curating as art

Idle Arts: Reconsidering the Curator

by Rossen Ventzislavov

introduction

There has been a great deal of debate about the current position of the curator. For the most part, however, the relevant issues have been ignored by philosophers. It is my purpose in this article to propose a way in which philosophical aesthetics can make sense of the curator's work and, more specifically, its claim to creativity and value making. My thesis is simply that curating should be understood as a fine art. My argument has three complementary strands that are delivered concur recently throughout the text. The first is that the curator creates artistic value through the art of se- lection and through the introduction of new custodial narratives. The second is that over the last hundred years, our understanding of what it means to be an artist has changed to include practices and approaches that are safely attributable to the con- temporary curator. The third strand of my argument is a critique of the attitudes and normative assumptions typical of scholars who oppose the curator's claim to the creation of artistic value.

Selecting art and incorporating artworks into various narratives are activities that presuppose the presence of curatorial ideas. A curatorial idea - an exhibition theme, a mode of spectator- ship, a single artwork placement, and so on - is a genuine contribution to the life of the artworks involved. I enlist the help of various philosophers and theorists to show that when and where an artwork is performed or exhibited has transformative effects on the artwork. Crediting the curatorial idea for its contribution of artistic value, however, requires a further philosophical step. With the advent of conceptual art, the line be- tween the creation of meaning and the creation of value has been effectively erased. While this permits artists to engage in purely conceptual work, it also allows for a reconsideration of the status of curatorial ideas. The main condition for the validation of conceptual art as art is the delivery of artistic meaning, and that, as is widely believed, is the guarantee for the creation of value. In my study, I explore the ways in which curatorial art - from the simple gestures of selection to the sweep of grand custodial narratives - meets this same condition.

The second strand of my argument pertains to our evolving definitions of artists and artworks. If we should accept curating as a fine art which brings forth artistic value, we have to also be able to col- lapse our concepts of curator and artist into one.

This is made possible by two complementary tendencies: while curatorial work has grown to afford artistic creation, the artist's work has evolved to include curatorial activity. Marcel Duchamp is the first to historically explore this overlap, and his arguments are worth pursuing because of their particular implications for the nature of curating. If an artist can pick out any object and pronounce it an artwork, what she is doing, among many things, is adding value, through a certain mode of selection and a respective idea-driven narrative, to the object and the larger world. In this sense, the "art- work" itself is not the object the artist picked out, but precisely the act of selection and the narrative which informs it. The only nominal difference between this and what the curator does is that the artist's "raw materials" are not always other artists' works. Some of the examples I give below demonstrate why this should not present a challenge to the proposed equivalence between artist and curator. Another possible challenge could be the fact that curators and artists most often simply do not do the same things. This, again, is no serious problem, as it is clear that artists partaking in different art forms, say dance and filmmaking, could merit their common title even when they blithely engage in radically different methodologies and practices.

The most stubborn perceptions of difference between artist and curator are those I address in the third strand of my argument. My purpose here is to demystify the roles of the artist and the curator as they have been traditionally understood. The most important difference that emerges in the literature is the perception that curators are institutionally, ethically, and financially encumbered, while artists are not. My study finds this perception fatally mistaken. Constraints of the institutional kind are nowadays not only relevant to but also welcomed by the majority of artists. It is often precisely through successful and lucrative institutional engagements that artists achieve the dubious veneer of freedom traditionally associated with the creative arts. Constraints of the ethical and political kind are sometimes forgotten or subverted in contemporary art, but they still remain relevant to the respective works' reception, longevity, and significance. As to financial constraints, there has never been a time in history when the art market has enjoyed the un- abashed courtship of artists as intensely as today. Another perceived difference is the curator's responsibility to the larger society - to preserve art and to use it for the purpose of public education and general ennoblement. If we are willing to exempt artists from the same responsibility, what we are in effect doing is admitting that the educational and ennobling component of art is not the artist's own, but is a matter of the value curators add to the artist's work. In what follows, I show how these and other perceived differences between curator and artist lead to similar unsavoury implications. The main problem, however, remains the underlying structure that makes these perceptions possible - a traditional picture laden with normative assumptions and strict labour divisions. This is why, before I can show how ready we are to accept curating as a fine art, I start with a short discussion of the reactionary forces that have held us back until now. From there, my article continues with an exploration of the art of curatorial selection and the claim to artistic value thereof. Following that, I demonstrate how the gradual overlap of the roles of curator and artist undermines the most prevalent objections. In the final section of my article, I offer an example of curatorial intervention as a practical confirmation of the relevance and the timeliness of my thesis.

ii. the traditional picture and beyond

Since the first allusions to it in Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist, my thesis has garnered equal measures of attraction and contestation from people who think and talk about art.An unspoken rea- son that various figures of the artworld find it problematic to identify curators as artists is that the divisions of labour they protect are inherently normative. The inadvertent application of this normativity in equal measure affects curators who style themselves as artists. It is thus that both the proponents and the detractors of my thesis for the most part remain blind to the honorific assumptions they apply to recognizing someone as an artist.

What qualifies artists for their place atop the artworld hierarchy? To this virtually everyone would answer something to the effect that artists specialize in creative work. This sets artists apart from critics, curators, and collectors whose actions are subject to various practical interests and responsibilities. The artist makes art in the primary and naked sense of thrusting something new into the world, creating value ex nihilo, as it were. The rest of the artworld engages art in the secondary, mediated sense of discussing it, selling it, preserving it, and so on. Consequently, most critiques of curators' artistic ambitions have been premised on a neat division of labour between the two modes of engagement with art. One way to begin to justify any conflation of the two has been to look for overlap between the functions artists and curators play. This, however, has its pitfalls. A fact that is rarely acknowledged - and one that con- firms the hierarchy I refer to - is that artists are rarely judged negatively for crossing over into the curatorial field. The crossing of the dividing line by the curator, on the other hand, is customarily sanctioned as a categorical transgression.

An understanding of the normative underpinnings of this picture is already available in Wilde, suitably buried under his quaint mannerisms. A part of the subtitle of Wilde's essay is Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing. The ethical censure I identify above is perfectly captured in the concept of doing nothing or, in my preferred idiom, of being idle. The tradition of regarding art as an idle occupation starts with Plato's Ion, goes through Immanuel Kant's insistence on dis- interestedness, and lives on today in the various debates about public arts sponsorship.4 That the artist's work is divorced from practicality is of- ten taken for granted also on account of a persistent romantic narrative - the glorification of all manner of poverty, strife, and suffering as markers of authenticity - which artists and their audiences have flirted with for so long. This is the locus of the greatest art-historical difference between the artist and the curator. Artists have been tradition- ally seen as being hard at work on their creative projects, but notoriously idle with regard to "real world" concerns.5 Curators, on the other hand, are considered extraordinarily productive and versa- tile at pulling the levers of the artworld and idle at just one thing - the sacred task of pure artistic creation. The scandal of this differentiation is that it no longer applies to reality. But, as I try to show, it remains stubbornly embedded in the dominant view of curatorial work - an entrenched division of labour on the basis of which artists are celebrated for being idle at life and curators are suspected for being idle at art.

While the grounding intuitions of this study are my own, my understanding of the curator's profession and its implications for aesthetics owes a great deal to Michael Kowalski's recent essay "The Curatorial Muse. "Kowalski offers a penetrating analysis of the curator's work from the perspective of major trends in the history of art and the philosophy of art. He gives a rich account of the artistic and philosophical revolutions that account for the contemporary idea that art has as much to do with mastering the crudely physical as it does with manoeuvring through the conceptual and the social. Mastery, even in the plastic arts, is no longer associated chiefly with a technique or a material practice. This observation teases out the peculiar tension between art as object and art as concept-a persistent problem of both art and aesthetics of the last hundred years. Kowalski pro- poses a new battleground for this tension in the work of the contemporary curator. In what follows, I urge a crucial further step: aesthetics owes it to itself to recognize the gradual emergence of a new art among the fine arts as we know them. Beyond the artworld's stagnant labour divisions and "pure" categories lies an open field where normative sanction should take a backseat to a new understanding of creativity. If we accept that curators are capable of adding value to the work of others or creating value on their own, the arbitration over art products and the environments they inhabit deserves its own place in our esteem, along with the classic dispensations of artistic endeavour.

iii. on selecting

The hanging of Henri Matisse's The Dance (I) in a stairway at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is scandalous and reverent at the same time. The scandal is the result of the august work's placement in what is usually perceived as service space and away from the dedicated Matisse room. For the uninitiated, one of whom I was on my first visit to the renovated MoMA building, the space is no match for the painting's iconic status. According to Walter Benjamin, we have been growing accustomed, from the nineteenth century on, to viewing paintings collectively - not unlike the way we watch movies at the multiplex.7 So accustomed, in fact, that maybe seeing Matisse's The Dance (I) in a stairway bothers us precisely because the placement does not allow for the beehive mode of spectatorship conditioned by viewing large paintings in large white cubes. A museum stairway is where one rests from the onslaught of organized culture, a place of unregulated traffic, a home for welcome distractions. As it is, the particular space where the Matisse painting hangs allows for a pleasant stopover, a vista point with multiple viewing angles, various velocities, and, most crucially, many focal points besides "the main act." For to- day's average museum goer, this would constitute a break with tradition. For Benjamin, however, this embraces the tradition of pre-museum spectatorship through the reinstatement of the personal viewing of artworks that historically preceded museum throngs. In other words, while defying cur- rent expectations, this might just be the best way to view The Dance (I).

However, as soon as one walks up to the display label, one realizes that this placement is appropriate for yet another reason: the text explains that the painting is a study for a commission by Russian merchant Sergei Shchukin originally intended to grace the walls of a staircase in the collector's palatial Moscow residence. The MoMA's choice has been saluted for its inspired way of honouring the artwork and its past.

Matisse's painting can even be said to gain from having its roots re- covered and integrated into the spectator's experience. The knowledge of the painting's provenance in no way undermines Benjamin's observations- in fact, the intimation of the work's personal his- tory enhances our personal reaction to its peculiar placement.

Such are the subtleties of curatorial work that they seem to add layers to the artworks them- selves. To me, this is a reminder of a truth that often remains under the critical radar - that curators are not only in the business of preserving value but also of creating it. In the MoMA's handling of The Dance (I), preserving the painting's value would have been amply served by a traditional focal placement like the one allotted to the painting's final version hanging in the Hermitage. Instead, the MoMA's curatorial staff has managed to add value to the work by breaking it out of one mode of spectatorship and placing it in another. What accounts for this inspired move is a mix of factors, including the curator's knowledge, his or her interpretative and theoretical frame, the institutional pressures to produce blockbuster shows and legacies, and so on. In my view, however, there is nothing more important in curatorial work than the simple constitutive act of selecting art and the environment to display it in. For this, much of the rest of the curator's powers and responsibilities are necessary but not sufficient conditions. In other words, there is a distinctive art of selecting practiced by curators which merits our attention independently of all attendant aspects of this embattled profession.

The concept of selection is crucial for our under- standing of what today's curators do. I can think of two important reasons for this. First, because any artwork that does not contain explicit directions about its contact with the public is in need of further mediation - placement, display, performance, and so on - from outside. Looking back in history, there are innumerable examples of art- works that were made or commissioned for specific purposes and were thus loaded with specific conditions of spectatorship. It is only in the past two centuries that the larger number of artworks has been unhinged from such preliminary custodial determinations. The curator's role as selector is in demand precisely because much of the art produced today is open to different custodial scenarios. The curator in this sense is the selector who proposes a home for art in the swelling eye of an ever-shifting mass beholder. The other sense in which the curator is a selector is by picking out works of significance from the undifferentiated mass of artistic output our times are embarrassed with. This is also a fairly recent historical development.

In his 1970 essay "Aesthetic Welfare," Monroe Beardsley recognizes some members of the artworld as "aesthetic auxiliaries." The role of these is "to help make works of art accessible by arranging the conditions under which they are most likely to be widely enjoyed. "Beardsley recognizes two specialties that distinguish an aesthetic auxiliary from all other members of the artworld labour force: the auxiliary possesses "some capacity to have relevant aesthetic experience, and some understanding of how aesthetic experience is brought about."For the curator, who clearly occupies a place of importance among the possible auxiliaries, these requirements fall tragically short of the work they are supposed to be doing. For one, as Robert Stecker has argued, artistic value does not have to be coextensive with aesthetic value as Beardsley would have it. Also, having a sensibility (a capacity for aesthetic appreciation) and an understanding of how art achieves its effects (usually resulting from the combination of sensibility and education) qualifies one to enjoy art in a discerning manner, but not to modify the conditions for its enjoyment.Beardsley's most curious argument, however, concerns the status of selection. He claims that even if a curator picked up a plumber's handiwork and placed it in a gallery with the usual descriptive label, that would not make the plumber an artist. How about the curator?

iv. erasing the distance between curator and artist

It is especially ironic in the context of my study that Marcel Duchamp's most definitive gesture of artistic selection involves precisely the placing of a piece of common plumbing in a gallery. After the initial backlash from the exhibiting of Duchamp's Fountain, a programmatic editorial for the art- work in question was anonymously released. Authorship over the object had already been assigned to a Richard Mutt. We have every reason to believe that the editorial was prepared by Duchamp and his close associates, quite as we are amply justified to believe that the work's author was Duchamp himself. The following passage from the editorial addresses the issue of selecting directly: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view-created a new thought for that object."15

In Duchamp's mind, artistic selection goes well beyond the sanctification of commonplace objects-it extends to the choice and modification of display environments, the juxtaposition of different artworks, and even the tampering with artworks themselves.1All of the above was perpetrated by him in the 1938 installation of his 1,200 Bags of Coal at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in New York. To Beardsley's cha- grin, Duchamp might even have muscled through the menial part of the installation himself, a task Beardsley reserves for the members of the art- world causally removed from the creation and preservation of aesthetic value. It is obvious that through such gestures Duchamp was redrawing the limits of what it meant to be an artist and, equally, of what it meant to be a curator. The 1938 exhibition was effectively curated by a man who, under the telling title of "Generator-Arbitrator," cheekily inhabited the two roles at once. If we

should try to imagine a professional curator, in- stead of Duchamp, putting the 1938 exhibition together, it is clear that the result could have been exactly the same. This relation of equivalence poses a major challenge for the labour divisions of traditional aesthetics. Duchamp's contribution to the dismantling of these divisions was taken even further afield by his successors. As Brian O'Doherty notes in his seminal book In- side the White Cube, Duchamp's work saw the beginnings of regarding gallery space as dialogically related and/or equivalent to the art it hosts.

Soon after Duchamp, Yves Klein would rid the gallery of art altogether and, in due time, Christo would bury a museum under a layer of fabric se- cured with rope. All of this could not have failed to tickle the fancy of curators the world over- it paved the way for bolder custodial scenarios and a revolution in what could be called curatorial expression.

The most outspoken, and perhaps most reputable, critic of the curator's claim to artistry is Robert Storr. An artist, curator, critic, and educator himself, Storr has given this claim due attention but has invariably come out with a negative retort. He finds the idea that curators are artists to be seriously mistaken, and he traces the mistake back to the various philosophical challenges to authorship. He correctly notices that Wilde's The Critic as Artist foreshadowed the burden of Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author. If we accept, on Wilde's and Barthes' urging, that authorship is a function of spectatorship, it seems a logical next step to recognize all artworld actors with any sway over the modes of spectatorship as authors, or co-authors, of the exhibited work. In terms of the primary argument, all Storr has to say is that in its most popular version - Barthes' - it served the historical purpose of mocking a particular tendency of author worship in France at a particular point in time.This does not begin to explain why-by virtue of what cross-cultural historical developments-an argument by a nineteenth-century writer (Wilde) survived in the work of an early twentieth-century artist (Duchamp) and found fecund soil globally after its elegant reiteration by a late-twentieth-century thinker (Barthes).

The main problem with Storr's position, how- ever, is not that he haughtily dismisses the importance of pertinent historical developments. It is rather the fact that, even if we agreed with

Barthes, we would not have to be implicated in the belief that curators are artists. This is so simply because Barthes' argument does not itself imply the contested thesis. The dissolution of author- ship is meant to empower the end user of the art- work and, by Storr's own admission, the curator is not in the business of havingaesthetic experiences but of facilitating these for end users. What would Barthes have said about curators? Since his main issue with assigning and upholding originary authorship is the illusion of the intelligibility of authorial intention - what he sees as the diminishing promise of "deciphering" texts - Barthes would cheerfully deny the curator any privileged access to the meaning of artworks. But it is crucial to no- tice that Barthes denies that kind of access even to authors themselves. In other words, if curators are dying to be considered artists - just as Storr makes them out to be-they might as well consider dying altogether.

Storr's positive proposal is for us to consider the relation of curators to artists as analogous to that of editors to novelists. The curator is like the editor who may justly take pride in spotting ability and fostering accomplishment but who is otherwise content to function as the probing but respectful 'first reader' of the work / manuscript - thus acting on behalf of all future readers - and is disinclined to interfere in a writer's pro- cess except to the extent necessary to extract the best that is in them so that the subsequent dialogue between their work and the public be of the highest and most open-ended order.

According to Storr, there is a freedom, and a ruthlessness in dealing with one's medium, associated with artistic creation that is categorically un- available to the curator and the editor. Creative work is thus mysteriously cleared of ethical and practical constraints.

If we allow that artists are ruthless and free as creators, we should probably have to make the same concession to the general public as audience. Storr commits himself to this by identifying the artist's status - in contrast with that of the curator - as reliant on the exemption from professional constraints. The general spectator should then be granted the same exemption on account of his or her definite lack of professional investment in the arts. Testaduras are foreigners in the art- world and thus, in what seems like a Lockean twist,

not liable to the laws of that world.2All of this assumes that the spell of Kantian disinterestedness applies to artists and spectators but not to curators. Leaving aside, for the moment, what curators do and where their interests lie, we can still see this picture as a distortion of reality.It is a fact that contemporary artists are, for the most part, finely attuned to the demands of the relevant markets, the ethical and political implications of their work, and even the tensions between their work and the curator's. Furthermore, it is no longer the case that the general public seeks out, at leisure and on idiosyncratic whim, the ennobling company of artworks. Storr's aristocratic approach to aesthetic creation and appreciation sees both as idle pursuits-idle in the sense that one could elect how to engage in them or to not engage at all. The reality, however, is that even the general public is nowadays folded into the artworld - the person on the street is accosted by art and its reproductions from all sides, she is required to take art- making classes earlier and art history classes later in her education, and she is constantly reminded that knowing about art is one of her tickets to social relevance, urbanity, and so on. Even street art - as bent as it seems on the annihilation of all intermediaries between artist and spectator - is often an accommodation of various interests, pro- motion tactics, and ultimately profit. These considerations put the claim of artistic freedom in perspective. Doing as one pleases is as available to the artist as it is to the curator, and, along with the gradual art-historical collapsing of the two into one, it becomes clear that exercising this freedom is equally risky, or equally rewarding, for each. It is true that the artist has the choice to create ex nihilo while the curator faces immediate constraints at the gate. But curating, when understood as a fine art (that is, as the selection of artworks and their incorporation in custodial narratives) is free to engage these preliminary constraints as irreverently and creatively as the artist engages the various shackles that await his work, however immaculately the latter might have been conceived. If this analogy did not hold, we would not be able to account for the vital role various shocking, ground-breaking, and plain bizarre curatorial decisions play in the artworld.

There is also another problem the curator and editor analogy brings to the fore. Since we value artworks and novels, we can assume with- out much controversy that artists and novelists are capable of and usually responsible for creating value. When Storr suggests that curators and editors, on the other hand, act as "first readers" - in effect what is popularly called "educated consumers" - their claim to creating value is rendered null. This is a troublesome implication be- cause with the advent of conceptual art, the line between the creation of meaning and the creation of value has been erased. The most direct formulation of the conflation of the two modes of creation is found in Sol Lewitt's "Sentences on Conceptual Art": "Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical." hen Ivan Gaskell suggests that "meaning might be generated by the juxtaposition of works of art," he brings the results of this conflation to bear on what curators do.In effect, the ideas (carriers of meaning) that bring a smattering of artworks to the same room, gallery, museum, or catalogue should be looked upon as artworks (carriers of value) themselves.

In his "Remembering the Past: Art Museums as Memory Theatres," David Carrier develops Gaskell's argument by suggesting that we think of the museum as a narrative.If a museum does tell a story, is this story equal to the sum of its parts-the artworks therein-or is it of a different provenance and significance altogether? Museum scepticism is popular enough for the expression to have become commonplace in art debates.The scepticism in question applies to the possibility for an artwork to retain its historical and contextual significance when subjected to the custodial determinations of the public exhibition space. But even museum sceptics are willing to grant the possibility that curatorial efforts transform artworks - in fact, the latter is a hidden premise in the sceptic's claim from the start. This, of course, speaks directly against the burden of Storr's curator and editor argument. The intervention of curators and editors into the life of a work of art is actually two- tiered. On the one hand, as both museum sceptics and many of their detractors agree, they are capable of and often responsible for transforming the artwork. On the other hand, the curator and the editor are both in command of original custodial narratives - the ones upon which it is often decided where a Matisse painting will hang and how a novel will end. In the curator's case, the custodial narrative is the natural product of the process of selection. The narrative's meaning is also precisely what gives the curator's creation its own artistic value, beyond and sometimes even apart from the artworks the curator brings together

It is interesting that Carrier himself resists pursuing his metaphor all the way. The final sentences of his essay read: "Perversely reading a book's chapters back to front takes effort, but refusing to follow the ordering imposed by a curator is easy. The historical hangings of our museums may influence, but they do not determine, how we see the art they display."While this is meant as recognition of the outer limits of Carrier's initial metaphor, it does not contradict the understanding of curators as creators of value. If anything, the ability to differentiate between the airtight order of traditional literary narratives and the more forgiving order of museum narratives constitutes a modest beginning for our future understanding of the curator's work as a different kind of fine art. A crucial further step toward such understanding will be the realization that artworks can be viewed as raw materials for curatorial creation just as, after Duchamp, everyday objects become raw materials for artistic creation. Both artist and curator inhabit the role of "generator-arbitrators," creating value through the powers of selection from the detritus of civilization or from what civilization has not yet learned how to value.

v. the curator is present

In 2010, the performance artist Marina Abramovic ́ was given a career retrospective at the MoMA. The show included two distinct offerings. The first of these was a comprehensive survey of documents about and enactments of Abramovic ́'s performance art pieces. The enactments were done by a group of hand-selected and specifically trained young performance artists. The second offering- which occupied the artist's attention and physical being for the duration of the three-month retrospective - was a new performance piece titled The Artist Is Present. For that, Abramovic ́ spent the entire three months, through all hours when the museum was open to the public, sitting motionless in the middle of the MoMA atrium. Throughout the exhibit, random volunteers were allowed to sit across from the artist and claim the vanishing point of her otherwise empty gaze.

The title of the MoMA retrospective was Marina Abramovic ́: The Artist Is Present. It is also the title of a 2012 documentary directed by Matthew Akers that chronicles the preparation, mounting, and impact of the show. In the documentary it be- comes clear that the site-specific original performance art piece - the artist's three-month presence in the museum's atrium - was conceived by the show's curator Klaus Biesenbach. The film also documents a conversation between the artist and her gallerist, Sean Kelly, in which Abramovic ́ suggests that her new performance art piece could end in an expertly feigned bloodbath, for the execution of which she would solicit the services of illusionist David Blaine. (A previous scene, in which Abramovic ́ and Blaine are having dinner together, shows the illusionist devouring a wine glass to everybody's dismay.)

The relationship between the act of artistic creation and the artist here is, at best, tenuous.Considering the expansive art-historical knowledge and experience of the people involved, we can safely assume that this tension is purposely built into the fabric of the exhibit. After all, the retrospective directly challenges the ontology of performance by means of re-performing. Also, the documentary makes it clear that Biesenbach's idea of the new piece does not travel far from Abramovic ́ 's own 1980s work Nightsea Crossing performed with her then collaborator Ulay. It seems, however, that the exhibit provides a definitive conceptual clearing for a new understanding of curatorial intrusion.

The issue at stake here is how we apprehend the limits of an artwork. I think it is productive to think of these limits doubly - in temporal and conceptual terms. In time, artworks could be thought of as having a beginning (the time Gertrude Stein first sat in that chair) and an end (the moment Picasso lifted his brush from the surface of Stein's portrait for good). There are, however, complications that arise from such an intuitive understanding of a work's creation. There is a famous saying whose authorship has been attributed to various historic figures like Leonardo Da Vinci, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, E. M. Forster, and still others: "A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned." As to the possible beginning of an artwork, a saying which is securely attributable to Stanley Cavell goes: "There is no preparation for art that is not already art." What these statements capture is the simple fact that artworks most often do not carry within themselves the conditions for their own historicizing. It is, as it were, possible to even

think, in the spirit of Cavell, of a conversation be- tween Picasso and Stein as part of the creation of the eventual portrait. Similarly, it should be possible to posit an openness of the creative pro- cess that transcends the temporal limit of the final stroke and, even, beyond the obvious pun, the death of its author. As to the conceptual limits of an artwork, if even a figurative seventeenth- century painting like Las Meninas could engender lasting conceptual challenges, little less should be expected from art that calls itself conceptual. In the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein, apprehending the conceptual limits of an artwork promises to be as unavailable to us as are the proverbial limits of our world.

Nicolas Bourriaud's idea of postproduction, also the name of his book on the subject, aptly captures the inherent open-endedness of art -its invitation for and accommodation of various interventions from an ever-shifting temporal and conceptual "outside." According to Bourriaud, "The contemporary work of art does not position it- self as the termination point of the 'creative pro- cess' (a 'finished product' to be contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities.One of Bourriaud's many examples is Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, a twenty-four- hour video work that offers a slowed-down projection of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho (1960). Gordon's piece is an exaggerated treatment of one of the problems of curatorial intervention: Is an artwork the same when displayed in a different manner? Has the curator added (or subtracted) any value from the proverbial original? It is hard to begin to answer these questions without recourse to Duchamp. It is, in fact, in Duchamp that Bourriaud unearths an early formulation of a metaphor I have discussed above with reference to Carrier. In Bourriaud's words, Duchamp de- fines creation by stating that "to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative."Against this backdrop, we are justified to think that curatorial work retains a strong element of artistic creativity to the extent that it engenders ever new narratives for artworks to dwell in. In terms of setting criteria for curatorial excellence, then, the quality of the narrative and the responses it elicits remain good candidates.

In Biesenbach's case, the proposed criteria for excellence have been handsomely met. The show he created, narratively and otherwise, was received warmly by both critics and the larger public. An interesting additional twist to this case of felicitous curatorial intervention is brought about by Biesenbach's public persona. On Storr's normative setup, there is something vulgar about a curator who seeks public attention. And, yet, for an increasing number of curators, their personal idiosyncrasies are becoming part of the larger custodial narratives. When Duchamp says that "the most interesting thing about artists is how they live," he could be looking for a locus of relatability outside artworks themselves. The statement, however, also allows for the reintegration, through basic human interest, of artworks in the lived narratives they come from and lend themselves to. There is, in fact, a subgenre of painting that covers depictions of how artists themselves live - Schiele's Room in Neulengbach comes to mind, as do the descriptions of Schiele's actual lodgings in history books. Storr is likely to accept artists' un- embarrassed personal revelations as a function of their general ruthlessness and freedom. This, how- ever, should not mean that he will easily agree that how artists live is the most interesting thing about them. Any insistence on human interest, with its egalitarian sway, threatens to flatten Storr's vertical normative structure.

What use could an article on the monastic aesthetic of Biesenbach's Manhattan residence have for the general public? It turns out that the curator's approach to his own private lifestyle can be fully integrated into his professional practice and the creation of value thereof. Biesenbach's residence has not only garnered an inordinate amount of attention for its strangely alluring subversion of comfort, but it has also inspired new work by artist Andrea Zittel. We stand, historically and experientially, at the point where such profound integration of life, work, and art is becoming in- escapable. Considering how disinclined Duchamp always is to present his insight as revelation, some- thing remains to be said about the possibility that this integration has always been in place - right before our unseeing eyes.

conclusion

In any entrenched taxonomy of professional roles, the possibility of versatility threatens and is threatened by a normative structure. Why is a plumber not an electrician? The common sense answer seems to be that it is because he does not specialize in electrical installation and maintenance. However, the question "Can a plumber be a good electrician?" seems to ask not if one specialty can be replaced by another, but if a plumber can also be another kind of specialist altogether. Instead of welcoming the possibility, we are most often inclined to find it suspicious. Various slippery slope queries are at the ready: What if all plumbers are in fact good at being electricians? What if knowing much about electrical circuits compromises the focus and effectiveness of a plumber's work? Can someone possibly be good at being a gardener, a philosopher, an architect, a school teacher, and a knob designer? At the expense of what?

In his "The Name of the Game," Tim Morton sees one major flaw with Storr's curator and editor analogy-the fact that the very use of an analogy presupposes a need to apologize for the profession in question:

Curator[s] as . . . constructions speak of a welcome self- reflexivity and plurality of approach, but they also al- most inevitably stick in the craw. There's a faint atmosphere of subterfuge about them, of borrowing the glamour or gravitas of another profession in an attempt to graft it onto one that we're aware is, for all its possibilities, also commonly bound up with the grey, clerk-y stuff of fundraising and filling out loan forms.

In so little space, Morton addresses the two most persistent problems my study has identified. The first problem is that people like Storr see different professions as incompatible within the same individual - hence, Morton's juxtaposition of the "glamour or gravitas" of artistic creation with what he calls the "clerk-y stuff" of curatorial work. The second problem, also well illustrated by the above juxtaposition, is that for Storr's analogy to get off the ground a preliminary normative structure must be already in place.

In Plato's Ion, the art of both the rhapsody and the poet are compared unfavourably to various occupations-mathematician, charioteer, fisher- man, doctor, ruler, and so on. There are three tiers to Plato's argument about art. One is that art does not answer to rules of any sort. The second is that the making of art does not involve or require knowledge of any sort. The third, and most subtle one, is the critique that art does not have a concrete purpose. Curators, no matter who is looking, have to follow rules, have to possess specific knowledge, and have to answer particular demands. On Plato's view, consequently, curators cannot be farther from artists. Apparently, Storr's assumptions about art are as ancient as they are wrong