The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

This book walks us through the process of how artworks eventually get their meaning. Using notions of belonging and membership and applying analytic perspectives, it shows us how curated exhibitions invite audience members to infer an exhibition’s narrative threads, giving artworks their contents and discursive sense. Arguing that exhibitions avail artworks as candidates for reception, whose meaning, value, and relevance reflect audience responses, it challenges the existing view that exhibitions present “already-validated” candidates for appreciation. Instead, this book stresses the collaborative nature of curatorial practices, debunking the twin myths of autonomous artists and sovereign artistic directors and treating presentation and reception as separate processes. Employing set theory to distinguish curated exhibitions from uncurated exhibitions, installation art, and collections, it demonstrates how exhibitions grant spectators access to concepts that aid their capacity to grasp artifacts as artworks. By drawing on a range of case studies from Impressionism, Dada, and Surrealism to more contemporary exhibitions such as Maurizio Cattelan’s “All” (2011), and “Damien Hirst” (2012), this is a new reading of exploration, conceptualisation, presentation, and reception, informing and illuminating current debates in curatorial practice.