Scientific supervisor’s review 
of master’s degree thesis by Ekaterina Moskaleva
“Contemporary art curators as cultural intermediaries: 
German and Russian experience”
(040100 – sociology, MA Studies in European Societies)

Ekaterina Moskaleva has been working under my scientific supervision for two years. She has shown herself as a hardworking, well-educated and purposeful student. As a devoted researcher, Ekaterina has demonstrated the ability to formulate non-trivial research questions, persistently carry out her fieldwork and thoroughly analyze the collected empirical materials. 
The subject area chosen by Ekaterina can be described as topical and bearing indisputable features of novelty: her MA research is devoted to the professional and communicative practices of art curators in two national contexts – Russia and Germany; empirically, she focuses on the experience of curatorship in the public and private institutions of St. Petersburg and Hamburg. Her interest in this topic originates from her ambitions to seek for scientific knowledge that could help better understand the social logic of cultural production, mediation and consumption in contemporary art and thus improve the way curators communicate with other actors of the artistic field. Moreover, Ekaterina’s choice of the subject of inquiry helps her provide a productive comparative perspective on curatorship and discover similarities as well as striking differences in the ways members of Russian and German professional communities engage in cultural mediation.

Another advantage of Ekaterina’s research project is the consistency of the chosen theoretical frame built around several core concepts: the field of cultural production, capitals, cultural intermediaries and more. Her analysis of curatorship is based on the theories developed by Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu. In the theoretical chapter, Ekaterina demonstrates developed skills of critical thinking by clearly outlining the possibilities and the limits of chosen theoretical frames for her research project. 

Doing her fieldwork in Germany and Russia, Ekaterina has managed to reach a rather closed field of professional curators and obtain a set of truly narrative interviews – despite using a foreign language when conducting part of them. She analyzes the collected narratives attentively and quotes them amply and pertinently which makes the text informative and interesting. In the end, she comes up with productive conclusions on the backgrounds, career tracks, ambitions and, most importantly, communication patterns of contemporary curators in two national contexts as well as the barriers to their successful performance and the institutionalization of their profession.

I would also like to emphasize Ekaterina’s deep involvement in scientific community and her strong interest in academic inquiry. Her efforts in theoretical and empirical research have resulted in her participation in several international research and art science projects devoted to knowledge generation in artistic collectives of big European cities and to the urban transformations enabled through artistic intervention.

The analysis of the paper conducted in Blackboard system (Safe-Assign program) has revealed 3% of textual matches. The further analysis of these matches has shown that they are of purely technical nature (front page, paragraph numbering, references), which again proves the fully independent character of Ekaterina’s inquiry.

The MA thesis written by Ekaterina Moskaleva presents the results of her original research, includes a number of theoretical and empirical insights and meets the standards of the professional community.

Scinetific supervisor,
head of MA SES
associate professor, 
chair of sociology of culture and communications,
department of sociology, St. Petersburg State University                          
 
Dr. Anisya Khokhlova                  
30.05.2016