2.4 The Rise of the “Curator as Author” in Contemporary Art
This detour to material culture approaches underlines key aspects of the curation economy regarding the relation between value and expertise, namely it indicates the relatively contingent character of value production for objects on display and its reliance on trusted authorities. This is crucial to note, as this contingency between symbolic and economic value, displayed objects and trusted experts is more apparent in contemporary art, which is the context within which the curator is elevated to the level of an auteur. In contemporary art, this mode of assigning value pushes contingency to its limits, as potentially any materiality can become art in a gallery space, provided it is conceptualized and contextualized as such. This is what Martha Buskirk notably calls the “contingent object” of contemporary art (2014), as the metamorphosis of mere stuf to art depends on the ability of an art-expert to construct convincing concepts and contexts around this object.
The figure of the readymade, mass produced, industrial object nominated— rather than made—as art and the legacy of Marcel Duchamp are here key. Duchamp suggested with the readymade that the idea to exhibit a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, or a fountain—that is, “random” cultural objects— merits artistic value. The materiality of an object, the skill used to produce it, or the aesthetic style it inhabits matter less (or do not matter at all) when compared to the conceptualization and contextualization of this materiality. It is a legitimized authority, an expert—that is the artist themselves—who can nominate random stuf as art. The groundbreaking reception of Duchamp in the high art of post-war America and Europe, in the post-retinal art movements of minimalism, conceptualism, and the pop art of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been also dubbed as the “Duchamp efect” (Buskirk and Nixon, 1996), gave currency to the idea that the gesture of selection potentially merits authorial value.7 The artist here is an alchemist, as “Duchamp transforms industrial vulgarity into a work of art” in the same way that an alchemist endeavors to transform the physical properties of matter (Moutsopoulos, 2021: 49). In short, the legacy of Duchamp’s readymade tells us that any object, even if industrially produced, can be elevated into an art object through appropriate framing. In this process the category of the artist and thus of the artistic authority is transformed. As Thierry de Duve puts it:
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
37