Thus, an independent curator does not have to describe a looted object in a museum in a way that conceals its histories of colonization, as mentioned above, but instead can denounce colonialism together with the institution’s colonial histories (e.g., in the fashion for example of Okwui Enwezor or Adam Szymczyk in Documenta 14, see Kompatsiaris, 2020). These curators can make a name for themselves in the intellectual marketplace as critics instead of simply as bureaucrats.
Somewhere around the 1970s and 1980s, the professional title of the curator started undergoing a linguistic, afective, and cultural shift among art professionals and in the wider public debate:
Before World War II, the organization of exhibitions was the task of what was called the “museum curator”, with the title’s implications of attachment to a stable institution and attention to building up and caring for a permanent collection. That role, as the etymological roots of curare or “taking care” imply, was mainly related to the interpretation of art and the preservation of artworks. In the decades after World War II, there was a shift from this type of “museum curator” toward what would eventually be called an “exhibition auteur”, which is to say, the role of the “curator” as we understand it today. […] This shift and the debate about what a “curator” is and does only really began in the nineteen-sixties. […] Over time, a curator’s work thus proved to be less about “caring for” in the sense of preserving art than about “discovering” lesser-known artists, movements, and scenes, a veritable profession shaped by master courses, thematic symposia, and conferences.
(Martini and Martini 2010: 262–262, cited in Madžoski, 2013: 34)
The new authorial persona of the curator is well established not only in ordinary artworld chatter but in curatorial studies and prominent texts in the field (O’Neill, 2016; Bishop, 2023; O’Neill, Wilson, 2010; Altshuler, 1994). The rise of the curator as “creator” (Altshuler, 1994: 236), “auteur” (O’Neill, 2016: 5), and “producer” (Smith, 2012: 46)8 are demonstrative of what the critic Rossen Ventzislavov declares in a categorical way: the curator’s work “should be understood as fine art” (2014: 83). Recognizable curators in the biennial and museum circuit, such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Candice Hopkins, and Katerina Gregos, to name just a few, produce authorial public discourse with exhibitionary and non-exhibitionary means. As all-round auteurs and public intellectuals, contemporary art curators compose texts, give talks, edit catalogues, and organize events that tend to grapple not only with art historical but also with social matters. Endowed with an aura of sophistication, artfulness, and cosmopolitanism, the figure of the curator signals an expansive, independent practice.9
“Independence” is a word that rings true in aspirational class discourse and there is no better example of an independent curator whose life and professional career inspires beyond the artworld’s touch than the global trotter,
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
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