Thin, pompous & waffly? You should curate
IDON’T know if you’ve noticed, but these days everyone calls him or herself a curator. It might have something to do with the Cape Town Art Fair. The place is crawling with svelte young people as thin as credit cards who have degrees in “visual arts”.
These are the curators — frequently the old “assistant” remastered. The beauty of the word is that nobody really knows what it means.
You don’t know what to call yourself. You can’t concentrate. You’re a curator.
Kanye West said on Twitter: “If I had to be defined at this point I’d call myself a curator.” The word colonises the social networks as “DJ” did a decade ago. It owns Twitter. Jonathan Harris, who calls himself an “internet anthropologist”, says: “Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression.”
When news-aggregator websites, like Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, promote themselves as cultural curators, you know it’s serious. In a siege economy, Cape Town remains full of galleries, exotic palaces, sacrosanct sepulchres, cathedrals of double volume often rising out of slit-throat neighbourhoods. Their prayerful atmospheres are filled with a lot of self-enchanted people called curators, often eating something tiny and Japanese al desko, surrounded by the accoutrements of productivity and glossy busyness. But what are they doing? First they have to learn art speak, now recognised as an international language, designed to bamboozle and confuse as it rappels one along the strings of false values that define much of the art world today.
A young woman who looks as if she has a touch of frontal-lobe instability guides us to six pairs of specs, interspersed with tins filled with marbles. They are arranged in a row along a shelf and blink and wink from the walls.
“You see,” she says, “the artist wants to confront you with your own preconceived ideas of cultural identity. Each pair of glasses propels the viewer into his or her own soul, interrogating a discourse on race and identity while simultaneously corralling them to the idea that infinite progression is possible.” Ah, I see. Then they have to hang the pictures (“Well, we don’t actually hang them ourselves.”) and, most importantly, write out a label that nobody can read.
And it is not only a few anorexic people in black who can curate. It is a career open to anyone who is familiar with phrases like “mutability of identification in South African art” or retail. Décor shops no longer sell sofas, they “curate your home”. A local restaurant will continue to offer “a curated market experience”. The editor of a local magazine is called a “content curator”.
Ghent-based sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere announced on Belgian radio that JM Coetzee “will curate her work at the Venice Biennale this year”. Coetzee? Curating? I remember the days when he used to write books and curators worked in museums.
Curator creep is part of the gig economy creeping through the art world. And it has far more to do with marketing than art.
Curators are often found eating something tiny and Japanese, al desko