The impact of the networked world upon the evolution of curatorship

by Peter Annhernu, Digital Media Arts, January 2010

Digital media is changing the work and status of the curator. Is this new context a threat to the curator’s professional role or an opportunity to take a new position in cultural production?

Part 1: How did the role of curator come to be what it is today?

To understand where curatorship is going, we need to understand where it came from. The practice of curatorship is something that emerged from the world of the museum during the Age of Enlightenment (17^th & 18^th Centuries). Although contemporary art and museum curators seem to be quite different now, they share a common history and many of their core activities (research, selection, cataloguing, devising ontology and presentation) are carried out in the same way.

It’s possible to trace a history of ideas about the display of art from the Louvre, to the Berlin museums, to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and back from there to Europe’s contemporary art spaces.

Part 2: The curator’s role in cultural production

To investigate the work of the curator means we need to look at the “supply chain” of art and culture from originator to the “audience”. Essentially this is an investigation into “cultural production”. One of the best thinkers on this topic was the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002). His work on why way art and culture is valued and how it is consumed is very helpful when trying to understand the roles that curators, artists and other cultural workers play.

Part 3: The practice of curatorship in the networked world

So what is the new world of the web doing for curatorship? Engagement of curators with the web, social media etc is still at a very immature stage. However there are some interesting examples out there – some that enhance traditional curatorship (eg eHive), some that look at digital art production and curation itself (eg Rhizome, CRUMB) and some that seek to “crowd source” curation (Saatchi Online). There are many examples of curators seeking to present work through the web, but the great majority of curatorial output in this medium feels like publishing rather than presentation.

Part 4: The future

The curator’s role has always shifted and expanded throughout its history, and will continue to do so. Advances in technology make it easier to undertake some of the core curatorial tasks, but bring new challenges, especially in the area of effective online presentation. Currently, the art world has a lot of interest in the curator and curatorship but there is also a lot of resistance to the expansion of the role into “authorship”. At the same time, funding is under threat and the concept of curatorship is being “borrowed” by other media forms, particularly journalism. It may be that the practice of curatorship ends up escaping the job of being a curator and instead becomes a set of skills applied by anyone involved in the field of cultural production.