it had become legitimate to be an artist without being either a painter, or a poet, or a musician, or a sculptor, novelist, architect, photographer, choreographer, or filmmaker. A new “category” of art appeared—art in general, or art at large—that was no longer absorbed in the traditional disciplines. Now, it is to this “category” that, clearly, Marcel Duchamp’s unassisted readymades belong, the earliest of which—the bottle rack—dates from 1914. A bottle rack is neither a painting, a poem, nor a piece of music; it’s art, or else it’s nothing. If it is not impossible to see it as a sculpture, that’s on the condition that one initially viewed it as art.
(de Duve, 1994: 63)
It is upon this new category of “art in general, or art at large” that the independent curator becomes an auteur; in this new category there is a necessary and constitutive decoupling of art from the “burden” of handcraft technique or skill, which opens up the possibility of endowing artistic agency exclusively to intellectual associations. The theorist John Roberts sees the artistic valorization of intellectual labor as part of a dialectic of deskilling–reskilling in advanced capitalism (2007). This involves a process in which the artist as productive worker is deskilled (i.e., handcraft technique is not a prerequisite for being an artist anymore), and reskilling as conceptual art requires new skills, that is conceptual thinking, mediation, and elaborated interpretations. With art coming closer to theory, and vice versa, this also summons an epistemic paradigm upon which the authorial power of the independent curator rests. Under this epistemic paradigm curators from museum staf are transformed “to impresarios with an acute ability to make relevant the dizzying world of stuf around us” (Arnold, 2015: 317).
The independent curator is not simply an organizer, a meager nerd of history and archives, or a cog fixing national imperatives but a creative persona on their own, potentially an author in the literary or filmmaking tradition, that is, someone who has a vision, style, and informed viewpoint about how their practice converses with the world. This signals the curator’s “liberation in the conceptualist moment”, which is marked from a transition “from caretaker to connoisseur” (Blazer, 2014: 47), introducing the curator into the authorial canon as an actor (potentially) independent from institutional museum politics. “Liberated” curators do not have to merely be permanent museum staf but can be hired in project-based exhibitions or be guest curators in museums (Arnold, 2015: 327). This opens up the profession to the market economy and ofers enhanced opportunities to control the curatorial narrative. In biennials, for instance, which are prestigious outlets of this new curatorial role, curators are typically not permanent institutional employees and have some creative freedom to set up their own discourse.
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Homo Curatorius