idea that has been taken up by curators, for the parcours entails novel uses of the existing environment as a means of shifting viewpoints and physical orientations. (Parcours is actually the name of a programming initiative of the Art Basel art fair that involves curatorial interventions throughout the city of Basel.) Creating droves of mini- and micro-celebrities, high-period reality television also gave viewers the chance to debate winners and to choose favourites. With these shows’ proliferation and seemingly endless brand extensions, there was a lot of work to do.

I do not intend to conclude on the Matrixian bum note that choice is an illusion. Not entirely, at least. In that interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, she answered my Socratic question of how we can resist the programmatic choices proffered by curationism by saying, ‘You become boring,’ sounding like someone out of an Andy Warhol or William Klein film. ‘You don’t pick [because] it’s all about choosing – selection, selection, selection.’ So you refuse the act of choice? ‘[You refuse the act of] identifying a group of object or things within a parcours. That’s why there’s no concept [to Documenta 13]. It’s just a mass of stuff.’

Christov-Bakargiev continues to work and refuse the title of ‘curator.’ In 2015, according to a press release, ‘the 14th Istanbul Biennial. . .will be drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev with a number of alliances. She will seek the artistic advice of Cevdet Erek, the intellectual rigor of Griselda Pollock, the sensitivity of Pierre Huyghe, the curatorial imagination of Chus Martinez, the mindfulness of Marcos Lutyens, the acute gaze of Füsun Onur, the political philosophies of Anna Boghiguian, the youthful enthusiasm of Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, the wise uncertainties of William Kentridge and manifold qualities and agencies to come as the process develops.’

Why is this so laughable? It is discursive and hedgy, introducing new diction (‘drafted’) for old concepts (‘curated’). It is still curation, for it acts within an important art-world institution, the prestigious Istanbul Biennial, employing celebrity art-world figures (Pierre Huyghe and William Kentridge), and making superficial claims not to do what it is in fact doing, not to be what it in fact is.

I can hardly promise redemption for the contemporary art world. But I have firm conviction that its obsession with curating is coming to an end, however slowly. I have already outlined or implied as such. A précis: almost everyone in the art world has learned how to curate in the contemporary manner themselves. Artists still committed to relational or ­installation-based work want autonomy, no longer needing curators to advocate for them the way they did in the 1990s – although they do need curators to fill the unglamorous roles of project management, facilitation and advocacy. These roles, a cycling back to a much older mode of curating, will persist. A Szeemannesque curator, however, is no longer a value investment for an institution. A Szeemannesque curator may, in fact, be a liability. For what the exhibition-maker wants, given budgetary and institutional constraints, she so often cannot have: complete autonomy. The star curator’s last gasp seems as a value imparter at art fairs, although art fairs, market-driven beasts that they are, will no doubt dispose of the curator’s auteur-imprimatur when it is prudent to do so. Currently, the art world seems to be drifting back to object-based making, with a return to modernist-formalist sculpture and painting, often to boring, empty effect. These are eminently salable objects that, for years, dealers have managed and presented with expertise. In this context, the exhibition maker is more or less superfluous, a dinosaur of the conceptualist era.

Artworks critiquing curationism, using curationism as the very means by which art is produced, are also emerging. London- and Berlin-based Tamil artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s ongoing project, When Platitudes Become Form (its title obviously a poke at Szeemann), involves, in part, the purchasing of contemporary artworks from galleries in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in which a new contemporary art market has emerged as a result of the ending, in 2009, of a decades-long civil war against Tamils in the island’s east and north sections. The superficial, salutary aspects of this – a liberalized, culture-oriented economy flowering from conflict – mask, of course, what many have called genocide. For an iteration of Platitudes at Toronto’s Mercer Union, Thomas placed these contemporary artworks from Colombo throughout the gallery, reconfiguring them in a highly anonymous, white-cube fashion that divorced them entirely from their geographic and socio-economic contexts. For Thomas, contemporary art is Contemporary Art, its anything-goes promises of plurality, with the curator in the role of Liberty Leading the People, hypocritical and shallow. In his exhibition brochure, Thomas told Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications at Mercer Union:

[T]he trouble with Contemporary Art’s ‘equal aesthetic rights’ is the same (at least structurally) as the trouble with the United Nations’ assertion of universal human rights. The liberal conception of universal rights upon which both are based allows Contemporary Art’s cultural/historical remixing and justifies the toppling of certain dictatorships to hand down human rights but it prevents the addressing of internal structural oppression. It invokes an abstract idea of equality that is institutionally normalised without being able to see the means by which that normalisation occurs.

Meanwhile, at a former Unilever plant about 800 kilometres from Kinshasa in the Congolese jungle, artist Renzo Martens is, with a small team of people, establishing the Institute for Human Activities. Situated in what the organization’s website calls ‘one of the most disadvantaged regions of the world,’ the IHA aims to institute a five-year ‘Gentrification Program,’ ‘endeavor[ing] to make critical artistic reflection profitable for the poor.’ As is typical of Martens’ projects, the IHA functions as dark, uncomfortable satire. Yet it exists – its Unilever affiliation an ironic statement on corporate sponsorship in contemporary art, for Unilever sponsors a high-profile artist project at London’s Tate Modern every year. The gist of IHA, then, is that curatorial projects, even when politically engaged, tend to funnel capital back to the West. ‘At the locus of the actual artistic interventions in, say, Congo, Peru, or the Parisian banlieues,’ reads the IHA’s website, ‘art may very well have an impact, though it often remains confined to the symbolic level. Such interventions rarely produce the material results achieved at the centers of reception. . . This gap is remarkably similar to the division between labor and profit in other globalized industries. Art may expose the need for change in Nigeria or Peru, but in the end it brings opportunity, improved living conditions, and real-estate value to Berlin-Mitte or the Lower East Side.’

Martens and his team say they want to curate a viable economy in this area of Congo, using, again somewhat (but only somewhat) satirically, The Rise of the Creative Class author Richard Florida’s contention that the presence of figures like artists, writers, designers, etc., comes before the presence of companies, the provision of tax breaks, etc., in post-industrial economic development. In a video on the IHA’s site, Florida is Skyped in to a Congolese audience, with Martens asking him questions mostly in earnest. The setting and juxtaposition are bizarre, with Florida onscreen in his impeccably decorated Toronto house, peering down at an audience whom he insists need to develop ‘the three T’s,’ ‘technology, talent, tolerance.’ One audience member asks him how they can possibly develop talent in the creative-class sense, implying lack of privilege and resources, and Florida defaults to rhetoric, encouraging ‘experimentation.’ On their part, Martens and his team claim to want to begin an economy first by hosting those who are intervening and creating an industry around their presence, and then by instating creative workshops, in which the ‘talented participants. . .will be challenged to develop their own artwork under the tutelage of professional artists.’ (Canadians will note an uncanny resemblance to what James Archibald Houston did in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, in the mid-twentieth century, importing printmaking techniques from Japan in order to found studios to engage underemployed Inuit.) Whatever happens with Martens’ project, it represents a fascinating mimicry of curationism, an aggressive attempt to make good on its critical and utopian promises. Its main success might be its actual funnelling of art-world monies to Congo, for it was initiated as part of the 7th Berlin Biennale and has a list of partners, including Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, that, while shorter, is not unlike Manifesta’s. Call it curationist subterfuge.

Curationism outside the art world seems far from becoming obsolete. The curated experiences afforded by digital technology are just too alluring and facilitating. ‘My metaphor is always signal versus noise,’ says Jesse Hirsh, Toronto-based broadcaster, researcher and self-described ‘internet evangelist.’ He suggests that, at its most useful, curated content provides us with guidance and clarity. Hirsh is critical, however, of the types of curation to which we subject ourselves online – ones that are, he notes, not new. ‘If you define yourself through what you love, that’s what consumerism always has been: buy shit to show who you are. On the internet you don’t have to buy it, so it’s easier, but it’s still consumer identity as curation.’

In an echo of Jaron Lanier’s popular, trenchant 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget, which contends that much of digital culture, because of the arbitrary way it was initially designed, has a way of flattening and thus frustrating user experience, Hirsh finds that huge social-media conglomerates like Facebook and Twitter actually generate very facile experiences based on antiquated modes of media engagement.

‘It speaks to the failures of artificial intelligence and machine learning that it’s still in such early, early days,’ Hirsh says. ‘It depends upon categorization, and the adjacent term of folksonomy, crowd-driven taxonomy – that’s really how Google operates. Google wants to make it seem like it’s the source of all wisdom. But all that Google is is an aggregation of people’s taxonomy and curation. For the thirty years that the internet has not totally been academic and military, categories have been the means by which everything is governed. Most websites are still governed by categories. All the algorithms and software are still glorified categorization.

‘You’re not getting interesting aesthetics presented as thematic, navigational ways of exploring the web,’ he continues. ‘The surrealism of the web is still in short supply. It’s a very literal, let’s-put-everything-in-a-box approach. That lends us a logic on how we sort through things and a self-fulfilling dependence on algorithms. Rather than trying to find a better way, Twitter, Facebook, they all just depend upon algorithms, thinking, in the case of Facebook, that we don’t want to see all of our friends, just the friends they think we want to see. It’s patronizing. It’s a constant curation but it goes back to basic notions of identity: who we are is expressed by what we like and collect. And that logic is obviously the Facebook algorithm; it’s the Google algorithm. What we click is what we like and is a constant collection or curation of taste and preference. And arguably, again on the machine-learning side, it’s flawed. Because we don’t always click for the same reasons. We don’t always collect for the same reasons.’

Hirsh imagines a future in which ‘curating becomes just this thing that people think they do because everyone does it. It’s like breathing.’ At the same time, he thinks ‘there will always be a role for tastemakers. People who find obscure stuff that no one knows about and bring it to their friends’ attention.’ He mentions a performance context, in which people engage with the cultivated sharing of bits of online data and imagery – tweets, for instance – in a live setting, something he experimented with at the Toronto venue the Academy of the Impossible, a ‘peer-to-peer lifelong learning facility.’ ‘It’s not really curating,’ he says. ‘It’s like curating, but that’s not quite the right word.’ Hirsh suggests that curating implies a force and a passivity; one party submits, the other dominates. His own fantasy of the end of curationism seems to be its deconstruction into something truly mutual.

While I was writing this book, several cultural phenomena emerged that appeared to express dissatisfaction with the power imbalances generated by curationism. One was the split of actor and lifestyle-curator Gwyneth Paltrow with her husband of eleven years, musician Chris Martin, and Paltrow’s damage-control press release, published on her website GOOP, saying they would ‘consciously uncouple’ rather than divorce. The phrase, suggesting a delicate, enlightened separating, perhaps with the aid of therapists and meditation, raised significant ire and mockery online. Vice’s Julie Mitchell wrote, ‘they didn’t get divorced like the middle class would. . . “Divorce” means fights in the kitchen and barbed comments over plastic glasses full of 2% milk.’ Some things cannot be curated; breaking up, apparently, is one of them. This affirmation of untidiness, of dirtiness, this collective reaction against the notion that unsettled feelings themselves can be moored, even framed, seemed a reaction against curationism, which, as we have seen, aims to please, attract, deflect and euphemize. Curationism then seemed to me synonymous with repression, a sort of WASPy micromanaging of life that ignored impulse, passion, destruction and anger. It is perhaps apt to return to the stereotype of the art-world curator as suited and put-together, not a hair out of place.

At the same time, the internet was discussing something called ‘normcore,’ a style-cum-philosophy coined by K-Hole, a New York–based art collective (or, as they put it on their website, ‘trend forecasting group’), that was picked up and discussed in New York magazine by writer Fiona Duncan, with the title ‘Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion.’ The article, inspired by one of K-Hole’s several bleak, modernist-style manifestos available as downloadable PDFs on their site, explained the ‘stylized blandness’ that was apparently becoming rampant among the young and/or fashion-minded: ill-fitting, plain T-shirts, pants and other mass- and factory-produced clothing worn by, well, the not young and not fashion-minded. (As a friend of mine put it, ‘Think Larry David.’) The backlash against normcore was, yes, curationist in sentiment, seeming, at times, panicky in its refusal to believe that identity could lie outside sartorial statements of taste, like a goth-punk whining to her parents about her school’s dress code. Weeks following, Vogue U.K. did an online spread entitled ‘Meet Norma Normcore,’ which evidently involved a stylist, and seemed to defang normcore in one fell swoop. The very idea of normcore, as it had trickled into culture, seemed more of the same: young, sexy people can wear whatever they want and look distinct and alluring in it; the avant-garde was extant and this was its latest lob; the demystified had yet again been remystified.

K-Hole’s own manifesto provided more provocative language, resounding Christov-Bakargiev’s call to ‘become boring.’ ‘If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing,’ the manifesto reads, and then, something that could have come out of Wolfe’s The Painted Word: ‘(It means being returned to your boring suburban roots, being turned back into a pumpkin exposed as unexceptional.)’ (Compare with ‘There is nothing more bourgeois than being afraid to look bourgeois,’ a quote attributed to Andy Warhol and included in Wolfe’s book.) Still, however, K-Hole see ‘acting basic’ as the next step in the avant-garde march of planned-obsolescence culture. ‘Having mastered difference, the truly cool attempt to master sameness.’

Less absurd was Miya Tokumitsu’s ‘In the Name of Love’ article in Jacobin magazine, which claimed that ‘there’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate – and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.’ Tokumitsu’s argument rightly dwells on class as an enabler and realizer of the DWYL ethos, and laments the ways in which traditional work, which still has to be done, has been erased. Here, in the context of curationism, we are talking about two related things: the information and cognitive economies and their new subset of professions, but also, more crucially, the deeply problematic curationist view of work, which, as we have seen, elevates and fetishizes deskilling and reskilling. As paradoxically agency-obsessed yet people-pleasing curationists, we have created a trap for ourselves, one reflected in the very professional conundrum that is the curator: more want to do it than can make a living doing it. Tokumitsu’s further arguments are very much in line with my own. She notes, for instance, that ‘DWYL reinforces exploitation even within the so-called lovable professions where off-the-clock, underpaid, or unpaid labor is the new norm: reporters required to do the work of their laid-off photographers, publicists expected to Pin and Tweet on weekends, the 46 percent of the workforce expected to check their work email on sick days. Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.’

At its worst, the power-mongering of curationism creates an intolerable noise, a constant cycle of grasping and display. To escape and conquer this, there must be stillness. Curationism is compulsive, attention-deficit. As we saw with Gioni’s Venice Biennale and Obrist’s collecting of interviews, it can take on the tone of the hoarder or the Orwellian archivist, with discrimination and fine-tuning falling away. The millennial curator wants this, that, everything, Christov-Bakargiev’s tactic of not curating by presenting ‘a mass of stuff’ seeming, despite its protestations, akin. We hoard in our daily curatorial activity, the internet making so much available, and digital folders storing so much more than physical shelves, with their files, ephemeral and deletable, permitting complete lack of commitment. To possess is not to understand, and can produce boredom, entitlement and apathy. We are now all Charles Foster Kanes, our devices our Xanadu mansions, with half of our possessions under dust cloths. I write this book on a laptop nearly full with albums and films, half of which I’ve never listened to or watched.

My personal sanctuary is, ironically, the museum, where, increasingly, curatorial and institutional interventions prevent quiet contemplation, compelling prescribed ways of looking and listening and encouraging superficial methods of engagement like smartphones and activity centres. There are lovely exceptions, of course. The Frick in New York, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and that fantastical museum about museums, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, are all oases divorced from the panicky exigencies of the contemporary market, out-of-time hallucinatory spaces encouraging lingering and exploration. It is naive, perhaps, to call for greater contemplation in the face of an economy and attendant culture centred on the bourgeois self and its predictable contexts. Yet I insist: you are more than what you like. You are more, even, than how you like.

But because curationism raised me too, I end with something I like. It’s a poem on the cover of the debut album of U.K. post-punk band Savages that I read as I began this book. Its call-to-action is preferable to Christov-Bakargiev’s ‘become boring.’ Curationism, it seems, has forgotten the very root of ‘curator’: cura or care and, by extension, genuine curiosity.

THE WORLD USED TO BE SILENT / NOW IT HAS TOO MANY VOICES / AND THE NOISE / IS A CONSTANT DISTRACTION / THEY MULTIPLY, INTENSIFY / THEY WILL DIVERT YOUR ATTENTION / TO WHAT’S CONVENIENT / AND FORGET TO TELL YOU / ABOUT YOURSELF / WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF MANY STIMULATIONS / IF YOU ARE FOCUSED / YOU ARE HARDER TO REACH / IF YOU ARE DISTRACTED / YOU ARE AVAILABLE / YOU ARE DISTRACTED / YOU ARE AVAILABLE / YOU WANT FLATTERY / ALWAYS LOOKING TO WHERE IT’S AT / YOU WANT TO TAKE PART IN EVERYTHING / AND EVERYTHING TO BE A PART OF YOU / YOUR HEAD IS SPINNING FAST / AT THE END OF YOUR SPINE / UNTIL YOU HAVE NO FACE AT ALL / AND YET / IF THE WORLD WOULD SHUT UP / EVEN FOR A WHILE / PERHAPS / WE WOULD START HEARING / THE DISTANT RHYTHM / OF AN ANGRY YOUNG TUNE – / AND RECOMPOSE OURSELVES / PERHAPS / HAVING DECONSTRUCTED EVERYTHING / WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT / PUTTING EVERYTHING BACK TOGETHER / SILENCE YOURSELF.