Curators

As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal kitsch are manned by graduates of hard-sell whose market-barker schtick does not need to include descriptions as their goods are self-explanatory.

Every other year they coexist with a different sort of operation: the galleries, ateliers, showrooms and studios of the Biennale. And with them an ever-burgeoning cadre of soft-sell operatives, who compose the hieratic order of the curatocracy. There is no piece of approximate art or workshopped event that cannot be curated just as there is no foodstuff that cannot be sourced. At a recent ‘ideas festival’, I was enjoined to participate in a curated walk round a small town. I resisted temptation, sourced a packet of crisps in a vending machine and ate them on a platform at Ipswich station.

When, over a century ago, G.B. Shaw accused them of being ‘conspiracies against the laity’, the professions were the law, the church and medicine. Whatever their practitioners claimed, all other endeavours were still trades. Not that it really matters. Once a trade develops its own mores, patois, rites, sartorial code and forms of indenture, it pretends to the characteristics of those original learned professions: exclusive, impregnable, self-important, impasted with bogus tradition, in love with its own pinchbeck arcana and gimcrack mysteries. It can safely be said that the curating malarky has achieved all this and more.

Curators were, till a generation or so ago, urbane historians of the renaissance or donnish scholars of the Beaker people. The dusty smell of muniments rooms hung about them. Today they are — well, what are they? Achingly hip neophiliacs who have mastered the peculiar illiteracy that comes from having been the willing victims of critical theory, cultural studies and art history, which, as we all know, begins with Duchamp — and ends with him too.