“Someone sat here to say, ‘get it?’”
—Genesis P-Orridge, “Omniman”
“The exhibition projects submitted must address relevant themes showcasing contemporary practices through a clear concept, and demonstrate a strong reflection on current artistic, cultural or social issues, while remaining accessible and inviting to a diverse audience,” reads the Art Gallery Association of Canada’s 2027 call for curators.
“Developed through an extended laboratory-based process involving the artists, Ateliers Belleville’s team and curators, the exhibition takes shape within the space, where each work intentionally intertwines with and influences the others,” says the text for Construction/Conduction, an exhibition curated by Mathieu Arsenault and Sarah Ève Tousignant.
“An Assembly for the Cosmos,” the group show curated by Antoine Bertron at Galerie UQAM, “aims to weave bonds of solidarity based on the recognition of interconnectivity and symbiosis, established with not only the living but also with the non-living, matter and the forces that animate it,” its text explains.
“Beneath the city surface,” says the wall description for Out of Time, a new exhibition at Centre VOX which Doriane Biot curated, “underground networks reveal the faults in a system on the brink of collapse,” as if at once describing the show and the wider state of affairs.
Three current Montreal exhibitions and a call for national curatorial expertise demonstrate that curation is the new artform par excellence at a time when art in all its forms is failing to exist for its own sake.
Curatorial initiatives have recently usurped individual artists and art movements within the contemporary art world’s complex political hierarchy. So much so that audiences today might recognize and invest as much in the curators as the artists themselves as the stars of the show. This represents a significant and specifically 21st century shift in art’s implicit social influence and exposes the economic underpinnings of object-ideas that hold purely speculative value.
This trend follows the Netflixization of visual entertainment and the festivalization of the live musical experience that emerged throughout the first two decades of the new millennium. Ostensibly, these turns emerged in response to consumers’ increasing appetites for variety and quantity over specificity and quality. However, the move towards curated contemporary art indicates that even the most hyper-specific cultural forms are viewed as potentially valuable when enfolded into broader organizational systems. And it is the organizers — and not the organized — that hold sway.
Nothing is so marginal that it cannot be enclosed; nothing so underground that it cannot be exhumed and included and exhibited. Like pigs sniffing for truffles, curators train their senses beneath the surface to transform dirt into fertility.
We might view the curatorial turn as a natural extension of the postmodern aesthetic mode, the palimpsestic assemblage of genre, history, and tradition. Culture unmoored from conventional context begs alternative organizational schemes. Enter art curators to creatively arrange works that are increasingly produced outside of traditional institutions, less influenced by mass artistic movements than by bureaucratic authority. Curators assemble artists and their works like orphanages rescue motherless children, placing them in the foster care of the artist-run center, the foundation, the university gallery — the new disciplinary enclosure.
Still, it is naïve to believe that all of this curating exists anywhere but squarely within economic confines. The real reason that streaming services perennially reclaim forgotten T.V. shows, and third-tier bands are constantly commemorated with festival-headlining slots, is to wring out every last valuable potential, to turn out the pockets of the nichest possible cultural outliers. So, too, do artists become raw capital, which cannot help but have an effect on the kinds of works they create.
Art at its most romantic ceases to be exclusively aesthetic, at its most political ceases to comment upon and react to some perceived injustice, and at its most social ceases to find its place within likeminded communities. Instead, art at its most cynical begins to exist to attract the curator’s eye, to fit a theme, and ultimately, to be a successful commodity within a system of capital exchange that pays only in attention and accelerated currency.
Politicians have historically looked to artists as barometers of social pressure. Now, artists appeal to politicians and granting agencies and curatorial experts to relieve economic pressure. Art becomes a retreat from true politics rather than confronting and reshaping it.
“I’d hoped I could get away with supporting the art that I liked with little compromise and much less external criticism,” writes Steph Kretowicz, co-founder and editor of the online arts publication AQNB, in her essay entitled “Gatekeeping Without a Gate.” AQNB ceased publication in May 2023 amidst the post-pandemic consolidation of not just big but immense tech. The platform became “impossible to monetize,” Kretowicz explains. The only way to sustain a project that seeks to assemble “incredibly dynamic but also pretty niche cultural discourse,” as she describes, is to curate it.
“The ability of articulation to give form to authentic discourse,” wrote Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, “was conditional upon its being linked together by the patent or secret function of the verb to be.” In other words, the existence of objects precedes their ideological or functional application. Aimless art, then, is most in danger of being subsumed by predatory capital chiefly because of its precarity, its mere and fragile existence. The smaller the artist, the more susceptible they are to curatorial profiteering.
When artistic taste exceeds the importance of art itself, we should be on high alert for a wholesale bankruptcy of aesthetic imagination — a “system,” as Doriane Biot wrote, “on the brink of collapse.”
Ars gratia artis, as it has endured for centuries, simply no longer exists. Real power and control are now located at the curatorial rather than the creative level. This puts extreme responsibility into the curator’s hands, an obligation to select, and order, and exhibit artistic objects in ways that antagonize rather than appease capital.
When politics occupies the realm of performance art, it is up to curators to make art perform politically.◼︎
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