On the Curatorship

The curator may exhibit, but he doesn't have the magical abilitity to transform nonart into art through the act of display. That power, according to current cultural conventions, belongs to the artist alone.(43)
The question is then, why have curators lost the power to create art through the act of its exhibition, and why has this power passed over to artists? The answer is obvious : In exhibting a urinal, Duchamp does not devalue a sacred icon, as the museum curators had done; he rather upgrades a mass-produced objcet to an artwork.(44)
Over the yearsmodern artists began to assert the total autonomy of art - and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well - because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic, even if the troy is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. Acoording to tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in sllent contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative discourse is a distraction, and must stop. Even affirmative discourse and favorable display were regarded as distoring the message of the artwork itself. As a result : Even after Duchamp the act of exhibiting any object as an artwork remained ambivalent, that is, partially iconophile, partially iconoclastic.(44-45)
A work of art cannot in fact present itself by virtue of its own definition and force the viewer into contemplation; it lacks the necessary vitality, energy, and health. Artworks seem to be genuinely sick and helpless - the spectator has to be led to the artwork, as hospital workers might take a visitor to see a bedridden patient. It is in fact no coincidence that the word "curator" is etymologically related to "cure". Curating is curing.(46)
The art work needs external help, it needs an exhibition and curator to become visible.(46)
By placing an artwork in a controlled environment, in the context of other carefully chosen objects, and above all involving it in a specific narrative, the curator is making an iconoclastic gesture.(47)
We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction between art and non-art is generally understood as a distinction between objects inhabited and animated by art and those from which art is absent. This is how works of art become art's idols, that is analogously to religious images, which are also believed to be inhabited or animated by gods.(49)
Such documentation, however, merely refers to art without itself being art. This type of documentation is often presented in the framework of an art installation for the purpose of narrating a certain project or action. Instead they become documents, illustrations of the story told by the installation. One could say that today's art audience increasingly encounters art documentation, which provides information about the aertwork itself, be it art project or art cation, but which in doing so only confirms the absence of the artwork.(49)
On the one hand, images in the museum are aestheticized and transformed into art; on the other, they are downgraded to illustrations of art history and therby dispossessed of their art status.(51)
This double abuse of images, this doubled iconoclastic gesture, is only recently being made explicit, because instead of narrating the canon of art history, independent curators are beginning to tell each otehr their own contradictory stories. In addition, these stories are being tole by means of temporary exhibitions (which carry their own time limitations), and recorded by incomplete and frequently even incomprehensible documentation. The exhibtion catalog for a curatorial project that already presents a double abuse can only produce a further abuse. Images don't merge into the clearing of Being on their own accord, where their original visibility is then muddied by the "arr business," as Heidegger describes it in The Origin of the Worf of Art. It is far more than this very abuse makes them visible.(51-52)