Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.17685/Peristil.59.12
Hospitable Embraces – Institutional Imagery and the Iconography of Curatorship
Beti Žerovc
; Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Department of Art History
Abstract
One of the crucial changes that occurred in contemporary visual art in the twentieth century was the formation of an immense institutional platform with thousands of very different institutions that not only exhibit, house, and support contemporary art, but also directly commission it and produce it. This global network of institutions is run by contemporary art experts – which as a rule means curators, not artists. Curators are the ones who devise and administer programmes, who invite the public to participate in a varied and constant stream of events, and who guide the public using a complex discourse rich in metaphor and conceptual abstraction. The art system, therefore, not only allows but even demands that the curator, too, in keeping with the charismatic ideology of the art field, be as fully “consecrated” as possible and also that production relations be defined, not clearly as actual production relations, but rather as, for instance, the relations of hospitable hosting.
Keywords
institutional art; history of contemporary art exhibitions; documenta; curatorial mythology; curatorial practice and theory; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Hrčak ID:
179002
URI
Publication date:
1.3.2017.
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