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  • Published: 2 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9783956795312
  • Imprint: STERNBERG PRESS
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $34.99

Curating the Complex and the Open Strike



If we ask where the curating of art occurs these days--in which places, which kinds of place, and how--apparent answers immediately appear: everywhere, expanding as if to ubiquity. Yet at the same time, we sense, with fragile purpose. In this, his newest book, Terry Smith explores the contemporary contexts of curating, looking for less apparent answers. It will map the dimensions of the visual arts exhibitionary complex, including its dialectical dance between institutionalization and deinstitutionalization; the persistence of professional classifications of curatorship; the given and changing categories of art exhibitions; the increasing variety of curatorial styles; the underthinking about publics; and (undistracted by curationism) the changing roles of art making and exhibiting art within an exhibitory iconomy that is at once viral and consumptive. A mapping of this kind might help us towards some answers to the more important questions: why curate art these days and in the name of which interests?

An analysis of the contexts in which curating takes place: why curate art these days and in the name of which interests?

If we ask where the curating of art occurs these days--in which places, which kinds of place, and how--apparent answers immediately appear: everywhere, expanding as if to ubiquity. Yet at the same time, we sense, with fragile purpose. In this, his newest book, Terry Smith explores the contemporary contexts of curating, looking for less apparent answers. It will map the dimensions of the visual arts exhibitionary complex, including its dialectical dance between institutionalization and deinstitutionalization; the persistence of professional classifications of curatorship; the given and changing categories of art exhibitions; the increasing variety of curatorial styles; the underthinking about publics; and (undistracted by curationism) the changing roles of art making and exhibiting art within an exhibitory iconomy that is at once viral and consumptive. A mapping of this kind might help us towards some answers to the more important questions: why curate art these days and in the name of which interests?

  • Published: 2 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9783956795312
  • Imprint: STERNBERG PRESS
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Terry Smith

Terry Smith was sacked in a widely publicised spat with his former employers over the publication of the first edition of Accounting for Growth in 1992. He is now a partner in a City stockbroking firm, Collins Stewart.

Praise for Curating the Complex and the Open Strike

"Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualise art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves."--Frank Jewett Mather Award