Reader's Digest: April 15, 2023
Having recently read two books about curation, I run the risk of reflexivity: would I recommend these books to other readers? I refuse to say.
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating is a collection of partly autobiographical essays by a star curator who insists, with apparent sincerity, that he does not “believe in the creativity of the curator.” His job is to make possible for artists what might otherwise be impossible for them:
Artists and their works must not be used to illustrate a curatorial proposal or premise to which they are subordinated.
Obrist offers a brief history of curating, from the Salon exhibitions of the French Academy, which began in 1648, through the establishment of the Louvre in 1793, with canvasses packed onto gallery walls, to the pristine white cube of today. Key turning points in Obrist’s narrative are Courbet’s 1855 Pavilion of Realism, a temporary structure near the Salon in which he showed The Artist’s Studio (rejected by the Academy) along with 43 other works, and the 1863 Salon des Refusés, which included Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.
David Balzer’s Curationism is dyspeptic sequel to Obrist, who is discussed at length as a self-promoting paradigm of the new curatorial class, situated by Balzer in a commercial trajectory that neutralized and institutionalized the avant-garde, turning revolutionary works into financial assets.
Both Obrist and Balzer note the contemporary expansion of “curating,” which now encompasses any attempt to manage the superfluity of options, from the Netflix algorithm to Subway “sandwich artists,” whose ingredients are curated by customers, to our self-curation on social media. Balzer quotes Kierkegaard:
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.” Curation provides this finiteness.
Which sounds helpful, except that Balzer mourns the effect of curation on the art world and sees its impending death as an opportunity for redemption.
It is thus with some sheepishness that I curate my recent online reading, which includes:
A very good essay by Jimin Kang on Sylvia Plath and the death of the author in the LA Review of Books.
Matt Seaton, informing, educating, and entertaining in a profile of the BBC in the New York Review of Books.
Also in the NYRB, Mark O’Connell on Adam Kirsch on the end of humanity. O’Connell responds to anti-natalists who plumb the misery of existence:
For instance: “How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right?” As of this writing, I will grudgingly concede that the room I am sitting in is a little on the chilly side, but not to the extent that I’m ready to succumb to cosmic pessimism; I can always put on a sweater.
It is with even greater embarrassment that I promote two pieces of my own on related themes: an appreciation of the BBC in the TLS (scroll down for my contribution), and my own take on Kirsch, as anti-prophet. Take your pick.
BONUS CURATION: Not to be missed, the new season of Barry Lam’s extraordinary podcast, Hi-Phi Nation, on the ethics of our digital futures.