Arts & Entertainment

Who cares?

“The role of the curator is doubtlessly a position of distinguished economic and social privilege paired with authority, and should therefore be weighted with responsibility. A responsibility to what, and to whom, however? It seems that the job description is refreshed and updated every time a new gadget leaves the factory assembly line…”
To read more of what Vanessa Kowalski has to say about curating in this current age check out her article “Who cares?” on our website!

an excerpt from ‘On Curating, Online: Buying Time in the Middle of Nowhere.’

By Vanessa Kowalski

What is a curator? The platitudinous question evades definition and is refuted no matter how it is answered and despite how often it is asked.

The ever shifting role of the curator has doubtlessly been the center of often polarising debate amongst those whom the definition most severely affects, be they artists, cultural workers, educators, employers, marketing managers, and of course, curators themselves. This Medusa of a moniker is used by both the most powerful institutions that dominate the cultural landscape. Is everyone really a curator? Yes. And no. (Is it possible not to look?)

Although curators often work on projects in collaboration with others, such as designers, editors, writers, educators, etc., there is an element of bias inherent in this process, as the curatorial role is ultimately an embodied individual position. Curators are deeply embedded within market dynamics, and for those who take the title professionally, the act of caretaking is both compensated and compensating—their role as tastemakers is instrumental in determining what and whose artworks are shown (and therefore assigned value) when, where, and in what context. This process of visibility they enable ultimately drives both the accumulation of economic and social profit for the network of involved parties, the curator often acting as both an instigator and parasite, rather than parrhesiastes.
The rise of the transnational curator in the 1990s, articulated in the mounting number of group exhibitions and biennales, and now a hypermobile force in the globalized world, led to both an increased demand for locally based expertise and the expansion of a privileged predominantly Western idea of contemporary culture, modernist ideas and histories. Naturally, an increase in the number of museums has resulted in the need for more curators, and subsequently the rise of graduate or certificate based curatorial programs in academia. The last several decades have seen the curatorial profession flooded, perhaps for the promise of incrementally rising salaries, not only by those who have graduated from such programs but also by artists, autodidacts, actors from nearly all fields from the likes of science and literature to advertising and marketing, and most often by women. While ‘curator’ is a relatively new title to be taken, self or otherwise assigned, embraced, rejected, celebrated or decried, no matter the individuals intention, it has, despite its surrounding controversy, been exposed to, or is perhaps even characterized by, notions of celebrity. The problematic notion of qualification within the field has led to an influx of competitive scurrying, paradoxically propelled by the desire to be the first to ‘discover’ new approaches to non-hierarchical thinking, to exhibition making, and critical discourse.

The role of the curator is doubtlessly a position of distinguished economic and social privilege paired with authority, and should therefore be weighted with responsibility. A responsibility to what, and to whom, however? It seems that the job description is refreshed and updated every time a new gadget leaves the factory assembly line…

Photo Credit: Sebastion Wolf

Vanessa Kowalski is a Polish-American curator, writer, editor and artist. She holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and an MA in Curating, Mediating, and Managing Art from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. After co-founding an alternative gallery space in Los Angeles, she has gone on to curate numerous exhibitions and series of public programming both locally and internationally. She is a co-founder and editor of we need to talk, a publication launched in Helsinki which looked at the art of the interview. She has kept a blog since 2016, www.pocketsize.gallery, which attempts to break down the idea of ‘women’s work’ by questioning what it means to be a woman and what it means to work. Her artworks and writing have been featured in books and publications such as Clog x Artificial Intelligence, Take Shape Mag, Precog Mag, Speed of Resin, and more. Her MA dissertation, ‘On Curating, Online: Buying Time in the Middle of Nowhere,’ explored ideas of exhibiting artworks in the digital realm and the need for expanded practices of care in the curatorial field at large. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as the Program Director of the NARS Foundation, an International Artist Residency Program dedicated to supporting emerging and mid career artists located in Sunset Park. www.vanessakowalski.com

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