The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)

<b>How curating has changed art and how art has changed curating: an examination of the emergence contemporary curatorship.</b><p>Once considered a mere caretaker for collections the curator is now widely viewed as a globally connected auteur. Over the last twenty-five years as international group exhibitions and biennials have become the dominant mode of presenting contemporary art to the public curatorship has begun to be perceived as a constellation of creative activities not unlike artistic praxis. The curator has gone from being a behind-the-scenes organizer and selector to a visible centrally important cultural producer. In <i>The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)</i> Paul O'Neill examines the emergence of independent curatorship and the discourse that helped to establish it.</p><p>O'Neill describes how by the 1980s curated group exhibitions&#151;large-scale temporary projects with artworks cast as illustrative fragments&#151;came to be understood as the creative work of curator-auteurs. The proliferation of new biennials and other large international exhibitions in the 1990s created a cohort of high-profile globally mobile curators moving from Venice to Paris to Kassel. In the 1990s curatorial and artistic practice converged blurring the distinction between artist and curator. </p><p>O'Neill argues that this change in the understanding of curatorship was shaped by a curator-centered discourse that effectively advocated&#151;and authorized&#151;the new independent curatorial practice. Drawing on the extensive curatorial literature and his own interviews with leading curators critics art historians and artists O'Neill traces the development of the curator-as-artist model and the ways it has been contested. <i>The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)</i> documents the many ways in which our perception of art has been transformed by curating and the discourses surrounding it.</p>