Learning to say no, the ethics of artist-curator relationships

Abstract

The article suggests that the perceived ethics of curatorial practice are not often in balance with operative ethics, and analyses the problem by focusing on the curator-artist relationship. Contemporary art curators constantly find themselves in a situation where they have to choose between the needs of the few and the many. Counter-hegemony theory is used to examine the curator’s duty toward the many, while the reading of Jacque Derrida’s concept of responsibility toward an individual and Alain Badiou’s ‘singularity of situations’ suggest that the few are to be considered first. In this article, I suggests that curators could learn to say no in order to be able to balance these different demands.