Entertainment: Advice to a Young Curator

Now for your pure enjoyment, this was posted by a "newspaper man" curating in Athens, on his blog named The Trap. On the sensitive subject of How to do fine in the world of art organisations. 

Enjoy~

Read a lot of post-structuralism, preferably in the form of quotations you can find in catalogue essays. Quote them in turn, profusely, making sure their relationship to any actual artwork remains obscure.

No studying anything before the 1960s is allowed. Learn all your history through contemporary art theory.

Never say you are anything more than a facilitator for artists. If inadvertently you do, and you momentarily appear like having anything remotely resembling a vision or, worse, an agenda, cover it up quickly with a phrase like “curators have to stand firm against the voracity of the market”.

Be as immaterial as possible, be a ghost. Support everything anti-spectacular and insubstantial. When asked to describe it, use words like interventional, process-based, archaeological, investigative. If challenged with something like the inability of others to see the point, call them antiquated and formalist and declare the work of art to be changing (...)

Read the whole post here.


The most important curatorial lesson I have learnt by now is that when dragging the Google Street yellow figure onto The Metropolitan Museum of Art zone, you actually get inside the galleries and have visual access to Egyptian reliefs (thank you, Google Art Project !)