Hans Ulrich Obrist (HAU). In the last twenty years, Obrist has recurrently been included in the artworld’s Powerlist, often figuring at the top; one can argue that the dissemination of the curatorial imaginary to the global artworld and its adjacent fields, owes much to Obrist’s popular persona as mobile, path-crossing, interdisciplinary, cosmopolitical, networked, innovative, and experimental (Buurman, 2018). For instance, Obrist is credited with enlarging the boundaries of the art field through “infinite conversations” not only with artists but with figures arousing cultural interest as diverse as Björk, Michel Houellebecq, Ken Loach, and Tariq Ali, in marathon interviews as director of the Serpentine Galleries and in a series of books (Obrist, 2014: Ch.9). The interview format, a format associated with journalism or academic research, in the hands of Obrist becomes the primary material for establishing art curation as a more expansive practice (e.g., by selecting the participants, setting up the debates and themes, or designing the interview space).
The theorist Nanne Buurman captures Obrist’s own self-fashioning in the autobiographical Ways of Curating (2014) that crafts a “hyper-mobile globally networking way of life” that not only feeds the curatorial global imaginary but “epitomizes neoliberal norms of subjectivity” (Buurman, 2018: 302). For instance, his autobiography refers to how his tireless art traveling taught him to sleep in unconventional places, like in night trains that he refers to as “a travelling laboratory for testing such practices”, and drinking 50 cups of cofee per day to keep himself awake (2014: Ch.11). Instead of acknowledging the privilege of an educated Western middle-upper class professional with possible burnout symptoms, Obrist romanticizes these experiences as “attempts to try out alternative ways of organizing daily life” (Obrist, 2014: Ch.11). Here, Obrist exemplifies the new curator not only as an uprooted global auteur but also as a hyper-productive worker (Balzer, 2014), while his work ethic rhetorically demolishes one of the last frontiers of capitalist value extraction, that of sleep (Crary, 2014). As a more-thanartworld persona, Obrist performs the “implications of curating in times of neoliberal globalization” (Buurman, 2018: 301), and, as such, is an ideal bridge between the figure of the independent art curator and the distributed curatorial imaginary.
2.5 “Organize Your Passion”, or Curating as Business
The distribution of curating as an afective and wider cultural modality in the post-2010s, borrows from Obrist’s and generally the independent curator’s creative, nomadic, and inspirational façade. Yet it more explicitly directs this persona to business rather than to the aimless drifting or the potential decadence linked to the artistic imaginary. Contrary to the independent curator’s frequent questioning of the structures of domination, the discourse around internet curation is underpinned by a techno-utopian vision that holds the liberatory promise of technology. This is the spirit of the libertarian
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Homo Curatorius