Curators in a contemporary art museum: responsibilities and status

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It is a well-known fact that, beyond working with art, curators often have an expanded role in the museum, contributing actively in its management and administration, its finance, its social and political agenda and its relationship with the art market. The fact that, for most museums, art is no longer their foremost priority, can be seen as a further reason for the dispersal of the curator’s role across multiple activities within the museum. In 1998, Michael Brenson remarked:

In New York, hardly anyone informed about art institutions is under the illusion that any of the city's big museums cares first and foremost for art, no matter how brilliant and sustaining their exhibitions may be or how exemplary they may be in caring for the art entrusted to them. Curatorial programs serve institutional and board interests and agendas that are economic, social, and political as much as they are aesthetic. These interests, more than the needs of artists, or of contemporary art, are at the forefront of exhibition programming in powerhouse museums in the United States. (Brenson 1998, 23)

In an environment with such interests, curators cannot but expand the focus of their practice.

So, there is no doubt that curating is a varied practice. But, as will be explained in what follows, by the same token curators have acquired a very powerful position within the structure of the museum and within the artworld as a whole.¹⁷¹

Position of power

Curators have a powerful position within institutions and this is reflected by the fact that the natural progression for many curators is to become museum or institutional directors (Morgan 2013, 28). Curators’ powerful status is the result of multiple factors; in order to better understand the underlying dynamics that are at play with regard to processes of perpetuation, it is important to explore these factors in some detail.

The status of the curator cannot but relate directly to the main function of the role: by deciding what is to be exhibited and what is to be collected, curators establish what art is relevant and valuable; therefore, they have the power of influencing the distribution of

171 Although different curators can exert the power that they have in their disposal differently, still (and regardless of the personal attitude of an individual curator) the general status that curators have influences the way they are perceived and approached by others.

91 resources and of determining the future of art. In the case of working with living artists, in particular —beyond studying, reflecting on and interpreting art history, beyond even determining what becomes art history,— curators support the viability of the practice of their selected artists through the very endorsement of their work, and thus they determine, in a sense, what art can or cannot be produced. Reflecting on the influence of curators, Maria Lind refers to cultural heritage as “curated cultural past” (Lind 2012, 12). Whereas Boris Buden proposes to imagine the curator’s role as that of a “(cultural) customs officer” and a “gatekeeper”, having the power of “silencing”, “trashing”, “veiling” and “rendering powerless” a part of artistic and cultural production:

[T]he curator allows some objects to enter, while blocking others and thereby devaluating them, leaving them to oblivion, or otherwise annihilating them. […]

Mediating, thus, draws borderlines and establishes demarcations. Concretely, not only does it determine the internal content of a cultural heritage but also its outside, its external “leftovers,” the space of “cultural trash,” which is not worth inheriting.

[…] This explains one very important duty the curator assumes in the field of contemporary art. Precisely in accomplishing a selection, she establishes the demarcation that define the so-called art system. Curators draw the boundary between the inside of today’s art system and its outside, operating at this boundary as gatekeepers. This too, is what they take care of and look after — the boundaries that distinguish the space of contemporary art. They introduce a threshold into this space, and control traffic of artistic goods and values in accordance with that threshold. (Buden 2012, 30–1)

Buden describes here a professional with the absolute power of determining an artist’s career.

And, in relation to our purposes, it is useful to consider the effect that this can have on the negotiations between an artist and a museum curator regarding the specifics of an artwork’s instantiation.

In fact, curators’ status is further strengthened through the close relationship they are in a position to form with the creators of the works. Museums have an interest in maintaining an active connection with artists, since this can support them in having greater control on their

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programming and their collections.¹⁷² This active connection between the museum and the artist is formed and maintained by the curator. Curators would be the ones considering an artist’s practice and inviting them to exhibit in the museum. Curators are the ones who would need to discuss with the artist in order to collect information for the production of texts that accompany the exhibitions. In cases where the artist is involved in configuring their work within the exhibition space during the set-up of an exhibition, it is curators that will collaborate with them in this process. There are also the complex processes that this thesis addresses — documenting the artwork’s defining properties, instantiating variable artworks, and making decisions pertaining to format migration, framing devices and display equipment,— as will be discussed further on in this Chapter, even when conservators of contemporary art are involved, curators maintain a close dialogue with the artist during such processes.

Curators have also been gaining power through their bonds with the wider artworld and, particularly, by being in close dialogue and collaboration with powerful private collectors. The relationship between curators and private collectors is, in fact, endorsed by museums: as noted by curator Peter Eleey, major collecting museums provide their curators as consultants to the private sector (Eleey 2013, 119). The reasons for which museums endorse this close relationship between curators and collectors are financial: using the words of Jessica Morgan,

“[v]ery few, if any, museums are able to collect without private support” (Morgan 2013, 26).

When this type of private support is pursued, it is indeed curators who have the role of motivating private collectors to acquire and donate particular artworks to the museum’s collection. Nonetheless, the relationship between curators and private collectors is strong by default, due to the co-dependency that characterises it. While collectors have the resources to support the enrichment of a museum’s collection, curators have the power to determine the value of a private collection, by promoting (through exhibitions) the artists represented in it.

A further factor which has been strengthening the curator’s status is what scholars report as the gradual waning of the separate role of the art critic.¹⁷³ Jessica Morgan has commented that, “in part a result of curatorial involvement in the critical and theoretical discourse of the 1980’”, the curatorial voice has merged with the critical one, forming “one double-headed beast”, thus destroying any possibility for publicly voiced dissent (ibid.). As curators often take the role of critics, it is similarly not uncommon to find art critics turning into curators, either permanently or periodically. An early example of this trend is the

172 A close connection with particular curators and the museums they work in, could influence artists to favour them when planning a show in the pick of their career as well as when a key work of theirs is on sale.

173 See, for instance: O’Neill 2007, 14 and Morgan 2013.

93 exhibitions that Rosalind E. Krauss curated at the Guggenheim in the 70’s. ¹⁷⁴ Of course, there are still art critics that are not involved in curating and their writings have a constant presence in media.¹⁷⁵ But still, today’s art critic does not seem to have the authority and influence that, for instance, art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) had on American Abstract Expressionism. Nowadays, this type of authority and influence seems to be solely a curators’

privilege.

The prestige of the museum curator was also supported by the curators’ leap to independent work: curators proved that they can be very influential outside of an institutional position and very successful in drawing the attention of audiences. At the same time, those museum curators who enter the museum with the experience of working independently, have the benefit of the extended networks that they have built through their independent collaborations — networks that can variously support their museum career.

Lastly, the curators’ power is enhanced by their visibility as the authors of exhibitions:

as Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak (1989) note: “the exhibition curator’s function authorizes a measure of fame which eludes other colleagues” (Heinich and Pollak 1996, 237).

As curators are visible, eponymous and, often, the public face of institutions, they are able to possess symbolic capital — a capital that pertains to prestige, celebrity and honour. It is important now to consider how museum curators stand in relation to the challenge of perpetuation of contemporary artworks, given the variability of their role but also their position of power within the museum and beyond.