Is the curator now the star of the show?

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The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)

By Paul O’Neill

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have seen a shift in what is understood by ‘curating’.  As Paul O’Neill puts it in the introduction to his very good book, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), during the last 25 years or so:

the figure of the curator has moved from being a caretaker of collections – a behind-the-scenes organizer and arbiter of taste – to an independently motivated practitioner with a more centralized position within the contemporary art world and its parallel commentaries. 

It is the history of the rise of these ‘independently motivated practitioners’ from the 1960s to the present day that O’Neill seeks to evaluate and account for critically to his readers.  He does this in three substantial but accessibly written chapters, starting with a detailed review of ‘the emergence of curatorial discourse’ over this period.  In doing this, he ranges over much of the history of modern art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, demonstrating how changes in practice have gone hand in hand with changes in strategies of display. 

O’Neill addresses ‘biennial culture’ and its global ramifications, starting with a working definition of ‘Biennial’ as ‘ a large-scale, international group exhibition that recurs every two to five years’, and taking as significant case studies a 1989 Paris exhibition, ‘Les magiciens de la terre’, Documenta 11 (2002) and the  50th Venice Biennale (2003).  The final chapter deals with recent developments in ‘Curating as a medium of artistic practice’, considering amongst others some of O’Neill’s own contributions as a curator, such as ‘Coalesce’ (several locations, 2005–10) as well as a writer. His argument, set out in his introduction and developed in this chapter, is that ‘curatorship is now a fully recognized mode of self-presentation’.

Potential readers should not be put off by some of the terms and concepts used by the O’Neill, some of which appear in the quotations from the text above, nor indeed by the apparent complexity of the book’s title.  A great strength of this book is that the writer is prepared to explain the ideas with which he is working, elaborating them where necessary both within his text and in substantial endnotes (30+ pages) which also include bibliographical references to a wide range of useful additional reading.  In this way, readers are introduced to some of the key exhibitions of the last quarter-century, and to the relevant literature as well. 

To take one example, a reference in Chapter 1 to the work of Raymond Williams both fleshes out the meaning of the term ‘emergent’ in the context O’Neill uses it, but also explains Williams’ intellectual background to those who might not be familiar with it.  Later in the same chapter, an endnote gives some history of the term ‘institutional critique’ for readers who wish to follow this up. 

In general, the way O’Neill writes about these  important and topical aspects of curatorship and exhibition practice is a model of its kind: he does not assume that his readers will come to his book with extensive prior knowledge, and explains without either ‘talking down’ or ‘dumbing down’.  This means that The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) would offer a very good summary introduction to this area of study for students, but would also be accessible to general readers who are interested in thinking about such issues of current interest as the rise of the big-name ‘celebrity curator’, and the proliferation of the ‘biennial’ – and other group shows of contemporary art –  as an international, indeed global, phenomenon.

The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)  by Paul O’Neill. The MIT Press 2012. 180 pp., 31 mono illus, £17.95. ISBN 978 0 262 01772 5