Curationism

Winner of the ICA Book of the Year, 2015

Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?

‘Curate’ has become a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows in a way that can eclipse the contributions of individual artists. At the same time, curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and businesses are adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. Everyone, it seems, is now a curator.

But what is a curator, exactly? And what does the explosive popularity of curating say about our culture’s relationship with taste, labour and the avant-garde? In this vibrant book, David Balzer travels through art history to explore the cult of curation, where it began, how it came to dominate museums and galleries, and how it emerged at the turn of the millennium as a dominant mode of thinking and being.

Recalling such landmark works of cultural criticism as Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Balzer asks whether curationism has finally reached its own limits, where its widespread success has paradoxically led to its own demise.

Author Biography

David Balzer is a writer, lawyer, editor, and educator. He is the author of Contrivances (2012), Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else (2014), and This is Not New: Art, Culture, and the Promise of Change (2025). His critical writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Artforum, and Frieze. He lives in Canada.