Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon are two of the world’s most celebrated curators. Known in the art scene as tastemakers and jetsetters— Obrist alone has made over two thousand trips in the last two decades— they are power curators. The fast-talking and hyperactive Obrist in particular, with his record of “high impact” shows, series of books, and globetrotting agenda, has become the model of a contemporary art curator. Clad in distinctive transparent glasses and scribbling endless notes, Obrist has topped the ArtReview Power 100, an influence bellwether. That a curator could top the list is an indication of how far curating has come. No longer niche players, curators are now what the German critic Willi Bongard has called “Popes of art”.
(2016: 125–126)
The fascination for Obrist here expresses a business-savvy alpha-maleness, such as with words like “power curator” and “pope”, combined with a sense of awe and wonder in respect to unstoppable traveling (“two thousand trips”), which in the context of global capitalism is essentially an uppermiddle-class afordability. Bhaskar further praises Obrist’s idea to endow curatorial agency to multiple actors and blow the profession “wide open” in the 2007 Lyon Biennale, which he co-curated. Here, the “genius” of Obrist feeds into the orbit of an entrepreneurial and innovative success story, which nevertheless maintains its philosophical playfulness and expressive freedom as it can be bold enough to perform a self-referential deconstruction of the curatorial profession, a sort of meta-curating:
But back in Lyon, Obrist and Moisdon wanted to be a little diferent. Rather than selecting and organizing artists and artworks, they selected a further sixty people to get involved. Many of these were curators in their own right and had now been designated players in an intricate art-world game. Each of these “players” would select an artist for inclusion in the program. Each player chosen by Obrist and Moisdon was a mini-curator. So, efectively what you had is—wait for it—curators curating curators curating. And then, given that they also made artists and critics curators, the whole category of curator had been blown wide open. Everyone was a curator. This was hyper-curation, curation cubed. The thinking behind the show was that, as the world becomes more complex, so no artist or curator can individually represent it.
(2016: 127–128)
Bhaskar speaks with a similar fascination about the genius of Duchamp: “Marcel Duchamp was a troublemaker”, Bhaskar tells us (2016: 136), bringing to mind the now classic 1997 Apple Think Diferent campaign that was devoted to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things diferently—they’re not fond of rules” (Street, 2016). This embodies the wider cultural mandate to “think out of the box”, to innovate and to be diferent. The explicit market appropriation of their creative imagination is probably not what these artworld actors signed up for—Obrist himself warns against the boundless curatorial spillover from art to popular culture—this “contemporary resonance, however, risks producing a kind of bubble in the value attached to the idea of curating, and has to be resisted”, he says (2014: Ch.4). Yet the entrepreneurial fascination with the afective and sophisticated tropes of contemporary art is not something that can simply be attributed to a misrepresentation of the market actors: by becoming “independent” in the context of neoliberalism, art curating itself had already embraced entrepreneurial tropes and modes of subjectification (see also Esanu, 2021).
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
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