before and after in order to identify the profile of that time through its major and minor forms, styles, and tendencies. We might then say, again too schematically, that art-critical thinking seeks to register the ways form is figured into meaning in individual works of art at the moment that they are first seen by the critic, to compare these immediate impressions with memories of elements in works that the same artist has made to date, in others made recently by other artists, and, if relevant, those made earlier. If these reductive characterizations are (provisionally) acceptable, then perhaps we could go on to say that curatorial thinking about the art of our time, or another time, is also devoted to making manifest the same elements that preoccupy art historians and critics, but differs in its relationship to the elements. Above all, curating seeks to encourage or enable the public visibility of works by artists either by assembling a selection of existing works for exhibition or by commissioning works for display so that they may be seen by a disinterested audience for the first time or be seen differently by such an audience because of the ways the works are presented. In this ideal, imaginary model, curating follows the response to a new work of art by the artist’s immediate circle, and in many cases by those interested in making it available for sale or wishing to buy it (thus the word “disinterested” in the previous sentence), but curating precedes art-critical response, audience appreciation, and the eventual assessment of art-historical significance.
William Kentridge, I am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, 2010. Image from performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Of course, each of these practices is deeply dependent on the other. If we can say that from the 1940s to the 1960s critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg gradually moved from working within what was essentially a literary genre—a belle lettrist writing of essays, commenting on events, and reviewing of books—to providing regular responses to the shows presented (we would now say, softly, curated) by the art dealers shaping the emergent commercial gallery scene in New York, then we might also say that the height of Robert Hughes’s art writing was achieved as he grappled with the blockbusters staged by the major public galleries in the city during the 1970s and 1980s, notably those presented by curators such as William Rubin, Walter Hopps and Henry Geldzahler. Critics active since then who seek to place their immediate responses within larger, unfolding frameworks have focused on the biennials and the internationalization of contemporary art (that can, and should, include readings of regional and local creativity against these broader horizons). Many other art writers have been content to serve as mouthpieces of the spectacularization promoted by the auction house-led art market. Unfortunately, this kind of writing prevails today in most art publications. Fortunately, it is being assailed on all sides: by a growing awareness of the historical resonances within contemporary art and by a dispersion of interest in art and visual creativity that spreads across social media. While criticality drives the first of these, it is a rare, occasional spark in the second. Here is an interesting challenge for curators: to think past the invitation to assist in the uncritical immediation of consumerized subjects that capital now offers (the much-celebrated interactivity that Slavoj Žižek correctly caricatures as “interpassivity”) and to curate experiences in which subjects exercise the kinds of creativity required by their contemporaneity.
In this context, the exhibition is a selective offering of art to an audience, to art’s future, and to the world to come. The curator is a crucial handmaiden not necessarily to the creation of an artwork (although that is becoming more often the case) but certainly to its becoming public beyond a narrow circle, to its entering the art world, its reaching (in recent times) the expanding audiences for art, and thus its circulation to the world at large. In this comparison, curators are likely to be more tentative, more provisional about their ideas of what is meaningful about the work than art historians and, to a lesser, but still appreciable degree, more circumspect about specifying the significance of art than art critics. They will certainly have a strong sense that the work is meaningful, albeit in ways yet to be fully defined. Storr puts it this way:
A good exhibition is never the last word on its subject. Instead it should be an intelligently conceived and scrupulously realized interpretation of the works selected, one which acknowledges by its organization and installation that even the material on view—not to mention the things that might have been included, but were not—may be seen from a variety of perspectives, and that this will sooner or later happen to the benefit of other possible understandings of the art in question. In short, good exhibitions have a definite, but not definitive, point of view that invites serious analysis and critique, not only of the art but also of the particular weights and measures used in its evaluation by the exhibition maker.11
Critics and historians, in comparison, seek stronger, more definite statements about the nature and the significance of the art they encounter and study. Curators do everything necessary to bring works up to the point where they may become subject to critical and historical judgment. They exercise a very similar repertoire of skills and competencies and are moved by a closely similar set of passions and commitments, but curators, on this reading, are appraisers, not judges. Nor are they mainly chroniclers, as art historians must be (even of the present and especially of the immediate past). Curators certainly may leap to attempt both judgment and claims of significance, but will do so with a conscious sense of how provisional their proposals must be.
What is being emphasized from these perspectives is curating as a profession, one that proffers art and offers fresh work or a fresh presentation of known work. To whom? To what? Making the work available to appreciation, understanding, interpretation, and impact. A corollary is holding back from articulating any of these things at the time of presentation and being reticent about doing so in the place of presentation. Interpretation remains in the wings, as a second order of knowledge awaiting the viewer who is imagined standing in front of the work in the context of an exhibition staged by the curator or as a participant in the work enabled by the curator, if that is its form. Within the space of the exhibition itself, the curator’s interpretation remains unstated, implicit. In its explicit form, it usually becomes available to the viewer later—in the catalogue, for example—as a supplement to the understanding that he or she already arrived at while taking in the exhibition.
While this sequence of events may benefit the exhibition visitor, it could be seen to disadvantage the curator. As many curators say, the preparation for an exhibition is governed by two deadlines: that of the catalogue being sent to the printer and that of the opening night. The gap between these dates can run to many months. This schedule deprives the curator of the chance to learn from the exhibition itself and to share that knowledge with the visitor. No matter how well the curator knows the work that is to be shown, no matter how suggestive the model, however experienced he or she may be, when writing in the catalogue the curator can state only a belief about the subject of the exhibition. No claim to be able to share its exhibitionary content can plausibly be made. In practice, most curators write as if this gap did not exist. To others, it is a root cause of the reticence that pervades their texts. It is extraordinary that a widely shared solution to this problem has not yet evolved.12
What is the role of wall texts within this model of curating? Modernist conceptions of the autonomy of the art object, expressionist theories of instinctive, unmediated empathy, and the more general reluctance among curators to, as it was often put, “interpose themselves between the artwork and the viewer’s direct experience of it” led to decades during which exhibitions received no more than the most minimal title (and then a purely descriptive one) and nothing more was to be found inside a gallery than wall labels with the name of the artist, title of the work, its date of making, and perhaps its medium, always in plain, nine point type. With the recent boom in audiences (the majority of which are unfamiliar with art) and the increasing display of art that is unfamiliar even to knowledgeable visitors, the provision of information within exhibitions has become essential. Even when the work of the exhibited artist or group of artists is well known, most exhibitions open with a general statement as to the main content and relevance of this exhibit. If, as we have already established,
