The Independent Curator has Long Been a Bankrupt Idea
It's time to call it what it was: parasitic
In June of 2018, Omar Kholeif announced that he would be leaving his post as Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago after less than three years. The announcement came shortly before the opening of “Raised on the Internet,” a sprawling generational survey he spent the bulk of his final year organizing. In a statement explaining the abrupt departure, Kholeif recited a common refrain among independent curators: he was simply too busy.
“I am also excited to get a moment (in the interim) to spend some more time on my freelance projects including the Sharjah Biennial, Abu Dhabi Art, HOME/Manchester International Festival, and the V-A-C Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, along with a number of books that I have set out to write,” he told Newcity. Indeed, Kholeif’s resume includes three new books in as many years - “Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art after the Internet” (2016), “Goodbye, World: Looking at Art in the Digital Age” (2018), and “You Are Here: Art After the Internet“ (2018). “The Artists who will Change the World” (2018), was, at the time of his announcement, available for pre-order on Amazon.com.
Kholeif is by no measure the first independent curator to hop from project to project while building a whirlwind of installments in his path. But his well-cultivated resume and breakneck schedule represent a cult worship that has reached its peak.
The independent curator came to power on the promise to tear down institutional orthodoxies. But what started out as a radical maneuver ended up being one of the most degraded organs of the status quo. Today, the independent curator is a creature of the ego-driven prestige economy. Lacking permanent material ties to institutions, academies, or local art communities, the independent curator operates in a highly networked manner that siphons off the reputational currency of institutions and other centers of power. They are intellectual dilettantes, whose loose interpretations of critical theory are recycled throughout an increasingly voracious program on international thematic exhibitions.
A backlash has long brewed.
How did the independent curator come to dominate the increasingly zero sum game of influence, attention, and institutional resources? How are institutions responding (directly and indirectly) to the regime of minor celebrity curators who increasingly dominate our discourse? Who, exactly, benefits from a climate in which the independent curators set the agenda, often overshadowing the silent cognitive labor of artists, critics, administrators, and dealers.
The time has come for us to tell it like it is: the independent curator is the real estate agent of the art world. With no original property to offer themselves, they mediate the work of others while adding minimal value. Nevertheless they gain cultural capital from the exchange. In a word, they are intellectual parasites.
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The independent curators’ role has been theorized perhaps more than it has been practiced - in fact, “the curatorial” is one of the only disciplines whose existence is dedicated primarily to attempts to define itself. There are several reasons for this. For one, the independent curator arose during a time of great introspection in western academic and institutional circles. Armed with aesthetic concepts deriving from postmodernism, the independent curator provided an ideal “third party” to counter the so-called hegemonic discourses of the time. Their rise was incumbent upon the self-referential, the insular, and of course, and intellectual vanguard, an elect. The second is somewhat more obvious: the independent curator was born into the arts discourse with a built-in inferiority complex. They have always been positioned in somewhat of a pickle. They are deeply reliant on the infrastructure of institutions, but must promise to be nimbler and expansive.
What was required, then, was an ersatz discourse around the independent curator and their practice - somewhat of an institution in and of itself. Known to some as “The Curatorial”, it is debated in enclaves like the Independent Curators International, the Whitney Independent Study program, The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) Bard, and The Exhibitionist, the now-shuttered magazine once spearheaded by Jens Hoffman.
There is also the unvanquishable panel industrial complex, of which curatorial practice is perhaps the most notorious client. All serve as platforms where curators talk, primarily to themselves, about how important they are. The result is one of the most self-involved corners of intellectual life - one that is equal parts insular as it is obsessed with its own celebrities. But the key to the discourse on “the curatorial” is that it continually manufactures a debate about the auteur status of the act of exhibition making. This privileged mode, to which the independent and the independent curator alone may access, is one of the great lies of our age.
Today the independent curator is arguably one of the most visible and venerated positions in the arts. The idea that a curator is anything other than administrative functionary of institutions and the art history that they perform is a historical anomaly. Paul O’Neill’s “Curating Cultures” chronicles the emergence of the independent curator. It began in the late 1980s as the “group exhibition became a dominant mode of curating contemporary art.” It is here where “curatorship” transformed into an artistic activity in its own right. Prior to this, the curator was typically attached to a museum or institution. Their work was often a dull, custodial affair. It was little more than to perform art historical categorization and analysis amidst the administrative work demanded by a collecting art institution. A great deal of curators working today have not fully transformed their identities; many still do work that recalls the commitment to an institutional mission. Yet the siren song of the independent curator has drawn the role of the curator away from the institutional focus that has underpinned the privileged place of art, its exhibition, and its public. A curator used to be a subject of the institution, and the institution an organ of a larger collective idea of art history, the public trust, and a celebration of the achievements of art. With the independent curator, the hierarchy is reversed. The chain of authority by which the exhibition affirms something larger is ruptured, replaced by a focus on the personal celebrity of the organizer.
The contemporary cult of the celebrity demands a figure that can be more plastic than a single visual artist ever could, more dynamic than a critic, and libidinal in appeal that is far beyond the ambit of the droll infrastructure of the exhibition of works of art. This has recently played right into the hands of various socio-economic upheavals wrought by digital technology. Hopping from museum to museum, biennial to biennial, and project to project, the contemporary independent curator is the perfect creature of network capitalism. The insatiable demand and shortened attention span of the digital arts press has created a petri dish out of which the easily consumable curatorial hype is catnip for end-of-year power lists, shallow provocations, and ego-driven power plays. In our age of degrading institutions, we instead place trust and authority in the figure of the entrepreneur. And what is more entrepreneurial than the independent curator? In platform capitalism, fixed labor is a risk. Instead, mediated interactions appear to hold outsize value. And the entrepreneurial maneuvers of the independent curator perfectly navigate a fractured winner-take-all game.
But what is “the curatorial”, exactly, other than the postmodern fetish for interdisciplinarity writ large? In “Talking Contemporary Curating” Terry Smith assigns a wide ranging territory to the the curator:
“To exhibit (in the broad sense of show, offer, enable the experience of) contemporary presence and the currency that is contemporaneity as these are manifest in art—present, past, and multitemporal, even atemporal.”
It is by way of this absurdly wide ambit that the discourse of “the curatorial” assigns auteur status to what is often little more than administrative work. Peans to “contemporaneity” appear to be so much deflection from an interstitial class that must constantly discuss itself for fear of being found out.
This scheme also subsists on poorly-regurgitated theory. The independent curator is obsessed with re-coding, re-reading, de-centering, and de-territorializing. They trade in hopelessly reckless portmanteaus: the translocal, Glomanticism, ex-inhibition. The curatorial indulges in bunk science, toothless political aesthetics, and loose speculations backed up by little more than the cliff’s notes version of popular philosophy. These concepts are next to meaningless, their primary objective is to add a bit of cerebral weight to an endless stream of profound provocations that provide cover for their subjective artist selections.
The independent curator has the privilege to never actually take a position, never to defend, but always to speculate.
The production of independent curators has dominated our critical discourse alongside the rise of the global biennial, the nearly constant international group exhibitions with intimidating themes and supergroup curatorial rosters. The more exotic the location, the more prestigious. Busan, Guangzhou, Sharjah, Kochi-Muziris? These sprawling exhibitions are not for the faint of heart. They are heavy-handed affairs in which very serious but ultimately empty gestures towards blurred boundaries, intersectional cross-pollinations, and interrogations of power occur. The possibilities are limitless (and borders transcendent) just as long as there’s a way for the collectors to reach it via first class flight.
The worst outcome of these international conventions of curatorial self-congratulation is the way in which they water down complex, concrete topics (such as the anthropocene, blockchain, or refugee crises) to mere abstractions for exhibitionary ends. The result is discourse of cliches, and at worst an almost total aestheticization of politics. Pay close attention to nearly any biennial, triennial, or thematic exhibition and you will find a tragic confusion among the performance of visibility and impact.
There’s nothing, really, that’s too far afield for the contemporary curator. The publications program at Documenta 14 promised:
“If this first volume examines forms and figures of displacement and dispossession, and the modes of resistance—aesthetic, political, literary, biological—found within them, coming issues will continue our exploration of coloniality and neoclassicism, performativity and the poor copy, silence and masks, feminism and transfeminism, hunger and architecture, and the politics of misery and its representations, from misericordia to miserliness.”
Got all that?
It’s impossible to make meaning out of such sprawling attempts to constantly be the authoritative mode of commentary and investigation. This sort of intellectual tourism has made the content of independent curator’s craft universalized to the point of irrelevance. The work of the independent curator has become so self-referential and absurdly insular that it threatens to break the role of the institution as a chronicler of the creative endeavor.
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The independent curator’s obsession with rhizomatic decentering belies the main side effect of their overall project: by inserting “the curatorial” as the central organizing logic of the conceptualization, execution, and perception of exhibitions, the independent curator executes a careerist sleight of hand. Exhibition making is clearly a group activity, but if it is raised to the status of art, then it must have a central author, a centered site of genius and creativity. This is why “the curatorial” is so obsessed with maintaining the notion of a privileged mode of exhibition making that is somehow transcendent of the normal activities of an art institution.
The independent curator wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to engender a shared network of authorless ideas of which they themselves become the author. The pursuit of “the curatorial”, then, is at best a cop-out and at worst a charade to abstract away the simple fact that independent curators offer very little to anyone beyond themselves.
When the exhibition is merely a platform for an enterprising auteur-curator, we engage in a neoliberalization not just of the institution, but also of the epistemological fabric of the arts - to wear out the treads of critique by way of continual overuse. The art made under the influence of this regime will suffer. But the privileged place of art in society is, just like the independent curator’s current reign, a delicate, historically contingent phenomenon. The independent curator, unlike the museum or art institution, doesn’t require a mission statement or consistent program since the mission always begins and ends with advancing one’s own career. The curator is supposed to tell the story of the artists; what is more common today, however, is an artist’s work being used to tell the story of the independent curator. Where we once could speak of a curator’s knowledge, today we would be more accurate to speak of a curator’s network.
The artist has their materials and historic conventions; the writer has various forms of prose, rhetoric, and research; and the gallery system has the commercial transactions through which they build relationships, and in turn, a canon. Each of these build institutions unto themselves, that while they are imperfect, qualify as providing utility to a community united in their commitment to a cause outside themselves. While the independent curator’s medium may be the exhibition, their true commitment is to their ego.
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The cultivation of a protected priesthood is even more in demand as recently the large-scale exhibitions that have come to define the curatorial no longer have a meaningful relationship to the public at large. As they reformat, publish, and happily ride the feverish roller-coaster of global art events, the curator produces a sort of end product that can only be engaged with “curatorially.” How often do we read art criticism that is little more than a comment on the decisions of the curator? Reviews of large, international biennials can afford to be little else than references to the singular curatorial vision, and in a world of declining opportunities to write about the arts this often occurs at the expense of critical engagement with the work on display.
One must take a position - or at least produce something of value - in order to stake the circulation of one’s influence in the discourse at large. Not so for the independent curator, whose use of the priesthood of “the curatorial” amounts to a strawman for an absence of any real ideas, a sort of unimpeachable intellectual tourism that permits the endless performance of interrogation as means of power. You can’t negate my ideas if all they amount to is a long-winded, “troubling of discourses” and “questioning of notions.”
The twelfth edition of Manifesta, the “European nomadic biennial,” was held in various venues in and around Palermo, Sicily. The site was, for the team of four “creative mediators,” a “node in an expanded geography of movements - of people, capital, goods, data, seeds, germs - that are often invisible, untouchable, and beyond our control,” according to their statement to the press, presumably those who had gathered for the entire marathon engagement. The relationship of Palermo’s storied history to the 12+ artists, 30 newly-commissioned works, and 5 venues is illegible to the viewer. Each point hidden, a puzzle, as it were, only solvable by the curator’s guidance. In his review of the Berlin Biennale in Frieze, Pablo Larios wondered the same. “The [Berlin] Biennale is primarily of interest … to art professionals interested, for the time being, in the latest biennale by an emerging curator.” Larios ends his thoughts with the lamentation that the current trend of biennial mania by international curators is, well, of interest “mainly to other curators.”
Just as the curator enters deep into an existential crisis, their attempts to subsume other functions of the art system becomes tellingly absurd. We already live in an age when the artist is increasingly performing the duties of the curator out of sheer DIY precarity. Walk back the production of most contemporary exhibitions and you will find that the presentation, production, and the conceptual platform for the show is quite often conceived and largely executed by the artists themselves. In reality, the independent curator has a purely administrative role, somewhere between an office temp or an over-caffeinated intern. The utility of social media, and the avenues it affords artists to present and package work by themselves is yet another phenomenon that squeezes out the nebulous role of the independent curator of contemporary art, specifically among emerging artists. In the face of so much cross-functional collaboration and production, the curator must colonize all to maintain the thin veneer of authorship. They are writers when we already have critics, they are administrators when most artists already do their own logistics, and they “present” exhibitions when there are already all manner of venues and institutions dedicated to the accessible display of art.
Why do we target the curator at a time when digital platforms monopolize our economy, neo-nazi’s threaten migrants, and the globe warms at an unsustainable rate? The dominance of the independent curator requires specific views about the circulation of art, discourse, and knowledge. The independent curator is a strength-of-weak-ties operator for an institutional landscape in ruin. And “the curatorial” is but the cultural arm of a neoliberal, individualist epistemology – fixity is a threatening impediment, slow, unproductive contemplation is a liability, and celebrity is an end in itself. At stake in this regime of the curatorial is nothing less than our faculties of analysis and discernment.
It’s also a question of infrastructural rot. The independent curator’s exploits have the subtle effect of normalizing the temporary project, one in which a financially-unstable, semi-professional class of individual entrepreneurs grifts in and out of quasi-institutional spaces, soaking in the critical lime-light as the unsexy bureaucratic functions that enable them fall prey to increasingly negligence, and in some cases downright attack. Unlike the museum, the writer, or the artist, the curator cannot transcend the limits of their collaborating institutions. A writer can address the masses without mediation, the museum can educate a general public beyond the initiated, and the artist can reach the public in any number of ways. But the independent curator is independent in name only. In their attempt to be the voice of the contemporary institution, curators became its most desperate prisoner. As a result, contrary to its claims, “the curatorial” can’t really be innovative, revolutionary, nor, even, independent. Instead they are little more than callow fellow travelers and fast followers of the ideas of artists, theoreticians, and milquetoast liberal causes - on balance: charlatans, who, like any clerical class, just need a bit of prodding to bring the entire house of cards down.