The curator in the art world and in the museum: History, theories and current issues

Abstract

The article analyzes the current state of curatorship and curating from a historical, theoretical and practical perspective. The aim is to understand the origin and the nature of the justified critique facing the profession nowadays from art institutions, artists, as well as from curators themselves, while exploring the challenges faced. The key historical developments of the profession are retraced, which nonetheless always had, to a certain extent, to come to terms with the main stakeholders of the industry: the artist, exhibiting institutions and the public. The profession’s interwoven position is further studied through a variety of positive and normative accounts from curators as well as from academia. These accounts make it possible to evaluate a profession whose complexity is reflected in its various practices, functions and officiating venues. Based on the historical and theoretical analysis, the authors explore the current position of the curator in the art field, as well as problems and criticism faced. Among them, significant attention in the article is paid to the ethical problems arising from the cooperation of curators with artists, institutions and the public, as well as to the alarming convergence of the functions of independent and museum curator and to the partially negative impact of working conditions on the quality of work of these professionals. The authors come to the conclusion that curatorship, because of its specific emergence in the world of art, faces new challenges that cannot be fully resolved because they are unavoidably placed between stakeholders sharing mostly antagonistic values.