The role of the curator

Traditionally, a curator has been defined as the custodian of a museum or other collection – essentially a keeper of things. The Association of Art Museum Curators identifies curators as having a primary responsibility for the acquisition, care, display and interpretation of objects, such as works of art. They work with their institutions to develop programs that maintain the integrity of collections and exhibitions, foster community support, and generate revenue.

A curator of an exhibition is the person who is in charge of organising it. The curator decides on which artists’ work will be featured, the title or name of the exhibition and its theme or subject. The curator is traditionally the ‘object specialist’ who works in tandem with ‘audience specialists’, like educators and public programs and other staff. Curators may thus reach audiences not only through exhibitions, but publications, websites, forums and other events.

While the traditional curator maintains a collection of art/artefacts by preserving, exhibiting and studying those objects, the contemporary curator need not work with a collection or objects at all, and instead engages with cultural meaning and production, often from a position of development that is shared with the artist. This requires sensitivity to the interests and intentions of the artist.

As art practices expand, the work of the curator expands to accommodate or reflect them. Harald Szeemann’s career marked the change from working at some remove from the processes of art production, to becoming actively involved in its development. This shift in the role of the curator can be seen as a response to the changing meaning and relevance of the art object over the last four decades: dematerialisation prompted a redefinition of art to deal with conceptual art, process art and performance art among others. 

After Szeemann, the figure of the curator would no longer be seen as a blend of bureaucrat and cultural impresario. Instead, he emerged as a kind of artist himself. The collapsing definitions of curator into artist and vice versa reveal art and curatorial practices to be ever evolving as the territories overlap.

Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition Live in your head: when attitudes become form at the Kunsthalle Bern irrevocably changed the public role of the curator who was now less a passive facilitator than an active player – a refashioned creative agent responsible for the exhibition’s very staging as an event. After resigning from his position at Bern, Szeemann became something that had never previously existed: the independent curator. It was a role that would affect the most fundamental operations of the museum community for decades to come, focusing less on conventional tasks such as collecting, restoring or keeping board members and trustees happy. Instead, Szeemann’s shows were a one-person business, run on passion and obsession, with a team of devoted collaborators taking care of exhibition architecture, transportation, insurance problems, bookkeeping and all other practical matters. As Szeemann once said, ‘Where no obsessions are to be discerned. I have no reason to linger.’