Culture Of Curating And The Curating Of Culture(s)

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Once considered a mere caretaker for collections the curator is now widely viewed as a globally connected auteur. Over the last twenty-five years as international group exhibitions & biennials have become the dominant mode of presenting contemporary art to the public curatorship has begun to be perceived as a constellation of creative activities not unlike artistic praxis. The curator has gone from being a behind-the-scenes organizer & selector to a visible centrally important cultural producer. In The Culture of Curating & the Curating of Culture (s) Paul ONeill examines the emergence of independent curatorship & the discourse that helped to establish it. ONeill describes how by the 1980s curated group exhibitions--large-scale temporary projects with artworks cast as illustrative fragments--came to be understood as the creative work of curator-auteurs. The proliferation of new biennials & other large international exhibitions in the 1990s created a cohort of high-profile globally mobile curators moving from Venice to Paris to Kassel. In the 1990s curatorial & artistic practice converged blurring the distinction between artist & curator. ONeill argues that this change in the understanding of curatorship was shaped by a curator-centered discourse that effectively advocated--and authorized--the new independent curatorial practice. Drawing on the extensive curatorial literature & his own interviews with leading curators critics art historians & artists ONeill traces the development of the curator-as-artist model & the ways it has been contested. The Culture of Curating & the Curating of Culture (s) documents the many ways in which our perception of art has been transformed by curating & the discourses surrounding it.