Anton Vidokle
Art Without
Artists?
It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well
beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for
works of art. Curators do a lot more: they
administer the experience of art by selecting
what is made visible, contextualize and frame
the production of artists, and oversee the
distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes
that artists compete for. Curators also court
collectors, sponsors, and museum trustees,
entertain corporate executives, and collaborate
with the press, politicians, and government
bureaucrats; in other words, they act as
intermediaries between producers of art and the
power structure of our society.
??????????A press release for a recent conference on
curatorial practice (at which I originally
presented this paper) portrayed the figure of the
curator as a knowledgeable and transparent
agent moving between cultures and disciplines –
a cultural producer par excellence. Furthermore,
it seemed to suggest that art has become a
subgenre of “the Curatorial”:
The conference “Cultures of the Curatorial”
aims at positioning the Curatorial – a
practice which goes decisively beyond the
making of exhibitions – within a
transdisciplinary and transcultural context
and exploring it as a genuine method of
generating, mediating and reflecting
experience and knowledge. . . . Between art
and science forms of practice, techniques,
formats and aesthetics have emerged
which can be subsumed under the notion of
the “Curatorial” – not dissimilar to the
functions of the concepts of the filmic or
the literary.1
The necessity of going “beyond the making of
exhibitions” should not become a justification for
the work of curators to supersede the work of
artists, nor a reinforcement of authorial claims
that render artists and artworks merely actors
and props for illustrating curatorial concepts.
Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk
of diminishing the space of art by undermining
the agency of its producers: artists.2
1. Overreaching
Curatorial practice is predicated upon the
existence of artistic production and has a
supporting role in its activity. While artists may
well produce art in the absence of curators, if no
art is being produced, curators of contemporary
art, at least, are out of a job. For this reason,
attempts to curatorially “produce” art and artists
by the simple expedient of including them in a
show often result in little more than a curatorial
embarrassment, as in the famous case of Roger
Buergel’s inclusion of celebrity chef Ferran Adrià
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Ferran Adrià, head chef at El
Bulli restaurant.
in the last Documenta.3?While Adrià may indeed
be a genius as a chef, his talent does not
automatically turn his cooking into a new form of
art, and neither did?Buergel’s framing of it. As
Buergel?said shortly before the opening of the
show:
I have invited Ferran Adrià because he has
succeeded in generating his own aesthetic
which has become something very
influential within the international scene.
This is what I am interested in and not
whether people consider it to be art or not.
It is important to say that artistic
intelligence doesn’t manifest itself in a
particular medium, that art doesn’t have to
be identified simply with photography,
sculpture and painting etc., or with cooking
in general; however, under certain
conditions, it can become art.4
All true up to a point, but what is that point?
What are these “certain circumstances”
that?Buergel?alludes to, under which cooking can
come to be considered art??Part of the reason
why the transformation of cooking into art did
not take place at Documenta is that Adrià’s
cooking was not already anchored in the stream
of commodities and careers constituted by the
art system; in this regard it is interesting to
note?in comparison that Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks
and is still recognized as an artist, though in
reality he is only an average cook.5 The
extraordinary aspect of his cooking is not its
quality as cooking, but rather its presentation by
Tiravanija himself as an artist who cooks.?It is
important to distinguish between the artistic
decision to include an activity within an artwork
and the curatorial power to designate something
as art or like art through its inclusion in an
exhibition.
??????????Another example of how curatorial power
can be distinguished from artistic authorship by
its legislative authority over what takes place
within the space of art could be seen in the last
São Paulo Biennial. Whereas, in a kind of grand
authorial gesture meant as a comment on the
crisis of biennials, the curators first announced
that the entire biennial would be devoid of art,
the concept later changed, presumably when
this gesture was found to discourage
professional visitors from attending. The void
became merely partial: only the second floor of
Oscar Niemeyer’s biennial building was to remain
empty, while the ground floor became a “public
square,” “opening itself up as the ágora in the
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