I read Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility a few years ago and just flipped through it recently to look at some of my notes. The text is taken from a symposium organized by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative and later recorded in book form.

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Dave Hickey (in true Dave Hickey form) addressing a room full of curators and museum directors:

“Are you really accredited in aesthetic midwifery? I don’t know. And from whence do you derive your authority to function as patrons to a large, democratic culture? I don’t know. I also discerned another ambient idea, derived from this, that the curator is sort of a moral money launderer — that public institutions have all this dirty money coming from corrupt corporations, dealers, and patrons that magically passes through the curator, as the river of grace passes through the Virgin, and is thus transubstantiated by his or her ethics and passion and vision. This came as a big surprise to me — the idea that curators function as a screen of virtue through which the wicked money of commercial culture flows and is redeemed. In my view, this is nothing more than an arrogant institutional rationalization for intervening between the artist and the money. Just the sort of thing institutions accuse dealers of doing.”

I get more and more wary of curating as practiced by larger institutions. The curators become power brokers losing track of the public interest in favor of building their own resume while helping their employer keep up with the Jonses. All this is done for national and international recognition as opposed to really serving the institution’s community.

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Mari-Carmen Ramirez (Curator of Latin American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) in response to a question concerning “the voices of artists of color” and “who decides how they enter” the public institutions:

“That kind of question presupposes that African Americans and Latinos, or whoever, are somehow vying or knocking at the door to enter into this big institution. That is very important, that needs to happen, and, certainly, it’s happening, but there is a lot more to be done. I also want to stress that these communities need to develop their own voices in their own spaces, in their own locales, and develop their own models. They need to think through what some of these issues in culture are all about and come up with an answer of their own. […] It’s not about where we locate them in this big pie over here that’s been going on for a number of years. That can happen, but it’s never going to change the picture completely. There needs to be another kind of reinvention taking place at the level of our communities.”

If public moneys are going to continue to fund art, then there needs to be a more democratic way of representing the public in museums and art centers receiving those moneys. I agree with that. But I’m glad that Mari-Carmen followed that up with stressing the importance of generating a new model instead of trying to be validated by the old one. However, putting the work of an “artist of color” in an old, white museum, bestows the artist with a modicum of public validation, but it also seems very colonial. The work still gets dressed up in the architecture of old, white men which recontextualizes the work more than the work recontextualizes its new digs. I’m not proposing art ghettos where everyone remains segregated, but I’m suggesting that new inclusive practices and approaches to exhibiting art grow from communities instead of subscribing to old, outdated archetypes.

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Mari-Carmen Ramirez addresses the issue of globalization and biennials:

“What we’ve seen is that, in the context of countries and regions that have suffered from chronic political and social situations that you may associate with underdevelopment, or something like that, where art institutions have never really been very solid, they’re, at most, very fragile, very vulnerable. This whole issue of globalization and integration into the circuits has imposed a series of pressures on those structures. You have museums that need to be responding to their communities, trying to catch up to this global ideal, and trying to structure their programs around MoMA, for instance, or other institutions, instead of really responding to their constituencies. […] We have to be very careful about not falling into the idea that, yes, because all these things are closer, and there is more of an exchange, that the situation has changed or that we really are engaged in some kind of global dialogue. We are very, very far away from that, and we need to be very aware of what the pitfalls are.”

There is too much emphasis on plugging artists into a global dialogue. Artists who are part of a “global style” may get more shows, write-ups, and spotlight, but where is the focus on individual communities? Here in Putnam County, Indiana, local artists are doing their best to be part of a larger dialogue by putting their work more in line with what they see in Southwest Art or Watercolor magazines since that is what they have available. Then the local museum does its best to exhibit the work in “traditional” museum ways. What happens is a sad, pale imitation of a system that doesn’t and can’t work with their location and budget. The flavor of place, upbringing, and beliefs is lost in the khaki puree of globalization.