Contemporary curating practices: authorship, negotiations and collaborations

Abstract

The article briefly discusses the creation of the first modern museums and the establishment of their collections to understand when the appearance of a figure that would “watch over” those collections came to be requested by the art system. However, it would be in the mid-twentieth century that curation would become omnipresent in the art system, whether by its role in educating the audience (as a mediator between artists and exhibitions), whether by mediating the increasingly complex relationships between artists and institutions. Therefore, curation is debated here having as examples authors such as Terry Smith, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Claire Bishop, as well as exhibitions such as Lucy Lippard’s Number Exhibitions (1969-1973), Harald Szeemann’s When attitudes become form: live in your head (1969), Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre (1973). Those events are examples in which the notions of an authorial role of the curator as well as the curator-artist were present. Finally, we will comment on events inspired by the domestic realm where authorship and collaborative aspects would blur the borders between artistic and curatorial practices, such as in Kitchen Show: World Soup (1991), Moradas do Íntimo (Brasília, 2009), Estudos de Recepção - arte contemporânea em espaços domésticos (Vitória and Vila Velha, 2015), among others.