Angry Old Man 1

 

It has been some time since I last posted anything here, and I can't really understand why.  Except that, too often, I put stuff on Facebook or into turgid emails my poor friends have to wade through in order to discover the state of my mind, and if I need help, or cake, or coffee.  Mostly it is the last two.

However, I think it is time I began to write again, rather than discussing my views with the dog on our short walks taken before the heat rises from barely acceptable to utterly intolerable, which latter may in fact be how I feel about the artworld.

Having reached that stage where new opportunities have ceased hereabouts, and the only worthwhile things are in Europe (oh, and the UK, I forget we 'got Brexit done' and have utterly buggered the arts - and sciences - for years to come.  But hey, we got control of our borders, something we already had, but don't tell the Surrey rascists who still think Brexit a good idea) I have fallen to musing on (dot dot dot) curators.  I am sure that once upon a time there were more gallery directors, exhibition assistants, and curators lived mostly in museums.  Now there are more curators than artists it seems, and the curators vie for funds to produce publications and attend conferences and, and here is the point that affects my reason, get money for exhibition proposals and then search for artists to 'respond to the curatorial concept'. Meanwhile the artist just sits and waits, devoid of any ideas, a mere automaton requiring the magic formula of the curator's concept to kick start the corpse into life.  I am a mere lump of clay and need the slip of paper to animate my base material.  

I object to this, to having to bend my ideas to fit the views of a curator fresh from an MA in Curatorial studies.  Maybe curators should, post MA, do some on-the-job training - five years of being a technician in a gallery building walls and painting things white, a few years standing in a gallery looking after exhibitions, that kind of thing.  Actually, this would be good for everyone in the artworld.  Especially those cloistered in academia.

This is all deeply unfair, and many of the curators I know have indeed spent their time painting walls white and fiddling with lights while the opening deadline for the exhibition looms.  But I wish there were more open calls were curators would develop ideas with artists, rather than proscibing what the artist(s) can produce.  And then that artist can make the work and the curator can deal with all the other bits, like getting money, arranging transport, painting walls white...