the art of boredom

roguebicycles:

“The growing use of the term ‘curator’ in other fields, while misleading to many, fools no one who is actually in the industry and knows about the scope of activities that a curator undertakes. The use and abuse of the term outside the field indicates how opaque the contemporary art world and its processes may be to the rest of society, but perhaps we should welcome this as a teaching moment, where what curators do can be discussed and illuminated in a broader context.”

Kristen Hileman, curator of contemporary art and department head of the Baltimore Museum of Art, says that while she wasn’t overly aware of the definition creep of “curate,” she’s fine with one field borrowing terminology from another: “In fact, it is intriguing to think there is something so evocative in the vocabulary describing my job that others want to use it to articulate their own abilities or services. One of the legacies of 20th-century art has been a thorough appropriation of the everyday, so how could one object to the non-art world stealing something in return?”


The word “curate” could be attractive because of its implied prestige, suggesting that objects, experiences or people are being chosen and presented by an expert best equipped with the necessary knowledge and experience. Hileman says, “In short, I can see the appeal of a knowledgeable specialist making selections or recommendations in an information and image-saturated culture.” She adds, “I would also speculate that, in time, the use or overuse of the term might rob it of some of its preciousness, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since contemporary curators bring other skills to the table beyond connoisseurship.”

i hate the word abuse.

singularitarian:

External image

That’s not photoshop; that’s an actual cloud hovering inside an actual room. Artist Berndnaut Smilde merges art and science to create small man-made clouds that exist — albeit for just a moment — indoors.