In a niche of their own

As words commonly used to write about the visual arts become increasingly useful to advertisers, ‘to curate’ is becoming the synonym du jour for ‘to choose’. For David Balzer however, this shift in language reflects a shift in behaviour. ‘Now that we “curate” even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?’ Curationism asks. The answer, in a word, is relegation. Whereas connoisseurs know the best Rembrandts, wines and restaurants, curators promote an object to high status through their mere engagement with it, imbuing it with a new-found quality through their act of choosing. In the art world, this has resulted in superstar curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist, who tour the world making items desirable via their selection alone. In the real world, claims Balzer, ‘curating’ is the best way to look at a whole range of enterprises.

He identifies the famous Impressionist art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel as the first to do this, imparting monetary value to the avant-garde through the assurance his taste gave some 140 years ago. This is a fair, if a historical, portrayal. Balzer has a tendency to assume the world was always as it is now, right down to talking about everything — even art, especially art — in terms of free market economics.

As a result, Curationism is increasingly persuasive as it nears the present. The best sections concern the rise of conceptual art from the 1950s onwards, the rise of international high finance, and the merging of the two, causing art to respond to its newfound mainstream-fame-yet-exclusivity by critiquing the money spent on it and the museums that expensively house it. The art produced by this union tended not to be user-friendly, so curators began to be vital as translators who could explain difficult or conceptually abstract work to an increasingly diverse audience.