pilot:1 Alistair Robinson Curator and Programme Director, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) Competition for status and recognition is as fierce for artists as it is for curators. Accordingly, ego-driven curatorial practices, which underline the curator’s own intellectual prowess, attract greater attention and resources than ‘ambient’ curating, driven primarily by the desire to provide opportunities for artists. The latter approach doesn’t get press coverage or brownie points – the devil always gets the best tunes.
David Mabb Artist and Course Leader, MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London I am unclear what is meant by ‘academicised’ here. Presumably it refers to the growth of curating courses that now exist at Goldsmiths and the RCA. In a way they are no bad thing, if – and it’s a big ‘if’ – they teach a professionalism that can help artists to produce better exhibitions. The usual criticism of these courses is that they encourage curators to think of themselves as artists who are ‘creative’, and float around the art world picking out artists without wanting to get down to the really boring organisational and fundraising stuff.
Gerrie van Noord Independent curator and Project Manager, Zenomap Like any practice that develops over a period of time, at a certain stage a process of professionalisation sets in. This usually involves a taking into account of what has happened so far, and an acknowledging of a history. Just as there is a history of art, there is now a history of ‘exhibition-making’ and ‘curating of contemporary art’ – a history that is now a continuously evolving process. Processes of theorisation formalise things, but they also acknowledge and emphasise the plethora of possibilities. And it’s not a bad thing to be aware of that. Just as there are dozens of professional training options for artists and for art historians, (nobody seems to object to their abundance), for quite some time there have been courses that take disciplines like museology seriously. And now there are
33
Q2