What is a Curator?_Claire Bishop

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What is a Curator?

Claire Bishop

1.

The subject of this paper is the emergence, around 1968–1972, of two types of authorship: the independent curator and the installation artist. These authorships arise from similar impulses, but lead to different functions. In making this argument, I will position myself against the Russian art critic, philosopher and occasional curator Boris Groys, who, in a recent essay, maintains that there is no distinction between (curated) exhibitions and (artistic) installation art. He writes:

At least since the 1960s, artists have created installations in order to demonstrate their personal practices of selection. These installations, however, have been nothing other than exhibitions curated by artists, in which objects by others may be – and are – represented as well as objects by the artist.  . . .  In short, once the identification between creation and selection has been established, the roles of the artist and of the curator also became identical. A distinction between the (curated) exhibition and the (artistic) installation is still commonly made, but it is essentially obsolete.1

Today, Groys continues, we can no longer speak of the authorial autonomy of the artist because he or she, from the beginning, is involved in collaborative, collective, institutionalised, productive practice (p. 94). In other words, since Duchamp, the roles of the curator and the artist are one and the same, because the ready-made equated the acts of creation and selection. Today, authorship is no longer singular, argues Groys, but a “multiple authorship“ more akin to that of a film, a theatrical production or a concert.

Groys’ argument strikes me as wrong. Although there is a clear point of overlap between curatorial and artistic authorship, it is unwise to conflate the two. To separate these roles I will take three steps: the institutional endorsement of installation art; the emergence of the independent curator; and the tension between them in the emergence of institutional critique.

 

2.

The histories of installation art and curating are of course inter­twined. In her book The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (1998), Mary Anne Staniszewski presents exhibition installation as a precursor of installation art. She argues that this shift takes place at MoMA with the exhibition Spaces (1970) and the Project Rooms series (1971).2 These exhibitions of installations immediately impacted upon the role of the curator, Jennifer Licht, because there was no longer an “object“ for her to install, just a set of technical and administrative functions to fulfill. As Staniszewski notes in rela­tion to Spaces, this new curatorial function included the securing of private sponsorship in the form of carpets, lighting, acoustic panels, miniature fir trees, strobe lights, etc. She points out the irony that the more artists asserted their autonomy by treating the museum gallery as a neutral framework for their installations, the more the corporation stepped in as co-sponsor of the work.

A similar convergence of exhibition design and installation art takes place in Europe at the same time, albeit with less recourse to sponsorship. It can be seen in the anti-subjective post-mini­mal­ist tradition (e.g. Richard Long at Konrad Fischer, 1968; Daniel Buren at Prospect 68), and in a more subjectively authored trajectory, such as Joseph Beuys’ installation of the Block Beuys (1970) or the collectively-produced and continually recycled installations of Paul Thek (1971–1973).3 In each of these examples, the installation artist brings about a diversification of the curatorial role, with a consequent displacement of curatorial interpretation onto the apparatus surrounding the exhibition. The installation and its author are the singular unit of meaning – rather than the curator’s proposal of a thematic, historical, generational or geographic theme that unites multiple, individually-authored meanings.

3.

This tension is played out most conspicuously in Documenta 5, 1972, the first major international exhibition in which a signifi­cant number of artists work in installation, taking over an entire room to show one work (Michael Asher, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Paul Thek, Art and Language, Joseph Beuys and Vito Acconci).4 The exhibition was directed by Harald Szeemann, today celebrated as the first independent curator follow­ing his resignation from the Berne Kunsthalle in 1969.5 At Documenta 5, Szeemann led a team of curators to produce an eccentric exhibition under the general rubric Questions of Reality: The Image-World Today. The exhibition was split into 15 dis­crete sections, and presented reality not just through works of art, but through the broader field of visual cul­ture: the work of the mentally ill, science fiction images, political propaganda, Swiss bank notes, and “trivialrealism“ (kitsch objects including sou­venirs of the Pope, military insignia, garden gnomes, and so on). Alongside these small displays were three themed panoramas of contemporary art, the most controversial being Individual Mythologies. This featured over 70 artists working in perform­ance, installation and process art. Through this section, Szeemann posited that all artistic activity, even in its most political and critical forms, concerns the formation of an interior world.6 As you can imagine, such an eccentric structure broke with the convention of showing only high art at Documenta, and stamped Szeemann’s identity over the exhibition to the extent that since 1972, all Documentas have been referred to by the name of the curator.7

It is perhaps unsurprising that this proposition received a hostile response among some artists, particularly those whose work explicitly opposed interiority, expression and myth. Ten artists co-signed a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung com­plaining about Szeemann’s curatorial vision, while two others published heated essays in the catalogue.8 Daniel Buren accused Szeemann of exhibiting the exhibition as work of art, arguing that “The works presented are carefully chosen touches of color in the tableau that composes each section (room) as a whole.“9 One senses that this strategy would be acceptable if the carefully chosen touches of colour were objects chosen by an artist; then there would be no competing model of authorship. But in Buren’s eyes, Szeemann turned the museum into a tableau “whose author is none other than the exhibition organizer“. The secondary or meta-authorship of the curator displaced the primary authorship of the artist. At the core of Buren’s com­plaint is the artist’s loss of autonomy when the curator becomes auteur – even while this fails to acknowledge the impossibility of a “pure“ and uninflected presentation of art.10

In a similar vein, Robert Smithson’s now celebrated essay “Cultural Confinement“, also published in the Documenta 5 catalogue, begins with an invective against the “exhibition maker“ as imprisoner of cultural meaning. Smithson rails against the white walled gallery that separates art from the outside world, and against the imposition of curatorial metaphysics. This is because both conspire towards consumption: the “neutralised, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomised“ work of art becomes “ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise“.11 The implication is that good curating will not just display according to given conventions, but be as dialectical as the works of art it aspires to show.

Robert Morris’ letter of withdrawal from Documenta, dated 6 May 1972, more directly concerns the gap between artistic and curatorial authorship. Morris objected to having his work used illustrate “misguided sociological principles or outmoded art historical categories“ – a clear reference to Individual Mythologies, whose premise could not be more removed from Morris’ anti-expressionism. He complains that Szeemann has not consulted him as to which work will be shown, but has clearly indicated which work he wishes to include.12 Morris also claims that Szeemann has not been in touch with him after he has expressed a desire to be represented by a different work to the one requested. This is important, for it introduces the idea that the curator has an ethical or moral obligation that is significantly different to an artist’s aesthetics of artistic presentation. What Morris wants from a curator is someone who respects the artist’s wishes, communicates clearly, and is available for negotiation.13 In other words, a figure who is subservient to the artist and who does not contest his/her authorship.

There is no clearer way to grasp these expectations than to imagine these complaints applied to an installation, or to an artist-curated exhibition. Although both curating and instal­lation are concerned with selection, they function within different discursive spheres: curatorial selection is always an ethical negotiation of pre-existing authorships, rather than the artistic creation of meaning sui generis.

4.

Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne (1968–1972) is essential to elaborating this complex interplay of power and responsibility. As the first instance of an artist presenting an exhibition as installation art (rather than the mise-en-scène of work by one’s contemporaries, e.g. Duchamp 1938), Broodthaers’ fictional museum installation cannot be seen apart from the larger context of the battle for autonomy and self-determination that climaxed in the protests of 1968. The Musée d’Art Moderne was founded, wrote Broodthaers, “under pressure of the political period of its time“: it “shared a character connected to the events of 1968, that is, to a type of political event experienced by every country“.14 Broodthaers had participated in the occupation of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in May 1968, and the instal­lation of a Musée d’Art Moderne in his own home four months later is indissociable from the motives leading to this occupa­tion: a desire to exert control over culture, and to steer rather than be steered by authority. In an open letter written at the end of the occupation, dated 7 June 1968, Broodthaers expres­sed these sentiments in a characteristically elliptical fashion:

What is culture? I write. I have taken the floor. I am a negotiator for an hour or two. I say I. I resume my personal attitude. I fear anonymity. (I would like to control the meaning/direction of culture.)15

The first avatar of Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, the Section XIXème Siècle, comprised a series of rooms in which the trappings of exhibition installation were themselves staged: packing crates, ladders, signage, and so on. It was an instal­lation created from the mise-en-scène of the apparatus of installing art. Broodthaers added to this installation with announce­ments, signs, open letters, invitations and speeches, all of which has been extensively discussed as a strategy to invoke the apparatus of institutional authority as a performative repertoire of conventions.16 The signs and postcards also evoke the nineteenth century, and we can speculate why this might be. In this period, the public museum replaced the private collection of art, the avant-garde emerged in opposition to the academy, and the romantic paradigm of individual artist genius was instantiated. The nineteenth century therefore provides an ambivalent model: the emergence of a democratic public space, but also the institutionalisation of bourgeois individualism. It is in this tension between private and public that the function of the curator comes into play, mediating between private accomplishment and the new public sphere.

Numerous avatars of the Musée d’Art Moderne appeared following the closure of the Brussels installation in September 1969.17 The largest and most ambitious section opened in May 1972 at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle: the Section des Figures, The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today, an exhibition of over 300 objects borrowed from over forty museums and private collections, each of which bore the image of an eagle, and which were conventionally installed on the walls and in vitrines. Each object was accompanied by a label stating, in English, French or German, “This is not a work of art“ – a contraction of Magritte’s The Treason of Images, 1928, with the logic of Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917. Broodthaers wrote that the titles of Magritte’s paintings provided a surplus that exceeded rational explanation: they “simply seal the viewer’s incomprehension and displace the work into an intel­lectual realm where it is rendered comple­te­ly unavailable to any common interpretation“.18 By borrowing the deictic “This is...“ of Magritte’s painting (a formula recently reprised by Tino Sehgal), Broodthaers could allow interpretation to proliferate: “this“ could refer to the word in the sentence, the label itself, the individual object it sat next to, the grouping of objects in a vitrine, the exhibition itself or the act of deciphering it.

The many layers of negation here echo a passage in Michel Foucault’s essay on René Magritte, This is Not a Pipe (1968), which Broodthaers recommended to readers in his catalogue to the Düsseldorf exhibition. Focusing on a late version of Magritte’s painting called Les Deux Mystères (1966), Foucault observes that:

Everything is solidly anchored within a pedagogic space. A painting “shows“ a drawing that “shows“ the form of a pipe; a text written by a zealous instructor “shows“ that a pipe is really what is meant. We do not see the teacher’s pointer, but it rules throughout – precisely like his voice, in the act of articulating very clearly, “This is a pipe.“ From painting to image, from image to text, from text to voice, a sort of imaginary pointer indicates, shows, fixes, locates, imposes a system of references, tries to stabilise a unique space. But why have we introduced the teacher’s voice? Because scarcely has he stated, “This is not a pipe, but a drawing of a pipe“, “This is not a pipe but a sentence saying that this is not a pipe“, “The sentence ’this is not a pipe’ is not a pipe“, “In the sentence ’this is not a pipe’, this is not a pipe: the painting, written sentence, drawing of a pipe – all this is not a pipe.“19

It is not difficult to transpose this voice of the teacher, attempting to stabilise meaning, to that of the curator: both embody an institutional authority that mediates between the work of art and its pupils/viewers. At stake is the site of meaning and the impossibility of “showing“ this meaning in a word or an object. Foucault ends his chapter with a vision of the pipe rising above the blackboard/easel and the children laughing – because even this pipe is not a pipe, but yet another drawing of a pipe, exactly the same as the one in the picture (or picture within a pic­ture). He envisages a collapse of meaning: the easel breaks, the painting falls to the floor, the words scatter.20 Broodthaers’ Section des Figures, and indeed all of the Musée d’Art Moderne, can be seen as encouraging such a rupture with pedagogic inter­pretation: in the words of Foucault, it shatters “not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to but also opposite one another) to ’hang together’“.21

Hanging together: words in a sentence, and works of art in a space. By appointing himself the museum’s director, Broodthaers ensures that he cannot be spoken for, and dis­lodges curatorial ventriloquilism with a twofold authorship – selection/creation, but also mediation.22 In this respect it is fitting that the final avatar of the Musée d’Art Moderne took place at Documenta 5 in 1972 and included the Section Publicité – the use of the eagle in advertising, shown alongside the Museum’s own archive, functioning as publicity for each other. It was accompanied by the Section d’Art Moderne, located in Szeemann’s sub-section Artists’ Museums. This installation featured a plaque on the floor surrounded by stanchions, bearing the slogan “Private Property“ in three languages; in the last month of the exhibition, Broodthaers changed this inscription, accounting for this shift as follows:

“Private property“ – the presentation of this inscription can be understood as as satire on the identification of Art with Private property. One can also see here the expression of my artistic power as it is destined to replace that of the organiser – Szeemann from Documenta 5 – (section Individual Mythologies).

The second aim, finally, seemed to me not to have been attained, and on the contrary, the inscription reinforces the structure put in place.

Whence the change, – for one of the roles of the artist is to attempt, at least, to carry out a subversion of the organisational scheme of an exhibition.23

The words of the revised inscription are a series of eleven verbs ending in pouvoir, “to be able to“, and the only verb capable of functioning as a noun, “power“: the final line of the inscription, faire informer pouvoir, therefore operates ambiguously as “make inform power“ or “make power inform“. At its closure, then, the Musée d’Art Moderne enacts a struggle that pits the first curator-auteur against the first artist-curator. Who con­structs meaning, and on whose behalf?

5.

But – to paraphrase Foucault paraphrasing Beckett – does it really matter who is speaking? Because what is at stake is not the precise and pedantic difference between the curator and the artist, but the different discourses within which each player functions. It is evident that the rise of the independent curator has problematised the idea of collective authorship, highlight­ing the need for a more nuanced vocabularly to address this. Boris Groys is not the only writer to compare the curatorial role to the cinema auteur: Rob Storr compares the curator to a film director who has the final cut – but also to a literary editor who negotiates with publishers and writers to get the “best“ version of work that can be attained.24 For Ralph Rugoff, the curator is a caretaker; for Viktor Misiano, a psychoanalyst; for Jean-Christophe Ammann, a matchmaker.25 In their 1989 essay “Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur“, the sociologists Nathalie Heinrich and Michael Pollack also compare the recently singularised position of curator to the auteur in cinema theory, but go one step further in attributing the changes in this role to the proliferation of exhibitions and museums.26 The exponential growth of the culture industry requires new skills of the curator: “an enlarged administrative role, determining a conceptual framework, selecting specialised collaborators from various disciplines, directing work crews, consulting with an architect, assuming a formal position in terms of presentation, organising the publishing of an encyclopaedic catalogue, etc.“ (p. 236). It is significant that many of these extraneous roles relate to marketing: there are more exhibitions because there are more venues for contemporary art, each competing for more audi­ences, more reviews, more funding, more sponsorship, and more profile on the international art radar. The expanded role of the curator dovetails with, and is inseparable from, the pro­mo­tional productions of the culture industry.

But this is only half of the story.

The newly singularised role of the curator is inseparable from changes in artistic production that took place during the years 1968–1972 – the years bracketing Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne. These are the years of a power-struggle, not simply for control of a space, but for a control of meaning (and in the case of Broodthaers, the claim to a profoundly ambiguous meaning). Today, when the influence of the independent critic has been supplanted by a not-so independent curator as an arbiter of taste – a semi-celebrity sought after by artists and gallerists alike – it seems ever more pressing to recognise the function of authorial autonomy that is evacuated in Groys’ claim that the curator and installation artist are a single entity. That installation art – whose ephemeral and experiential modus operandi so often sought to evade the market and the museum – ends up a factor in the promotion of both the museum and the curator, is an irony that perhaps only Broodthaers anticipated.

 

 

Notes:

  1. Boris Groys, “Multiple Authorship“, in Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (eds.), The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Exhibitions and Biennials, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006, pp. 93–99. I was invited to respond to this essay in 150 words; an impossible task. The present paper goes towards a full response.

  2. ‑She argues that the first installation in this series, by Keith Sonnier, “transferred the creative and ideological dimensions of an exhibition design to an individual“, inscribing it within the artists’ signature. Mary Ann Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998, p. 286.

  3. Beuys installed Karl Ströher’s collection of his work at the Hessi­sches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt in 1970; it has not been moved or deinstalled since that date. Variations on Paul Thek’s Pyramid/A Work in Progress, shown at the Moderna Museet in 1971–1972, were presented as A Station of the Cross (Galerie M. E. Thelen, Essen, 1972), Ark, Pyramid (Documenta 5, 1972), Ark, Pyramid – Easter (Kunstmuseum Lucern, 1973), and Art, Pyramid – Christmas (Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, 1973).

  4. Writing in Artforum, Carter Ratcliff thought that only three works managed to resist the exhibition’s overbearing curatorial remit by asserting their own terms of engagement, and it is telling that all three are installations (Nauman, Asher and Serra).

  5. Szeemann’s resignation followed the city’s hostile reception to When Attitudes Became Form, his groundbreaking exhibition of process-based art, anti-form and Arte Povera.

  6. The title, Individual Mythologies, was originally to be called Shamanism and Mysticism, in hommage to Joseph Beuys. Szeemann wisely changed this to allude to the little-known French artist Etienne Martin, who described his own sculptures as “per­sonal mythologies“. See Harald Szeemann, “III. Documenta 5“, in Écrire les Expositions, Brussels, La Lettre Volée, 1996, pp. 24–33. The other two large sections of Documenta 5 were Realismus, showing the 70s trend for photorealism in painting and sculpture, and Idea + Idea/Light, conceptual work by artists including Art and Language, Berndt and Hilla Becher, and Hanne Darboven.

  7. See Gabriele Mackert, “At Home in Contradictions: Harald Szeemann’s Documenta“, in Archive in Motion: 50 Years Documenta 1955–2005, Kassel, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2005, pp. 253–261.

  8. Letter to the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, 12 May 1972, signed by Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Dorothea Rockburne, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. The basic thrust of this brief letter is that the artist should be allowed to make his/her own decisions about their works and contributions to an exhibition. The letter is reproduced in Archive in Motion, p. 259.

  9. “These sections (castrations), themselves carefully chosen ’touches of color’ in the tableau that makes up the exhibition as a whole and in its very principle, only appear by placing them­selves under the wing of the organizer, who reunifies art by rendering it equivalent everywhere in the case/screen that he prepares for it.“ Daniel Buren, “Exposition d’une exposition“, in Documenta 5, 1972, section 17, p. 29, English translation taken from the web project The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist [http://www.e-flux.com/projects/next_doc/index.html].

10. It is perhaps intriguing that Buren – an artist whose work has engaged in a radical desubjectivisation of expressive forms such as painting, and a critique of art’s autonomy through the development of site-specific interventions – should now lament art’s lack of autonomy. Returning to this text thirty years later, in his contribution to The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist, Buren admitted that his position had not changed: “This does not mean that exhibitions do not require an organiser – they clearly do – the difference is between an organiser-interpreter and an organiser-author. With the latter, what gets exhibited is the curator rather than the works of art.“ Daniel Buren, contribution to the web project The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist.

11. Smithson argues that there is no freedom to be found in exploring “process“ within the predetermined space of the neutral gallery; instead, he advocates a “dialectics that seeks a world outside cultural confinement“, i.e. risking to engage with extra-artistic space. See Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement“, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson Collected Writings, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996, p. 155. Process was one of the subdivisions of Documenta 5’s Individual Mythologies.

12. As practising curators will know, this can cut two ways: artists always want to show new work, and Szeemann is perfectly entitled to express interest in a particular piece; on the other hand, we can assume that Szeemann’s letter perhaps had a rather assertive tone (Morris: “dictated“), indicating a desire for confor­mity to a concept.

13. Finally – and to develop further this ethical theme – Morris expres­ses his disapproval of the fact that Szeemann borrowed one of Morris’s works from a collector, without first informing the artist. Morris’s letter is reproduced in Archive in Motion: 50 Years Documenta 1955–2005, p. 258.

14. Marcel Broodthaers, open letter on the occasion of Documenta 5, 1972, and interview with Jürgen Harten and Katharina Schmidt, circulated as a press release on the occasion of his exhibition at Düsseldorf Kunsthalle in 1972; both are cited in Douglas Crimp, “This is Not a Museum of Art“, in Marcel Broodthaers, Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre/New York, Rizzoli, 1989, p. 75.

15. Marcel Broodthaers, open letter, dated Palais des Beaux-Arts, 7 June 1968, address “A mes amis“. Cited in Douglas Crimp, “This is Not a Museum of Art“, p. 76.

16. For an extensive discussion of the Musée d’Art Moderne, see Rainer Borgemeister, “Section des Figures: The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present“, in October, No. 42, Fall 1987, pp. 135–154, and Douglas Crimp’s “This is Not a Museum of Art“.

17. Including the Section VIIème Siècle (Amsterdam, 1969), the Section Cinéma (Düsseldorf, 1971), and the Section Financière (Cologne Art Fair, 1971).

18. Marcel Broodthaers, “Imaginary Interview with René Magritte“, in René Magritte, Écrits complets, Paris, Flammarion, 1971, pp. 728–729.

19. Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 29–30. My italics.

20. “The common place – banal work of art or everyday lesson – has disappeared“ (p. 31). By “common place“, Foucault means both the shared ground of language and ideas, and the “common­place“ as ordinary; in its place stands what he calls a “non-place“ of mystery and enigma – a surplus that is unstable, unbeholden to conventions, “translations with neither point of departure nor support“ (p. 52). Foucault refers to the emergence of the “non-place“ in Magritte’s uncanny painting Perspective: Mme. Récamier (1958), in which the living subject of David’s portrait is replaced by a coffin sitting upright (p. 41). He also refers to the “non-place of language“ in the preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, Routledge, 2001, p. xvii.

21. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 48, cited in Translator’s Introduction, Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, p. 4.

22. “And in place of the artist as author we find the artist as director of his Museum of Modern Art; that in place of the traditional, which is to say modern, museological institution, we find the museum-without-walls, that is, the actual enunciative regime of all that modernity calls art.“ Thierry de Duve, “Critique of Pure Modernism“, in October, No. 70, Fall 1994, p. 93. Even so, the official “meaning“ that evolves from the Musée d’Art Moderne is now institutionalised by the historians of institutional critique: a parallel drawn between the mythology of the eagle and the mythology of the museum as discourse. In this narrative, the Surrealist side of Broodthaers’ work is often under-emphasised.

23. Marcel Broodthaers, in Interfunktionen, No. 10, 1973, pp. 78–79.

24. Rob Storr, “Show and Tell“, in Paola Marincola (ed.), Questions of Practice: What Makes a Great Exhibition?, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006, p. 20.

25. Ralph Rugoff, “You Talking To Me?“, in Paola Marincola, Questions of Practice, p. 51; Viktor Misiano, in Carin Kuoni, Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, New York, Independent Curators International, 2001, p. 119; Jean-Christophe Ammann, in Carin Kuoni, Words of Wisdom, p. 23. The latter publication offers myriad analogies for the curator. For Dan Cameron, he/she is “a kind of artist“ (p. 39); for Robert Fleck the curator is “not an artist“, nor a “meta-artist“, but a “facilitator“ (p. 63). Lippard compares curating to choosing the illustrations for a book (p. 102), while Szeemann compares it to “the creation of a little poem or a drama“ (p. 167). For Yuko Hasegawa, the curator is like the “conductor of an orchestra“ (p. 80); for Rosa Martinez, the curator should be a combination of “intrepid explorer“, “diplomat“, “guerrilla“, “economist“, and “therapist“ (p. 111).

26. Heinrich and Pollack support this claim with the argument that the budgets for a large-scale exhibition and a film are roughly equivalent; both trade in the economy of temporary cultural products for mass distribution; and both require a team to work under a director whose identity undergoes major variations (producer, scriptwriter, director, curator, creator etc.). Both, we could add, tend to be commercial enterprises.