Curating.info

In like a lion, out like a lamb... welcome to March's Pick 'N Mix, a real mixed bag of treats this month:

- First of all, a postscript of sorts to last month's Pick 'N Mix, the "credit crunch edition": You've all surely read it by now, but in case you haven't, Holland Cotter's article, "The Boom Is Over! Long Live the Art!" in the New York Times is well worth a read. Complementing some of Francis McKee's comments that I quoted in last month's edition, Cotter writes: "Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing." Also, over at New Curator, there's an article on creative use of "slack spaces", which are some of the thousands of retail shops that have been vacated due to the credit crunch and not rented. As Pete at New Curator writes: "What better way to encourage economic stimulus than making sure commercial properties don’t fall into ruin and improving the image of the surrounding area?"

- I'm contemplating writing a whole article about "guest" curators and freelance curators, and their place in the market. Until then, maybe you can just read what I'm reading: an article on the American Association of Museums website called "The Stranger Among Us: Managing the Guest Curator Relationship", and an article by Sharon Heal entitled "Be My Guest" in the February issue of Museums Journal (sorry, the article isn't online! See if you can sneak a peek at Museums Journal at your local library or museum), the upshot of which is that it's a good idea to bring in outside experts in particular areas (for example, a milliner for a hat show) to curate temporary or permanent exhibitions.

- There's a good interview with the ever-interesting curator Nato Thompson at art:21. Favourite quote: "As much as the onslaught of cultural production over the last fifty years has radically altered capital’s relationship to aesthetics, it has also made us much more aware that knowledge has a form, and that there are a myriad of forms for the delivery of information and the production of knowledge. Basically, knowledge is a performance, whether it is the stage of the classroom, or the aesthetics of a typeface in a book, to the performance in a street, to a multi-channel video projection." A satisfying statement to unpick, which led me to ponder how curators perform knowledge.

- A brief article about the internationalism of the curatorial profession in the Japan Times: "Why Curators Stay at Home". To sum up, it asks why more Japanese curators are not "super curators", zooming around the globe, and the article comes up with the rather predictable answer that in order to be international, one must rack up a few air miles and be willing to exchange. Worth a read for the interview snippets with Fumio Nanjo, though.

- A fascinating piece entitled Whither Curatorial studies? is available on Artworld Salon. This piece rightly interrogates the existence of curatorial degree programmes and what they hope to accomplish and equip their students to do. "Undoubtedly the role of curator has been squeezed too narrowly between administration and dealmaking; but the travesty may be that curatorial studies programs fail to acknowledge this when they recruit students and collect their often sizeable tuitions. Shouldn't we then ask what sort of training curatorial programs are giving their students?" Of course, similar questions could be directed at so many fine art degree programmes and humanities programmes as well -- scores of artists leave art school without even knowing if their work fits into a commercial market or not, and if it does, what to do with that information. However, this essay at Artworld Salon is right to focus on curatorial studies, a field of study that, due the competitive jobs marketplace and varying contexts within which curators can work, demands much of those designing the curriculum.

- ...and, this just in: Nat Muller has reviewed the recent symposium at the Witte de With, "The Curators". A taste: "the curator as the new rock star, the self-proclaimed priests and priestesses of the art scene, the critics’ darlings or foes, the curator as genius, the curator as fascist, the curator as the icon we love to hate, or adore. It’s a lot of pressure…expectations were high."

P.S. Don't forget -- some of these articles don't stay online forever. If you want to refer to them in future, develop your own archiving system or use Evernote.

Welcome to December's Pick 'N Mix!

- First off, a project by Vienna-based curator Miriam Kathrein. Kathrein has been developing her artist vs curator/curator vs artist project since 2007, and the latest iteration of this project is being featured on trickhouse.org. The project is a vehicle for debate and visualisation that examines "...the relationship and shifting roles of artists and curators in contemporary art and the resulting consequences in art production." The latest work in this project is a collaboration with graphic designer Alva Unger, wherein three artist/curator pairs responded to selected texts that focus on notions of "expertise, authority, authorship, collaboration, intermediary, curator as artist, roles and competition". Six gorgeous posters have been designed which are free to download and print. The starting points for responses were quotes from texts by Jan Verwoert, Dave Beech & Mark Hutchinson, and Soren Andreasen & Lars Bang Larsen. The respondents were Borjana Ventzislavova, Jason Lazarus, and Clemens Leuschner (artists), and Michelle Kasprzak, Emmanuel Lambion, and Joseph del Pesco (curators).

- I've been watching a lot of video interviews with curators lately and thought I'd share some favourites with you. Sarah Cook, Newcastle-based curator and co-founder of CRUMB, discusses curating new media art and her most recent role as Curatorial Fellow at Eyebeam in New York in a video on DanceTech. Several clips are available at the Victoria & Albert's website, including interviews with the curators of Between Past & Future: New Photography and Video from China. JoAnne Northrup, Senior Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art, discusses their exhibition Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon on YouTube. Hans Ulrich Obrist, who needs no introduction, delivered an eight-part lecture to the European Graduate School, and these lectures are available on YouTube. Jens Hoffman gave an interesting lecture on the nature of curatorial practice, which is available on fora.tv.

The San Francisco Art Institute has a podcast series entitled "Dialogues". Two podcasts in this series may interest Curating.info readers: one featuring Laura Hoptman, and another featuring Carlos Basualdo.

Laura Hoptman curated the 2004 Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens. In her talk, Hoptman discusses her interest in artwork that explores big questions: those of life, death, and the meaning of the universe. Carlos Basualdo is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an Adjunct Professor at the IUAV University in Venice, Italy. He was a co-founder (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) of the Union of the Imaginary, an online forum for the discussion of issues pertaining to curatorial practice. These podcasts are long and feature lengthy introductions, so better to listen to these when you have a bit of time.

Veteran podcasters Bad at Sports teamed up with Side Street Projects to present a 10-part podcast series entitled "What Do Curators Want?" that covers best professional practices for contemporary visual artists. While the podcasts are definitely aimed at artists (and give some terrific concrete tips to artists), the messages about professional practices are often applicable both ways. Far from theoretical talks, these short, practical discussions might be useful to curators too. Of particular interest may be hearing how the featured curators in these podcasts discuss perennial issues such as artistic quality and different types of exhibitions and exhibition venues. Compare their views to yours!

Frieze Foundation (the good folks who bring us the Frieze Art Fair, Frieze Magazine, and other goodies) also have a great podcast series. One of their recent podcasts, Cultural Cartography: Does Art Travel? is a discussion chaired by Philippe Vergne (new director of the DIA Art Foundation in NYC, former Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Walker Art Center) focusing on whether art can really speak across borders. What happens when the local becomes global? Vergne, in his introduction, questions whether we are really taking advantage of international connections and jokes that this podcast could have alternatively been titled "Pasta or chicken?", echoing that familiar refrain on long haul flights. It's a strong panel and well worth downloading.

Happy listening!

Welcome to October's Pick 'N Mix. First off, a couple of housekeeping items. You may have noticed the arrival of the "Culture Pundit Ad Network" box to the right. I would like this site to support itself a little, yet I am unwilling to inflict garish and irrelevant ads upon my readers. The logical solution was to apply to become part of the Culture Pundit network, which delivers relevant ads to terrific arts publishers such as VVORK, Bad At Sports, Rhizome, and Art Fag City. Happily, they accepted my application and I will now be running their ads here. If you like Curating.info, give the ad a click every once in a while!

Another housekeeping item is about the links that I provide to newspapers and periodicals. I often see items that I like on news sites and link to them, only to go back a few months later and find that the item I linked to has become completely inaccessible. Usually what happens is that the item becomes available only to paying subscribers for that particular news service. To address this, recently I started using an archiving tool called Evernote. While I haven't been using it long enough to really know how well it actually works (or if there is a way for me to export or save the data that I have collected should I choose to leave their service), it does appear to do the trick of archiving whole web pages with one click. So I'd like to strongly recommend that if you find a link to something you are interested in here, especially on websites operated by newspapers and magazines, try using Evernote or some other tool to make a permanent archive for yourself.

...and now, onto this month's Pick 'N Mix items:

- I recently contributed an essay, "For What and For Whom?" to the CUREDITING issue of online journal Vague Terrain, which was guest edited by CONT3XT.NET. The theme of the issue aims to create "... a "screenshot" of actual tendencies within curatorial and editorial models: artistic creation and the processes of its re-formulation within different presentational contexts are brought together under the label CUREDITING, a hybrid between the two concepts of "curating" and "editing"." I chose to take the rise of online group curating as the point of departure for reflections about intentions behind curatorial and editorial tasks, and the misrepresentations that occur due to the use and abuse of the term "curator".

- On a similar note, Anna Somers Cocks unpicks a few misconceptions and myths about what curators do (you will want to "Evernote" or otherwise archive this link!). "Misconception number one: that curators have a narrow range of knowledge. The reality is that a good curator has breadth as well as depth."

- Interviews, interviews, interviews! Eyebeam Curatorial Fellow Sarah Cook is interviewed by Ceci Moss, and Director at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery Astria Suparak is interviewed by Lauren Cornell on Rhizome. NowPublic is featuring a video interview with Gavin Wade about Eastside Projects, a new artist-run space in Birmingham, UK. Last but not least, Artkrush editor Paul Laster interviews Christopher Phillips, senior curator at New York's International Center of Photography, about the Chinese art scene.

- I recently came upon the website for Curators in Context, which "...aims to be an open, fully interactive, bilingual and collaborative web space for national and international visual art curators." We can look forward to a digital and audio archive launching sometime this year. In the meantime, however, there is a great essay entitled "Speaking Through Silence" by Jan Allen, Curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, ON, Canada available for download (link opens PDF file). Allen says: "In laying out some of the "unspoken" dynamics underpinning curatorial practice, I raise questions about the degree to which conditions support the presentation of new forms of art and identify tensions inherent in the institutional curator’s role, including the seldom broached zone of personal and professional motivation." This essay brings us full-circle in a way by raising the question of motivation, which is highlighted in the "For What and For Whom?" essay that I mentioned first of all. Happy reading!

Welcome to the August edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of curating-related things:

- I've finished writing a short report on the IKT (the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art) Congress that was held in Montreal in May. Have a read!

- This interview with João Ribas by Ceci Moss on Rhizome is a good read. Quote: "Curatorial practice, to me, is about mediating such frames in the end--different contexts, different readings, different publics."

- "Curator crowds" are all the rage it seems, I've blogged about them briefly before, and they keep cropping up. Recently the Brooklyn Museum of Art produced Click, a photography exhibit that was curated collaboratively by anyone who wanted to take part. Via Art Fag City, I took note of a link to an interview with Jennifer Blessing, curator of photography at the Guggenheim, who offers her thoughts on this phenomenon of "curator crowds". The interview is excellent food for thought.

- Just a reminder to my readers that I really enjoy getting your emails (seems most folks are too shy to comment publicly!). Keep them coming, and any suggestions you might have about what I have on offer here are much appreciated. So send me a note, and then turn off your computer and enjoy the rest of the summer!

Welcome to the July edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of things that caught my eye over the course of the previous month. Check it out:

- A new Curating.info Conversations e-book has been released! Download it now.

This edition of Curating.info Conversations is with Karen Gaskill, the Director and Curator of Interval, and a Researcher at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool. She is also currently completing her practice-based PhD in Digital Media and Social Practice at the Digital Research Unit, The University of Huddersfield. The interview with Karen covered topics ranging from getting outside of the white cube to the expanding role of the audience.

- I recently discovered a blog called "Sideshows", written by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy. Recently Ms Chong Cuy has been publishing some really interesting interviews with young curators in China and Hong Kong. Recent examples include an interview with Kate Fowle, International Curator at the Ullens Centre in Beijing, wherein the notion of what "international" practice is today is discussed, and the second interview in the series is with Zoe Butt, Director of International Programs at Long March Project in Beijing, China. Well worth a read!

- Ms Chong Cuy, author of Sideshows, asked Kate Fowle to elaborate a bit more on the meaning of her title of "International Curator". Similarly, in this article we find founding film curator of University of California San Diego's ArtPower!, Rebecca Webb, discussing the difficulty of a title like "Film Curator". "A lot of people – when I'm here, anyway – say, 'Oh, do you work in a library or something?'" Ms Webb says. As curators, we all know titles have power and meaning, and this is usually why it is important professionally to seek appropriate credit for the work you have done. These specialist titles that were created for Ms Fowle and Ms Webb are meant to indicate an area of expertise, however, it is clear that it remains confusing for some people (sometimes because they don't understand what curators do in the first place, other times because the notion behind the specialism is so new?). Nomenclature is no small thing. I'll simply wonder aloud here: what can be done to indicate specialisation without inducing confusion?

- CultureGrrl (among other outlets) reported on the "leave" taken by Curator and Deputy Director David Franklin of the National Galleries of Canada. For me, this news story raised several ethical questions. Among all of the very obvious questions around the obligations of the gallery to its employees and to its public, the next issue that arose for me was of Mr Franklin's privacy. Curator at the National Galleries of Canada is a prominent position, to be sure, but did Mr Franklin ever imagine that his decision to take extended leave (or to effectively leave his post) would be fodder for the national and international press? I'm not sure that he did. Whatever his reasons, he isn't appealing to the press to make a case against his employer -- yet -- so perhaps he should be left alone, and we should presume his colleagues are capable of continuing his work, until we hear a statement from Mr Franklin himself. Or do any readers here think otherwise?

First of the month again... even with an extra day, February seemed short! Here's the March '08 edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of little news items in the realm of curating.

• A fascinating article on the state of museums and galleries in China on ARTnews notes that a concern in the face of explosive growth "...has been the absence of training programs for museum professionals in China, a country where the term "curator" did not exist ten years ago. Even now, there is only one program in curatorial studies, run by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which is graduating its first class this year. "In China, we didn't have degrees such as arts management or curatorial studies, so most of the museum directors were originally artists," says Fan Di'an, who like many directors in China got his position through political appointment." The artist/curator model is well-established, particularly in North America, and so the reaction to a similar model emerging (albeit under quite different circumstances) is one to keep an eye on.


• If new media, Internet art and networked art are your thing, there's lots of good reading at this page at the BAM website, with several downloadable documents detailing conversations and interviews with curators, artists and directors by Karen Annemie Verschooren. The interview with Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney, is particularly fascinating and candid in its description of the early days of exhibiting new media artwork in a prominent museum.


• Thomas Krens is leaving the Guggenheim, and this act has sparked a lot of reflection on his years at the helm. Charlie Finch on artnet.com characterizes the influence of Krens on curatorial practice as "...turning everything into an art that was at once contemporary and exchangeable in ever increasing increments of value." It's a very critical standpoint that also claims that "...the land of Krens evoked the carnival and the circus. Whether showing Spanish painting gems, Aztec war toys, garments or bikes, Krens' vision included the kitchen sink, the golden bidet and everything in between." From that statement out of the USA, let's jump (gently) across the pond for a moment. The new Director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, made a statement saying that as far as he was concerned, the era of the big, sexy blockbuster is over, and Guardian writer Jonathan Jones discusses how the blockbuster itself is not to blame, but that one should blame "sloppy curating - curating that is addicted to short cuts, allergic to the years of research and negotiations it takes to put on a really good exhibition." Food for thought.


• Finally, the New York Times reports that "nine months after taking over, Jeffrey Weiss has resigned as director of the Dia Art Foundation, saying he had realized he was not cut out for the job." Mr Weiss says: "It took me too far away from curatorial and scholarly work [...] I had an idea that being director of Dia would be different because it is such a small place. [...] My hope is to return to curatorial and scholarly work, but right now I'm taking a breath." It'll be interesting to see both who Dia hires next and what Mr Weiss does next, and serves as a point of reflection on where a curatorial career can be said to "terminate" -- does a curator need to stay in jobs expressly about curating, and leave museum/gallery direction to those with deeper interests in business/administration?

It's the first of the month, which means it's time again for Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of interesting tidbits that have captured my attention recently - this month, it seems to be interviews, interviews, interviews!

• The Uncuratorial Curator is a recent interview on artnet.com with Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York. In the interview, Gioni discusses the unique possibilities at the New Museum, his friendship with controversial Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, and much more. Speaking about future plans for his work at the New Museum, Gioni says: "...the museum itself is designed to become a place where the memory and the presence of the street is kept and preserved. [...] We want to do shows that are immersive. You come to an exhibition and the whole exhibition is an experience. It feels a little like being in the head of an artist."


• David Garcia recently posted an interview with Chinese artist Lin Yilin and some commentary to the nettime mailing list. The post and the responses it generated are excellent and well worth a read. Early on in his post, Garcia notes the role of the Western curator in the Chinese art boom:
  

  Most of this kind of support for Chinese experimental art seems to come from the western curators. In part this is because a significant number of Chinese artists have chosen to speak our 'language', by which I mean they have adopted the lexicon of western contemporary art practice and used it to explore and to navigate their own experiences of rapid modernisation. The benefits of this kind of political 'economy' flows in both directions; the language of contemporary art practice seems fit for the purpose of navigating the extreme volatility of current Chinese experience and our tired cultural vocabularies are enlivened and transformed by their collision with a new context.



• And last but not least, a good interview with Ex-Whitney curator Larry Rinder. Speaking about this new role as a college dean, Rinder says: "As a curator, you're generally dealing with things that are already made -- artifacts, works of art -- and trying to puzzle through what they mean and how to illuminate them through writing and juxtaposition. It's a reflective practice. Whereas working in an art school is a more productive activity -- catalyzing information and giving artists the tools and the provocations they need to move forward."

Welcome to the October edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of bite-sized items that have captured my attention recently.

• The "five questions" format for an interview seems to be as popular as ever. Here are two that have caught my eye: five questions for Matthew Higgs, guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and five questions for Ou Ning, founding curator of the Get It Louder exhibition, a four-city showcase that explores the increasingly blurry line between art and design in China.


• This little morsel is stretching the mandate of this blog a little, but I thought I'd include it here anyway: William Gibson, godfather of cyberspace, recently (and very briefly) mused in an interview on the idea of "curating" via eBay. As Gibson says: "Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. eBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. eBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement." The interview is available on the Washington Post website. (via ExhibiTricks)


• This UNESCO position paper gives a good overview on how the role of the museum in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage was considered at the expert meeting that took place in 2004. The paper deals with this subject in very plain English and raises some very interesting points. One of the most thought-provoking segments for me was this bit:
  

  Museums are already, in this sense, involved with living heritage: collections that look dead to us in their depots and showcases may be very much alive to descendents widely separated in space and time from this material and conventional ways of dealing with it. And here is a conundrum: if the dead collections in museums (dead, anyway, except to the few who can lay hands on them!) can 'come alive' under certain circumstances, can currently ‘living cultural heritage’ die (inadvertently) if it is musealised in a certain way? What does it mean to speak of ‘safeguarding’ living heritage when the outcome of musealisation is so unpredictable?

  
  


• "How Many More Curators Will Leave the Trade?" cries the headline at the Art Newspaper. The article discusses a perceived "brain drain" from the curatorial roles at museums, because of low salaries and increasing pressure to fundraise and deliver outside of job descriptions. True or false? Read the article, and you be the judge. This article is no longer available, because the Art Newspaper keeps their archived articles for paying subscribers only. It appears that even an abstract of the article is unavailable without paying - how disappointing.