Notes from a love motel: ‘Curatism’

I’m just back from a month’s curating course in South Korea, courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. I spent my spare hours in my dingy downtown motel keeping a little diary while I was there and here is entry number two. For the rest, see “Diary” in the October edition of ArtThrob, which should be live in a couple of days.

Curatism:

I like learning new words. New English words, I mean — ones I can use in writing when I get bored with the few hundred words I use most frequently in reviews. I mean, I like learning foreign words too (like Korean for “thank you” and “tuna”, which I know), but it’s important in my trade, word-peddling, to have a stock of words to peddle. So yesterday I picked up a little book at the stationer down the road from the Gwangju Biennale Hall in which to write new words I hear or read. The first new word I almost wrote down in my little book is “curatism”, uttered today by the vice-president of the Gwangju Biennale, Yong-Woo Lee. I held back because it occurred to me that I would only ever use the word to be scornful, and even then, I would be helping to formalise an addition to the annoying and ever-expanding list of derivations of the word “curate” (used in the context of art: to organise an exhibition).

My online dictionary (no space in my suitcase for a real one) does not know the words “curating” or “curated”, although I use both all the time. To complicate the situation more, there is a bastardised version of these already bastard words which is used (but not by me) almost as often: “curation”. The dictionary practically combusts when I search for this word. It does appear to know “curate” and “curator” though. The first entry for “curate” stipulates that the word, a noun, refers to an ecclesiastical position. A curate is a sort of spiritual caretaker, an olde-worlde pastor, before the good stewardship of bling and holiday homes became part of the job description. In second place is curate: “to serve as curator for”, which brings me to the word “curator”. A “curator” is “the person in charge of a museum, art collection, etc”. This sounds acceptably accurate, although I far prefer the legal definition of the word: “a guardian of a minor, lunatic, or other incompetent, especially with regard to his or her property”.

These omissions and inclusions are telling, I think. Curators, although they exist, seem to do so only in noun form. They are a figurehead of authority and administrative responsibility, although what first springs to mind when one (if one is an online dictionary) thinks of a curator has nothing to do with his or her actually doing anything — or at least anything worth noting in the dictionary, where every profession from begging to neurosurgery is represented. In the pantheon of the art world, curators suppose themselves to be the ones calling the shots, giving form to all the babbling that comes from their stables of lunatics and/or incompetents, the artists.

I’m being flippant, of course, not to mention harping on. I do think it’s quite possible for “curators” to “curate” creatively and generously, without simultaneously alienating the public and the artists with whom they work. But the sort of curator I’ve sketched in the lines above seems to sit like a chimera on the back of the art world, of the sort afflicting Baudelaire’s burdened group of travellers in Paris Spleen. In the short vignette titled “To Every Man His Chimera” the narrator encounters a group of men walking from one dusty nowhere to another, each one with an enormous and disgruntled chimera* appended to his back. The narrator wonders why the men seem so indifferent to their burdens until this question begins to weigh on him so heavily that he too must replace his burden with indifference.

If we play this little game for a bit, big-gun curators — and the biennale mafia are supposed to be the worst — are like these cling-on chimeras, and in order to try shake the beasts, other famous and well-meaning big-gun curators like Yong-Woo Lee and next year’s Gwangju Biennale director, Massimiliano Gioni, begin to invent alternative words for the work of curating. By renaming curators “agents”, “commissioners”, “facilitator”, or other titles gleaned from a corporate lexicon, the problem is temporarily obscured behind a fuzz of neutralising jargon. Similarly, by fashioning a derisive “ism” from the word curate, the wielder of the word “curatism” gives the impression of having progressed beyond the whole system the Curator-god stands for. However, the reality is that the revolution, if it happens at all, is short-lived and even then only semantic. In a matter of months the “agent” is as nefarious as the curator once was and is found guilty of “agentism”.

The problem, as Baudelaire’s chimeras illustrate, is that whatever you call them, curators and curating will still be there, trying to steer their hosts, the art world, along some nowhere path. The solution? Indifference, I guess. Let the curators do whatever it is they suppose they do, and while they’re at it, maybe they could work out a set of useful related dictionary definitions.

*Chimera: 1) A fire-breathing monster of Greek mythological origin that is made up of parts of many different animals. 2) A 1983 solo album by Willie Nelson.