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Andrew Hunt on the A to Z of curating
'Is there really anything left to say about curating?' This was an incredulous response by colleagues to my mention of this article before an event at London's Conway Hall in late May. If a prolonged period of discourse around exhibition displays came to an end somewhere in the late 2000s in preference for an examination of exhibition histories, then any attempted furthering of experimental forms on exhibition-making outside of the more critically reflective category of 'the curatorial' (the academic conversation around curating) may now seem passé. However, it is a fact that discussion on the subject continues to grow, a symptom of which is the flood of literature that continues to be published.
Problematically, curating has undergone such a shift that it is now seen as the dominant paradigm not only in contemporary art but also in the wider culture. This is a view claimed by David Balzer in his 2015 publication Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else - a fast-paced contemporary history of curating. It is a perspective that is also hinted at in Jens Hoffmann's short 2014 book (Curating) From A to Z, which acknowledges that the term 'curating' is now applied to any ordering of objects or media, from those making 'a party playlist to the artful arrangement of furniture'.
It is perhaps surprising, then, that the current stream of books on exhibitionmaking represents a relatively niche cottage industry. On the one hand (in Balzer's view), curating's expansion points to an increasing all-pervading restriction where every aspect of visual experience and the wider culture is controlled or mediated, while, on the other, the specialist subject of curatorial debate in the visual arts provides an arena in which imaginative researchers can actively engage with the subject through the process of making an exhibition in real time.
The only alarming feature of the increased activity in small publishing is that it sometimes appears as an arms race to become the 'authority' on contemporary curatorial practice, with allegations of 'self-positioning' being levelled at figures such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hoffmann himself, who were both accused by Paul O'Neill in his 2012 book The Culture of Curating and Curating of...