Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

This brings me to the discussion of the readymade and the “contingent object of contemporary art” (Buskirk, 2014: 5), whose value relies even more profoundly on expert curatorial mediation as it often does not carry visible traces of style, technique, or skill (that is, features through which people are socialized to understand art). In a context where mediation becomes an arbiter of artistic value, art curation develops into a practice mediating increased symbolic capital, which can elevate individual curators to the status of auteurs, that is, authors of original works of art in the literary and (later) cinematic tradition (Lubar, 2014). The rise of the independent curator to a creator is attendant on the conceptual moment that “liberated” the profession in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly via the biennial circuit. In the final section, I discuss digital curation practices, arguing that the popularization of the inspirational and semi-intellectual persona of the independent curator is key for turning curation into an object of desire, investment, and fascination. I also argue that the business appropriation of the term should not be (merely) lamented as a moral aberration, neoliberal abuse, or misrepresentation; instead, the market imperative of platform curation already inhabits the entrepreneurial figure of the independent art curator.

2.2 Curators from Ancient Rome to Modern Museums

The profession of curator has a long history, which, for the most part, unfolded independently of the gallery and the museum—the institutions with which curating is mainly associated today. The curator’s career as a professional title goes as far back as ancient Rome; etymologically the word derives from the Latin word cura, meaning care, assistance, and guardianship but also treatment or cure. In the Roman Empire, curators were appointed public servants with administrative, caretaking, and protecting duties in regard to humans, objects, and institutional entities (Madžoski, 2013: 13). Curators could be guardians or overseers of minors and lunatics, financial custodians of cities, or overseers of public services such as sanitation and water supply (Hunter, 1803; Peachin, 2005). Throughout Roman history, their titles and roles were in a state of flux, a fact that signifies the richness and multiplicity of the term from its early uses. For instance, curators were appointed by an oficial to protect a person past puberty, who was declared unfit to manage their civic matters, including spendthrifts, minors, the mentally ill, and even “the deaf, the dumb, the incurably diseased” (Hunter, 1803: 732).3 In turn, a figure like the curator rei publicae was an appointed, and later elected, government oficial of relative prestige, whose main function was to “investigate and supervise, on a short-term basis, the finances of individual civic communities” (Mennen, 2011: 69). The work of a curator rei publicae was mainly administrative, involving “the investment of town funds; the retention of public assets within the public domain; the prompt execution of bequests to the town; the integrity of town lands; and the application of grain funds to their intended purpose” (Duncan-Jones, 1987: 253). Other curatorial titles were curatores annonae, who were caretakers of food supplies, curatores regionum, who were overseers of Roman city districts and curatores aquarus who were in charge of water supplies and aqueducts.4

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The curator’s caretaker role in ancient Rome was multiple yet mostly administrative; starting from the Middle Ages and in the context of the Catholic Church, this role became more explicitly spiritual: the cure of the soul. In the Middle Ages, “curate” (as a noun) was a title given by bishops or other high clergy to another member of the clergy who was in charge of the spiritual well-being of a parish (the title still exists today). The curate’s tenure, permanent or temporary depending on the circumstances, was a period of training on curing the souls in the form of a shared ministry, which works in and through the larger collective of the church rather than as an individual endeavor. Indicatively, in a 1964 letter titled Letter to the New Curate, the Irish poet Conleth Ellis addressed their new local curate as someone for whom the community has “an awe of the powers of your hands and your voice”, someone who they look to as “the incarnation of His powers, a continuation of His work among men”, assuming that he is “uninterested in money and the good things of this world” (1964: 494). Implying asceticism, the curate’s role concerns the well-being of members of the ecclesiastical community, catering, preserving, and elevating their souls to a loftier, godly state. In this religious context, the curate inhabits a figure of spiritual power and prestige, with the tropes of asceticism and sacrifice potentially confirming his (and later hers) legitimacy: to better curate souls.

In the 20th century, with the birth of national and later modern art museums, “curator” became a title given to permanent museum staf5 in charge of the institution’s collections varying from art, national, and natural history to technological, heritage, and ethnographic exponents. In museum cultures, the curator is expected to rationalize and give meaning to a museum’s collection, that is to group, archive, and arrange objects under a common narrative (Horie, 1986). They are expected to be experts in the area related to the collection, an expertise which should result in the efective cataloguing and contextualizing of objects. Efectiveness here relates to how successfully a museum performs its prescribed public role, which is mainly to educate the public and enable knowledge which improves, in one way or another, human societies. The objects in these collections, as we discuss in more detail in the next section, are not random but selected for their capacity to stand as testimonies which index a specific age, space, or culture. This

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documentary value of objects, a materiality standing for a larger history, endows museums with an identity, a “brand”, so to say, which the curator is both subservient to and the co-creator of. An archaeological museum on ancient Egypt, for example, would consist of a collection of objects expected to enable knowledge on this specific civilization; if it does not, it will be publicly perceived as a failed museum. The curator’s role here is crucial, as they need to mobilize their expertise for making objects speak, connecting objects with narratives, and placing these narratives within the museum’s larger identity. Since the early museum days, the role of curator was to give additional meaning to certain material objects through their expertise.

The most obvious documents in this discussion consist of historical, archaeological, or art objects, whose value tends to be considered irrefutable and often part of the national or universal heritage. Yet with the rapid industrialization of material culture, the acceleration of technological advances and the rapid obsolesce of technical devices, the timespan within which an object can be metamorphosized from an everyday object to an object worthy of appreciation becomes dramatically reduced. A “Nokia phone” or a “Soviet toy” are now artifacts of technological archaeology, indicating distinct cultures from the contemporary zeitgeist. Museum objects can expand to literally anything, ranging, from

catalogues and advertising literature, […] posters, badges, public health notices, greeting cards, […] patent models, patent specifications, and prototypes of objects, […] scale models, two and three-dimensional miniatures, drawings and prints, […] memorabilia, […] innovators, ethnic groups, and special practices”, as well as “objects currently in use, or recently invented, especially if they may become significant.

(Davis, 1980: 98)

Already within the museum context, the scope of the curatorial profession has expanded both quantitatively, as experts need to be found for all these types of increasingly diferent objects, and qualitatively, as more informed narratives are needed for museums to be distinguished from other forms of visual display, including social media accounts, digital galleries, or blogs.

Narratives about collections have what we can call anchoring points, including morphological, chronological, and geographical registers (or all of the above), around which they are structured (such as, “sculpture in ancient Mesopotamia”, “burial objects of the Hellenistic Period” or “rock posters from the 1970s”). We will meet these anchoring points also later in the case studies discussed in Part 2. As a museum oficial, the curator applies their expert knowledge to produce a coherent narrative. Yet, a museum curator as permanent or semi-permanent staf needs to follow the institution’s broader agendas, which is in turn related to its funding bodies, board of trustees, governmental power, and the “truths” structuring respective national identities.

As for any act of interpretation, grouping things together under a common narrative is not an objective process free from larger museum politics. As we shall see, it is precisely through this unhinging from institutional dependency that independent curators gain the status of public intellectuals.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea that every document of a civilization is also a document of barbarism, Vesna Madžoski argues that in the context of colonial museums these precious objects stand for a representation of history written by the victors: “the acquisition of the majority of those objects is anything but innocent; they were brought from somewhere, taken from someone, dead or alive” (2013: 32). The narratives of colonial museum objects as unique artifacts of a civilization, for example, in the Louvre or the British Museum, conceal the barbarity of their acquisition inflicted by violence and colonialism.

The Sarr–Savoy report (2018), commissioned by the French government, stirred a potent debate in European museum and acquisitions discourse related to the unconditional return of museum objects that were acquired through looting.6 A curator at the Musée d’Orsay cannot possibly admit that the collections they host are results of colonialism or looting as this would create the discursive conditions for colonized countries reclaiming these collections (“why you do not give them to us if you admit they are stolen?”). The curators’ role then in these museum environments can even entail something more sinister, that is to enable “educated” narratives that would neutralize, if not silence, the colonial relations that made the appearance of these objects possible. Thus, apart from being caretakers of collections, curators are also tamers of objects, or sharpen the edges of collections by positioning them in discourses and institutional rituals. This is not to say that objects inhabit some “vibrant matter”, which, if left uncontrolled, will spread havoc to their museum hosts (Bennett, 2020); but to say that—as in every representation of knowledge—the act of positioning objects within organized narratives presumes that some of their aspects are highlighted while others are silenced. Ethnographic or national Western museums are an obvious case in point, but one can think of representations pertaining to knowledge of national cultures in general. For instance, the representation of victory against Nazis in World War II is a case in point of conflicting interpretations; American museums highlight the role of the American army, Russian museums the victory of the Red Army and the liberation of Auschwitz, National Museums in the Baltics tell a story of competing totalitarianisms, and so on. The curatorial storytelling of objects chooses which stories to tell and which to exclude, which to highlight and which to undermine.

The curators in these national spaces must adjust, more or less, to national narratives as they are state employees who need to accommodate their story to the larger imperatives of nation building. The “liberation” of the profession of the curator from institutional shackles marks a symbolic revolt precisely against this figure of the curator as an institutional and state employee.

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2.3 Expertise, Value, and Materiality in Museum Spaces

Before continuing with the evolution of the profession of the curator after the 1960s and 1970s in art contexts, I shall make a short, yet crucial, detour to theorize curating vis-a-vis value production as this will prove helpful in the later chapters. The main idea I would like to examine is that the selection, display, and storytelling of items—all key aspects of curating—are gestures producing economic and symbolic value. We will return to this process of value creation throughout this book as it is particularly relevant to the contemporary curating economy. According to the material culture perspective, objects do not inhabit essences which position them in unambiguous ways within a social order (e.g., Kopytof, 2017; Hooper-Greenhill, 2020; Ssorin-Chaikov, 2020; Kompatsiaris and Chrysagis, 2020; Attfield, 2020). Instead, their meaning and positioning is to a larger or lesser degree contingent upon the interpretations, framing, and discourse enabled in and through social interaction. This is even more so for objects that are perceived as documents or testimonies of knowledge. The status of a document is not self-explanatory or given; from a discourse theory perspective, objects must be inserted within discourses in order to be considered as documents in the first place. For the media theorist Nico Carpentier, discourses are defined “as knowledge structures that consist out of systemically articulated signifiers that together form reasonably stable entities” (2022: 94), that is, ritualistically repetitive claims of knowledge which shape an interpretative stability regarding entities. To give an example, an advertising poster from the 19th century needs to be positioned within a relatively stable discourse, say of “early printing technologies” or “modern marketing methods”, so as to become a document. Once it is a document, it can further highlight or challenge this discourse. In this regard, the role of the curator in a museum is key as it carries the expert narratives through which an object is discursively constructed as worthy of appreciation rather than “mere stuf”. As experts are key in formulating knowledge—precisely because they occupy a higher plane of prestige within fields of knowledge— expert narratives ofer stability to particular discursive formations.

This does not mean that the materiality of objects is irrelevant; on the contrary, materiality provides a given platform with specific possibilities for interpretation, which in turn can dictate which interpretations can be more plausible, popular, or preferred and which can be ruled out. In other words, materiality is not a secondary aspect in shaping knowledge but “intimately knotted and entangled, and in permanent interaction with the discursive” (Carpentier, 2022: 96). Materiality then has a forensic value, so to say, as the given materiality of a displayed object allows it to be framed in a specific way so as to be convincing and thus authorize a regime of value, present or future. The advertising poster, to return to the example above, has certain irrefutable material properties, which can evidence a number of things, such as the technologies used for its production, the style employed by its creators in terms of shapes, colors, and forms or the very material it uses as its medium.

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The display of an object as a museum document does not emerge out of an objective truth; while attributes like scarcity, age, uniqueness, and the capacity to index a culture do play a role, its display is ultimately a gesture of selection with social, political, and cultural implications.

The cases we can discuss here to highlight this point are many but let us see how a natural object, such as a moon rock, becomes a valuable museum object (Pearce, 1994). For anyone apart from those with expert geological knowledge, a rock taken from the moon would appear as an ordinary rock that would probably arouse little or no interest. That is, if seen in an environment where there are no narratives about it, anyone could mistake it for an earth rock, which most probably would entail indiference. Its materiality, in other words, would be insignificant. Once a moon rock is selected on the basis of its physical properties by an expert institution to be a museum piece, however, its very materiality transforms in front of our eyes. From the ordinary object it once was, it changes, almost magically, into something precious, upon which all sorts of political, social, and cultural investments can be projected. Politicians can describe it as a national treasure, museum audiences can take selfies in front of it, people can discuss it over dinner with friends, argue about its origins, implicate it in conspiracy theories, and so on. The same materiality is suddenly animated by expert knowledge, which elevates it from mere stuf to an object indexing the moon. Referring to a moon rock displayed in the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., the cultural theorist Susan M. Pearce says that

the moon rock is an actual piece of the moon retrieved by the Apollo17 mission. There is nothing particularly appealing about the rock; it is a rather standard piece of volcanic basalt some 4 million years old. Yet, unlike many other old rocks, this one comes displayed in an altar-like structure, set in glass, and is complete with full-time guard and an ultrasensitive monitoring device.

(Meltzer, 1981 in Pearce, 1994:10)

It is “through its selection and display” that the moon rock has “become a part of the world of human values, a part which, evidently, every visitor wants to bring within his own personal value system” (Pearce, 1994: 10). What then “distinguishes the ‘discrete lumps’ from the rest”, Pearce continues, “is the cultural value it is given”, as “the crucial idea is that of selection, and it is the act of selection which turns a part of the natural world into an object and a museum piece” (Pearce, 1994:10, emphasis added). Framing the rock’s materiality in expert language turns this otherwise tedious object into an exceptional piece that stands apart from the rest in an altar, it individualizes and artifies it. The materiality of the rock—its surface, chemical composition, shape, and so on—can provide possibilities and limitations for its interpretation and framing, but ultimately it is the expert discourse that inserts it into the world of human values (see Figure 2.1).

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To expand on the relationship between expert discourses and a document’s value beyond the walls of the museum, one can think of how the material culture of past civilizations is curated in the context of prevailing epistemic paradigms, as they circulate and get localized in spatio-temporal contexts. In this vein, the archaeologist Yiannis Hamilakis discusses the transformation of Greek antiquities from ruins or mere stuf to valuable objects indexing a glorious civilization (2009). For Hamilakis, this metamorphosis was the result of an expert discursive formation, an epistemic paradigm, that is to say the Enlightenment ideas, the rise of the political formation of the nation-state and Greece’s invention by Europeans as the cradle of Western civilization. Asking, “what […] ordinary people of the Hellenic Peninsula [thought] of antiquities in the centuries before the dissemination of the ideas of the nation and the foundation of the Greek nation-state”, Hamilakis argues that during the Ottoman years and before Greece’s War of Independence in 1821, the classical antiquities for ordinary people were a “peculiar otherness” rather than indexes or documents of knowledge (2009: 65). As such, they were “tightly integrated in the web of daily life”, either as architectural structures for fortification purposes, ancient temples becoming churches or statues invested with legends or myths (Hamilakis, 2009: 65). As the privileged signifier of the “Greek nation” gained currency among intellectuals and some elites in Europe, the same ruins were now elevated from the domain of everyday life to highly significant documents that had to be preserved and enclosed through ticket admissions and special lighting or by developing knowledge around them, such as in conferences, catalogues, and visual memoirs. By “reworking and recasting western ideals, a process of interweaving these ideas within the cultural matrix of pre-modern society” (Hamilakis, 2009: 75), these ruins underwent a process of artification, as Shapiro and Heinich describe it, ndicating European glory. The Enlightenment discourse, as an epistemic formation emphasizing a “return to the classics”, granted to Western and then local experts the authority to curate ruins, metamorphosizing them from everyday stuf to extremely valuable documents of a civilization.

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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:

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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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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,

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