Aarhus University

Curating in the Digital Age.

Ekaterina Skorokhodova
MA Curating
Semester 1: Curatorial Theories


Index:

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………4

The contemporary curators as a product of their time………………………………………….5

Contemporary society, experience and consumption…………………………………………..7

The user-generated image and its proliferation as the greatest curationist event………….......14

Questions of authority and importance for contemporary documentation of art

exhibitions…………………………………………………………………………………....17

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………21

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….24

Abstract

Curating in the Digital Age based on my personal experience of Tomás Saraceno’s Carte
Blanche exhibition “On Air” at Palais de Tokyo in November 2018. Visiting the show induced
interesting observations about the way in which contemporary exhibition audiences consume
the exhibition space with their cameras and photographic devices in order to derive from their
experience contemporary art exhibition in the form of the digital image.

The paper sets out to analyse the major external forces shaping contemporary curatorial
practice such as the rise of the Internet, immaterial labour, the proliferation of user-generated
content on distributive networks essentially social media and the experience economy.
Subsequently, the text comments about the intricate relationship of these elements with the
artistic domain, one which often leads to the commodification of the artwork.

In order to confirm the observations carried out while invigilating Tomás Saraceno’s show, a
study of user-generated content produced by the audience was carried out by taking to
Instagram and downloading and sorting images featuring various angles of Saraceno’s
installations. This process proposes contemporary curating as an increasingly social practice
while putting forward the idea that user-generated content can open up unprecedented insight
into the audience’s psyche and become a valuable research tool for the curatorial profession.

Introduction

In 1936, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction1”, Walter
Benjamin claims that art has lost its aura. Inspired by this idea, the aura in this paper treated as
the aura of the contemporary art exhibition that is subject and in various ways, dependent on
digital proliferation and alternatively, as the aura of the contemporary curator which has
permeated wider popular culture in a time where “everyone curates” and “everyone is a
curator”. Benjamin’s essay can be considered as a commentary about society and a review of
the mechanical means of reproduction of the time in relation to the exhibition of the work of
art. It is worth dedicating some thought to what he would have made of the current moment
where means of reproduction are not only mechanical but also digital. This opens up intriguing
questions about the intricate interplay between the physical and virtual realms and how digital
production, reproduction and circulation of images is rampant and has become deeply ingrained
in our everyday routines, including in how we experience art and the exhibition space as a
contemporary audience.

This paper adopts a similar stance from a different angle; rather than the work of art, the art
exhibition and the professional curator become the main subjects of focus situated within the
framework of the present moment defined by themes such as digital culture, Internet and
contemporary modes of experience and consumption. Arguably, the user-generated image and
its proliferation on social media and Internet mark the heightened manifestation of all these
present defining elements simultaneously at work, possibly leading to a situation where, as
David Balzer claims “the aura of curation, is now undoubtedly possible without the curator2”.
Therefore, a study of such images taken in the exhibition space and then released online, serves
to inform the reflexion on the “contemporariness” of current exhibition models and curatorial
practice as well as the speculation about how these may be shaped by current conditions.

This body of work came about primarily as a result of visiting Tomás Saraceno’s Carte Blanche
exhibition “On Air” at Palais de Tokyo in November 2018. Throughout the visit, I observed
the exhibition audience flowing around the galleries and fast became fascinated with the almost
prescribed order in which a large number of visitors navigated the exhibition and stopped to
take pictures in certain spots and particular angles despite lack of directional signage. I grew
interested in this occurrence (or rather, reoccurrence) and the questions it started to raise. I

1
Benjamin Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Broché, 2010
2
Balzer David, Curationism. How curating took over the Art world and everything else, Broché, 2015

resorted to Instagram to try and retrace this process visually and confirm that my observation
was not unfounded.

To my delight, I was able to pin down the strong element of repletion that had been perceived
in the exhibition. Through a thorough process of indiscriminately downloading and
systematically organising pictures that came up in searches using the hashtags #tomássaraceno,
#palaisdetokyo, #onair, #carteblanche and numerous variations on these words on Instagram,
I traced the artworks and the angles that seemed to have left the strongest impact on the
audience, for whichever reason. However, I was equally struck by the variety, the incoherent
(sometimes verging on cacophonous) assemblage of user-generated imagery that could come
up even when conducting a straightforward search, was in itself a significant and telling
discourse. When expounding on the relationship between visual user-generated content on
social media and contemporary curatorial practice, Instagram dominates the discussion, being
widely regarded as the most visual-orientated social medium currently available and most
largely in use.

The contemporary curators as a product of their time

Who is the contemporary curator? Without deep examination of the term and its history, it is
quite enough to determine the curator’s profession as one that has outgrown its traditional
boundaries and whose remit is constantly shifting and expanding within the art world and even
outside of it. Recent years have seen the rapid ascension of the curator from an anonymous to
a central and authoritative figure in art world, as well as the rapid proliferation of the curatorial
profession and its practices into popular culture.

“Curationism” is a term coined by David Balzer, which Documenta 13 curator Carolyn

Christov-Bakargiev in conversation with the author refers to as “acceleration of the curatorial
impulse to become a dominant way of thinking and being3” in a moment when as audiences
and consumers, “we are engaged as well, cultivating and organising our identities duly, as we
are prompted4”.

Balzer attaches a certain “slipperiness” to “what is actually means to be a professional curator5”

within the present context where the scale of the curatorial practice within the art world is still

3
Balzer David, Curationism. How curating took over the Art world and everything else, Broché, 2015
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.

a major discussion, but at the same time, curating has slipped outside of the artistic filed and
becomes a sociological phenomenon that has been absorbed into current social structure and
culture. Does a lack of clear definition or rather, the coexistence of multiple possible
definitions, renders the contemporary curator an endangered species undergoing an existential
crisis of sorts and who will live on only as a loosely defined idea – an aura missing its original
source? Or does it, on the other hand, open new possibilities for contemporary curatorial
practice?

Considering the particularities of the curator’s profession, it seems more interesting to focus
on the notion of “contemporary” as the present moment, rather than on the figure of the curator
itself. A product of their own time, influenced and connected to the values of the 21st century
such as technologies and social media, is what determines and shapes the “contemporary
curator” from the curator as a mere museum custodian. Consequently, the present-defining
element is necessary in term of understanding the current working climate of the curator, the
requirements of their practices and how these might change with time.

I would like to briefly recall my experience as visitor of “On Air”, Carte Blanche to Tomás
Saraceno, at Palais de Tokyo in November 2018. The framework of Palais de Tokyo, as one of
the world`s foremost international art institutions, along with the presence of the audience,
generated a particular set of dynamics with complex themes across ecosystem, human and non-
human, at play. I watched the ritual of the audience repeatedly “playing” with Saraceno´s
artworks with their gaze and the extended technological gaze of their cameras and mobile
phones that often serve to capture, reframe and deliver snippets of their lived experience to the
gaze of social media users following from behind the screen elsewhere, simultaneously
disattached and connected. I could not help but consider their physical presence and actions
around the galleries as powerful expressions of contemporary modes of consumption with
curatorial qualities, charged with several potential implications to the exhibition curator´s
practice, including the extent to which the “curatorial impulse” could elevate the audience to
the status of “co-curator”, or in the very least, a collaborator of sorts on the exhibition process.

Following the supposition that the content of art exhibition is a consumable of which cultural
capital in the form of the image is to be extracted, the exhibition space gains place within
current capitalist structures. The exhibition has always been employed as a tool within an
overarching structure and as a flexible model that moves with the time in accordance to new
social patterns. In the case of Palais de Tokyo, Saraceno’s installations are forming a paid

exhibition in an age where artistic activities complete with innumerable other leisure activities
for audiences’ attention and where audience numbers are imperative to the success and survival
of the event. The professional curator is in charge and most present during the process of
selecting artworks and deciding on how these are to be shown in the exhibition space, however
as soon as the art institution opens its doors for public viewing, the curator is largely absent
save for the faint consciousness that the show has been curated by an invisible figure whose
name appears on the wall and in the catalogue.

The content of the exhibition is then open to interpretation, appropriation, documentation and
discussion – all processes that unfold independently of the curator, have become central to how
contemporary audiences experience art and have far reaching effects. In a sense, the curator
gives up their ownership of the exhibition space as thus is no longer dedicated to just showing
art, but directly or indirectly also a commercial, social and political space dedicated to staging
the experience that the audience is looking for. By extension, the curator’s practice, with the
exhibition as its main outcome, is possibly as commercial, social and political as it is an artistic
one, whose conditions are at times three dictated not by the requirements of art but by other
external forces and their mechanisms embodied in the audience. It is therefore crucial to
understand what these external forces are and how they are activated in the gallery.

Returning to the Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno, watching as people walk around the
galleries, I started asking questions related to the nature and value of the audience´s experience:
What has led to the need of documenting lived experience in the form of images and video?
What value is derived from accumulating such material? What happens to that visual material
once it is captured and taken away from its original context? How does such an action manifest
itself when undertaken on a mass scale? What are its effects?

Contemporary society, experience and consumption

Despite contemporary society’s connectedness and collaborative spirit, largely brought about
by the rise of the Internet and people’s activity on social media, on the individual level it is
gripped by a throttling anxiety relating to the need of asserting one’s unique identity. Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev comments incisively about anxiety as being the struggle of ensuring that
we are acknowledged by others as unique individuals and one that capitalism is well aware of
and has employed in ‘courting’ consumers by passing on to them the opportunity to make value
judgments. Christov-Bakargiev moves on to remark that the “obsession with the curator as an

imparter of value6” impacts everyone inside the art world as well as outside of it, thus
prompting “curation’s close alliance with capitalism and its cultures7.”

Due to the unprecedented possibilities that modern technological devices and social media
offer their users in expressing themselves instantly, boundlessly and visually over the Internet,
communication increasingly happens in the form of images and videos. It has never been more
convenient or more tempting to capture, edit, upload and circulate user-generated content about
anything that we come across, that which Peter Osborne in his essay “The Distributed Image8”
refers to as “the ‘new media of digital image production, storage, distribution and recovery or
reactualization.” The shift to digital requires that almost every fraction of materiality has its
own online, possibly better-looking equivalent; so much so that Internet presence has almost
become the way of verifying physical existence and vetting the quality of people, entities,
events, objects and anything imaginable with which we are not immediately familiar.

The notion of digital and its connotations with virtuality and immateriality places a renewed
focus on our own physicality and the significance of the digital image in enabling us to
communicate a unique, or ‘curated’ identity online, satisfying the impulse to cultivate and
organize – to impart value, while surpassing our own materiality with images that will outlast
our physical lifetimes. Boris Groys asserts, “never before has humanity been interested in its
own contemporaneity. […] Every presentation of digital data, every production of a digital
copy-image, is at the same time a creation of our own image, an act of self-visualisation.9”.

Actions of self-visualization happen through personal social media accounts where individuals
upload content, mostly ‘copy-images’ of themselves and images related to own experiences
that in a way are absorbed into a support structure working towards ‘curating’ a self-portrait of
sorts. The scope for sharing visual material afforded by social media platforms points towards
the importance of aesthetic value in all lived experiences since what is visually appealing for
one reason or other, fast becomes more likeable and shareable - a kind of digital eye-candy that
ensures the circulation and as a result, the survival, of the digital self. The accrued capital for
the individual from such activity is often cultural rather than monetary, yet equally, if not, more
important at times, as it enables them to find an own voice, take up an own space, frame
themselves (quite literally) as well as acquire a following within a global Internet community.

6
Balzer David, Curationism. How curating took over the Art world and everything else, Broché, 2015
7
Ibid.
8
Osborne Peter, The Postconceptual Condition: Critical essays, Paperback, 2018
9
Groys Boris, In the Flow, Hardcover, 2016

It is, therefore, not difficult to perceive why individuals increasingly invest themselves and
their resources in self-curation and value production.

Beyond the individual level, however, social media activity has become an economy in its own
right. First coined by Italian sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labour refers to the
value produced from cognitive abilities and commodified by capitalism despite its intangible
output and being hard to quantify. In the digital age, immaterial labour takes various forms
related to the digital knowledge economy, including user-generated social media content. In
their introduction to “Economy. Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century10”, Angela
Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd raise various valid points demonstrating how through user-
generated content, art is commodified by capitalism while the boundaries between
consumption and production in art and social media become blurred: “ […] substantive changes
in production and consumption have taken place. These changes are amply demonstrated when
our fascination with communicating our identities leads to Facebook entering the stock market,
much like an industry that relies on productive labour…11”.

Dimitrakaki and Lloyd, heavily echoing Christov-Bakargiev state that “our fascination with
communicating our identities” induces us to take part in value-production. Further on in the
same book, in his essay "Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour”, John Roberts elaborates
on how the commodity becomes image as users are “enclosed in a continuous waking cycle of
valorisation” which keeps them engaged in content-production.

In Roberts’ view, “immateriality” has already heavily impacted the production and reception
of art over the last twenty years. As a contemporary art audience engaged in value production,
reframing art within images that are meant to ‘curate’ own identities subjects art to increasingly
commercial conditions of production and consumption.

Interestingly and perhaps not coincidentally, the 1990’s marked not only the beginning of the
curationist moment which carries on today, but also a turning point in how companies started
offering memorable and total buying “experiences” as a way of engaging their customers and
offering added value. In their seminal work “The Experience Economy12”, B. Joseph Pine II
and James H. Gilmore explore the phenomenon that is still highly applicable to how companies

10
Dimitrakaki Angela, Lloyd Kirsten, Economy. Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century, Value: Art
Politics Liverpool University Press, 2015
11
Dimitrakaki Angela, Lloyd Kirsten, Economy. Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century, Value: Art
Politics Liverpool University Press, 2015
12
Pine II B. Joseph and Gilmore James H., The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, 1998

sell their goods and services today: “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses
services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates
a memorable event.13”

What is the relationship between this new mode of selling, consuming and exhibition practice?
Particularly striking is the fact that the four components of a successful customer experience
identified by Pine and Gilmore resonate strongly with the kind of experience that contemporary
art events offer their audiences: entertaining, educational, aesthetical and escapist. In
“Civilizing Rituals: Inside public art museums14”, Carol Duncan even employs highly similar
language describing the art museum in a quasi-anticipation of Pine and Gilmore’s work: “I see
the totality of the museum as a stage setting that prompts visitors to enact a performance of
some kind, whether or not actual visitors would describe it as such.”

This not only highly resonates with the performative qualities of the audience’s experience of
Tomás Saraceno´s show, but puts forth the proposition that experiences are now no longer
simply an event that is lived through, but have been redefined by the “experience economy”
into purchasable consumables from which the consumer expects to receive an added value of
sorts. Looking closely into this, it could mean that potentially the whole of lived experience is
subject to becoming a consumable from which some kind of (economic) value can be extracted
and this also holds true for the way in which the art exhibition is currently experienced by an
audience-consumer within a museal structure functioning like a business in several ways;
selling tickets in order to generate revenue, launching marketing strategies and devising ways
of increasing visitor numbers from exhibition to exhibition. Therefore, given such an overlap
between art and economy, is the exhibition space really all that different from the shop floor?
Is the professional curator operating within this structure really that different from the retail
worker and all the other product and service providers that are staging experiences for their
customers?

According to Pine and Gilmore, “Experiences […] have to meet a customer need.15” Does this
mean that an art exhibition should also be designed to address audience needs? If so, what are
these needs in the present day and what kind of value does the audience-consumer expect to

13
Pine II B. Joseph and Gilmore James H., The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, 1998
14
Duncan Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Routledge, 2015
15
Pine II B. Joseph and Gilmore James H., The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, 1998

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receive from visiting an art exhibition? How does the professional curator, as a conceptualiser
of such an experience, respond to such questions?

Following Boris Groys’s words, “the spectator expects a so-called aesthetic experience from
art16” , the kind of experience from which value in the form of the digital image can be
extracted. Therefore, the way in which art and the exhibition are experienced by the
contemporary “technologically armed” audience is important in terms of how these are
documented and how they will live on in the digital realm. This is particularly significant with
regards to the temporary exhibitions with a pre-established start and end date, since after the
physical set-up is dismantled and the exhibition space is freshly painted to make way for the
next show, what remains to prolong its ‘lifespan’ indefinitely is mostly its online presence in
the form of visual content accumulated by the audience.

It is worth considering how crucial or otherwise this stage of the “digital afterlife” is becoming
to the whole exhibition process and the exhibition’s legacy as well as whether modern forms
of documentation have the power to come full circle in bringing about an overhaul to
contemporary exhibition narrative; even prior to the exhibition’s outcome, as practitioners start
anticipating and working with this in mind, both aesthetically – in how artwork is displayed
and how the space is distributed, as well as conceptually – by working with themes and art
forms that address modern modes of consumption characterized by the complex overlap
between art, the economy and the Internet. To this end, the status of the digital image in a
society that has embraced the move to online and the proliferation of the image through the
mechanism of the Internet to the extent of “contemporaneity being staged on the level of the
image17” and the creation of an ‘alter-reality’, is one that is highly telling and deserves thorough
analysis.

Tomás Saraceno`s artwork Algo-r(h)i(y)thms presented at Palais de Tokyo from October 17,
2018 to January 6, 2019, as part of his Carte Blanche exhibition “On Air”, can be considered
as the ideal paragon of “consumable art” and the experience economy proliferating into the
field of art. In this installation, members of the audience were invited to play by gently plucking
or sliding their fingers up and down the strings. In doing so, they become part of a network of
unexpected encounters, jamming and tuning in to the reverberating rhythms that surround
them. Each of the strings in the work resonates at different frequencies. Some of these are

16
Groys Boris, In the Flow, Hardcover, 2016
17
Bishop Claire, Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? Paperback,
2014

11



audible while others are beyond the range of human hearing and can only be felt as vibrations.
Infrasound amplifiers transform the floor into a speaker, and lying in the floor, the visitor´s
body becomes an extension of their ears, a vibrating membrane that shifts attention towards
other modes of perception. Thus, the audience is given a central role in activating the space, to
the point where their own person becomes the art and the boundaries between who is producing
and consuming art become blurred. A situation is created in which taking a cultural-capital
charged image of the art can be considered as a legitimate and essential action in documenting
the performative nature of this exhibition, and therefore, encouraged, rather than a temptation
that is hard to resist.

Tomás Saraceno, Algo-r(h)i(y)thms, 2018, Installation view at “On Air”, carte blanche exhibition to
Tomás Saraceno at Palais de Tokyo, October 17, 2018 - January 6, 2019.
Photo credit: https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/en/event/carte-blanche-tomas-saraceno

On the other hand, the process of having individuals placing themselves in unusual positions,
potentially to have a picture taken, can also stand as a subtle critique of the way in which
contemporary audiences commodify art. Whichever way one looks at this scenario, it remains
the case that the documentation of this exhibition is largely left in the hands of a camera-armed
crowd by a conceptualizer who knows that his audience is busy with immaterial production.

In such a way, the exhibition’s “digital afterlife” is guaranteed as the visual content that is
produced in relation to it is aligned with the aesthetic experience that the audience expects from
art. The exhibition “On Air” has been presented for three months at Palais de Tokyo and a

12



quick Instagram search using the hashtag #tomássaraceno yields around 5 000 images results
80 % of which is Algo-r(h)i(y)thms´s images.

Dena Yago in her article “Content Industrial Complex18” presents the idea of “exhibition as
content farm”, where “successful art is whatever begets the most UGC.” She refers to Anne
Imhof’s Faust installation, presented at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017 on the German
Pavilion, as “art that spams our feeds, as if its ability to demand attention not only within the
white cube but outside it proves its very status as art.19” Yago’s resonating statement certainly
suggests a shift towards artistic content whose “status as art” is no longer determined by
specialist practitioners in the field, but popular online opinion and its number of appearances
and reappearances on users’ screens. Another observation made by Yago is that it is usually
large-scale works with spectacular qualities that become backdrops for like-generating
pictures, further indicating a possible increase in the production of artworks and installations
that function as attractions aimed to increase ticket sales for art institutions.

Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017 at German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2017

Photo credit: http://moussemagazine.it/anne-imhof-faust-german-pavilion-venice-biennale-
2017/

18
Yago Dena, (March 2018), Content Industrial Complex, e-flux Journal nr.89, March 2018
19
Ibid.

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The user-generated image and its proliferation as the greatest curationist event
The obsession with taking pictures did not start with the arrival of camera-equipped mobile
phones. If anything, recent technology has only facilitated, intensified and broadened what is
deemed as photographable. In “Photography: a middle-brow art20”, Pierre Bourdieu approaches
popular photographic practice from a sociological perspective and remarks that it is “subject to
social rules”, “invested with social functions” and “experienced as a need” that “can be satisfied
within the limits of economic means”. Bourdieu here raises an important insight that despite
the impression that owning a camera one is able to photograph what they want, however they
want, that freedom is still regulated by invisible greater social and economic principles:
”Although the field of the photographable may broaden, photographic practice does not
become any more free, since one may only photograph what one must photograph, and since
there are photographs which one ‘must’ takes just as there are sites and monuments which one
‘must’ do.”. “…in its ordinary form, photographic activity is both an index and a means of
social integration.21”.

In light of Bourdieu’s statements, it is interesting to consider the art exhibition as a subject

within the popular and to various extents, social practice that is photography, particularly in
the present age when that image is most likely to circulate and be molded by the technological
means available to users and the complex virtual structure of the Internet. In studying the image
and its capacity to redefine the narrative of its content, there are various factors that need to be
considered, including who is taking the picture, why the picture is being taken, who it is
intended for and its journey through the apparatuses that render it visible and shareable.

Following this process, one can begin to understand more insightfully how the production and
the proliferation of the art exhibition become user-generated image may affect contemporary
curatorial practice. The huge variety and number of individuals and entities present on different
social media channels render this a complicated social experiment on a large scale leading to
several open-ended observations and outcomes, particularly since the critical analysis of user-
generated images of art is a new idea. However, one can argue that it is perhaps this sense of
inconclusiveness that paves the way to further discussion and experimentation with
possibilities.

20
Bourdieu Pierre, Photography: a middle-brow art, Stanford University Press, 1990
21
Ibid.

14



As I mentioned earlier, my observations at On Air led me to follow up on Instagram by

searching for and sorting visual material uploaded by visitors of Palais de Tokyo, using related
hashtags such as #tomássaraceno, but also #palaisdetokyo, #onair, #carteblanche, and other
similar variations. Tomás Saraceno’s Algo-r(h)i(y)thms certainly qualified as a spectacular
large-scale installation and the most popular artwork of the exhibition. Just around 5000
pictures taken between October (the opening month) and January (the closing month) were
sorted into separate folders according to which aspect of the exhibition they featured since the
exhibition made use of several internal gallery spaces on two levels. Within each folder, the
pictures were sorted according to the angle at which the spectator had approached the artwork
with their camera.

Screenshot of posts by Instagram users with hashtag #palaisdetokyo

Instagram was chosen as the primary source from which to gather visual material due to the
fact that it is one of the most populated, actively used and visual-oriented social media
platforms with around a billion users worldwide on which users are easily able to ‘curate’ a

15



visual identity and communicate a visual narrative through their profiles. By uploading pictures
and videos, users portray their own point of view about what they are experiencing. The
possibility of applying colour filters and editing the image in various ways prior to uploading
it online further emphasises the notion of personalisation. The uploaded image itself already
serves to frame a particular state of mind that other users can see and interact with. However,
the use of clickable hashtags opens up the possibility to serve that image to a broader spectrum
or specific segment of individual viewers and invite like-minded online communities to engage
with it, as it allows users to narrow or expand their searches and acts as a means of image
categorisation.

In this way, the image is first given a place among other pictures in the individual user’s image
gallery, thus becoming integrated within the user’s personal visual narrative on their profile,
and subsequently offered up to a wider flow of loosely related images where it is seen by other
users who might relate to that specific image and its user’s profile, potentially choosing to
“follow” that user. As a result, it can be said that the individual image loses its autonomy – it
no longer represents its subject, it is not meant to stand out by itself, but to show something
about the individual that chose it alongside other images serving the same purpose.

In “Ways of Seeing22”, John Berger effectively illustrates how images belonging to the same
board are rendered equal through “belonging to the same language”, in this case, the taste of
the individual and the portrayal of their unique identity. He raises the noteworthy point that,
“logically, these boards should replace museums23”. In a similar manner then, is the individual
user choosing pictures for their Instagram profile, fulfilling the role of curator? The process of
taking, selecting, editing and captioning pictures certainly involves several curatorial traits and
in many ways works towards supporting the “curationist moment”’ described by Christov-
Bakargiev. When considering the image of the art exhibition as a component of the language
that articulates individual identity, can it be said that the contemporary art curator works under
the condition of having to offer up the outcome of their work to a second curatorial gaze that
of the self-curationist user-spectator?

Boris Groys considers nowadays’ art audience to function both as art producer and consumer,
particularly as everyday life has become increasingly designed for consumption on the level of
the image. It is therefore not far-fetched to extend this view to curatorship and believe that the

22
Berger John, Ways of Seeing, Mass Market Paperback, 2008
23
Ibid.

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same audience is likely to want to take part in curatorial production, wanting an input in the
process of becoming selective and distinguished cultural producers.

I would also like to consider the user-generated image as a paradox negotiating opposing ideas.
On one hand, there is the image that serves to communicate an individual’s unique identity,
suggesting a total freedom of expression, theoretically resulting in a unique image. On the other
hand, there are the social rules and social functions governing photographic practice as
suggested by Bourdieu, resulting in the production of images that “must” be taken. The latter
suggests that even in working hard to have unique experiences and communicate own
identities, individuals are responding to an external voice that leads them to having the same
experience, yielding the same or similar visual material already achieved by others.
“Photographic activity is both an index and a means of social integration24”, states Bourdieu.
So when the resulting image is taken with the intention of uploading it to a social platform with
the aim of reaching and being acknowledged by other users. How does this translate to the art
exhibition as the photographic subject?

While scrolling through Instagram search results, one could observe how individual members
of the audience had weaved the exhibition into their personal narratives when focusing on
single images. In “The Postconceptual Condition”, Peter Osborne refers to this as “the
translation of ‘the archive back into individual life stories’”. However, the flow of images as a
whole can also be considered as a collectively curated visual archive, revealing more about
how the audience had consumed the exhibition not just individually but as part of a wider
group. Certain images kept reappearing, with their remarkable resemblance becoming even
more obvious after they had been downloaded and sorted, which factors had led to their
repetition? What rendered them images that must be taken? How can one identify the external
voice that originally set the tone to how the exhibition should be experienced?

Questions of authority and importance for contemporary documentation of art

exhibitions

Individuals and organisations with an established presence in their real world spheres are often
more likely to accumulate a much greater following, have better exposure, generate more
response from users and be considered more credible when sharing material on their social

24
Bourdieu Pierre, Photography: a middle-brow art, Stanford University Press, 1990

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media accounts. It could very much be the case that individual users who are interested in a
particular topic would look for ways to align their views with those of larger and more
recognised authoritative entities in order to increase their own credibility and follower base.

In the case of “On Air”, I thought which might be the most ‘official’ and ‘authoritative’
Instagram accounts that the audience would most likely look at when setting their expectations
ahead of visiting the exhibition and to have a look at what they had to share about the show.
Four main accounts were chosen: @palaisdetokyo – the official account of the contemporary
art center Palais de Tokyo that organises the exhibition, @studiotomassaraceno – the official
account of the artist studio, and @estherschipperberlin as well as
@pinksummercontemporaryart – two of five galleries that represent the artist (the most active
on Instagram).

Instagram screenshot by @palaisdetokyo showing exhibition “On Air”

Photo credit: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp2NAyblIm5/

When comparing posts from these accounts to the user-generated images I was working with,
I noticed that some of the most frequently reproduced pictures among users did indeed greatly
resemble those uploaded by the more authoritative accounts. It is hard to track and verify the

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extent to which the general audience’s online activity is significantly informed and shaped by
such online presences and how individual users’ activity influences other users’ activity in its
turn, but it is highly probable that this “trickle down” effect takes place on social platforms that
thrive on engagement and conversations between users and that contemporary users are
increasingly turning to when searching for information.

The power of the original as a primary source remains highly significant and those individuals
and entities that hold ownership or exercise certain rights over it are likely to borrow from its
aura through their association with the work. In the physical exhibition space, the curator
remains an authoritative figure whose expertise enables them to take ownership of the
exhibition space and make decisions about how the work is shown, how the space will be
transformed for the upcoming show and how the exhibition is to be experienced through the
production of texts and visuals that set the tone to its narrative. For such reasons, the curator
legitimately has authorship of the audience’s experience because they were among the first to
visualise it and charged with its execution. They were the first there. In this sense, the exhibition
space is an authoritarian space where the idea of one or a small number of people “reigns” and
the public is only invited inside as a paying spectator.

Arrangement of user-generated pictures resembling the original post by @palaisdetokyo

(with user names as file names)

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Spectators are entitled to interpret and have an opinion about what they are experiencing, there
is little to no opportunity for them to share it there and then in the space and receive a reaction,
and in most cases, they are kindly requested to leave the space in the same condition as they
found it for subsequent visitors, with little to no opportunity to leave their mark.

However, these conditions can be subverted in the online realm once the individual logs into
their personal social media account and uploads their own image of the exhibition experience
they have just lived through. As producers of that image, they are free to mediate the exhibition
experience on their own terms, assert with their online followers that they were indeed there,
share what they saw, express their judgement and get acknowledged for having been there and
seen the show in a way that is not possible in the physical space. Despite the online presence
of official sources and individuals with real-world expertise and/or ownership of the event who
might have a broad follower base and high influencing power, the virtual space of the Internet
remains a much more democratic and diverse space where alternative voices and views can
take off.

In addition, as art no longer remains the elitist and exclusive domain that it has been historically
but increasingly invites public engagement, the Internet with its connective spirit becomes a
powerful tool for the art consumer who has something to share, particularly since the digital
image has the potential to reach a larger audience than the original event. In an interview25 with
Terri Smith, Hans Ulrich Obrist refers to the 21st century as “the age of the Internet” and
specifies that the big question of our century is how to foster collective action, leading to a
crucial question by Terri Smith, “How does the Internet change curating?”.

The contemporary curator, as a practitioner living and working in the digital age, is increasingly
required to have a professional online presence and their practice “in addition to creating
content and designing exhibits, [has] expanded to the supervision and management of the
stream of information that originates from the on-line communities.26” However, the finite
exhibition space that the curator oversees and the boundless virtual and active space that is the
Internet which is often dominated by popular rather than specialist views, are two highly

25
Smith Terry, Thinking Contemporary Curating, Independent Curators International, 2012
26
Sarzotti Michela, Sharing the Museum: Social Media and Curatorial Practice, Interventions, the Online journal
of Columbia University´s graduate program in Modern art: critical & curatorial studies, Vol.1, Issue 2: Framing
the Internet, 2012.

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dissimilar environments across which the contemporary curator is required to exercise their
practice and renegotiate their central position.

Conclusion

This paper approaches the question of what constitutes the contemporary curator and his
practice by considering the major external forces that are shaping their working conditions and
the curator as an individual who is inevitably influenced by and connected to the social values
of their time. The 21st century is highly defined by the rise of the Internet and the way in which
online connectivity has permeated virtually all spheres of everyday life. The omnipresence of
technological devices in both professional and private environments along with contemporary
society’s constant interaction with its screens has become normalised, but has rapidly brought
about radical shifts in modes of communication, consumption and societal values that should
not go unquestioned.

The contemporary exhibition space is not spared from the “technologically armed gaze” of
modern audiences. While taking out one’s camera or phone to capture and preserve what one
is currently experiencing has almost become second nature among the current generation, it is
important to look at this action more closely and contemplate its implications, particularly
when undertaken on the mass scale and considering that immaterial production has become an
economy in its own right from which real profit can be derived. Contemporary curators
working within the increasingly capitalist structures of art institutions and art events have a
significant role to play, particularly due to their central role as cultural producers and decision-
makers with regards to what is presented in the exhibition space.

Today there is an increasing tendency towards the “exhibition as content farm” where artworks
and installations serve as attractions aimed at leveraging ticket sales and derive their artistic
status based on the proliferation of user generated content on social media platforms. This
points towards a certain complicity in this process on the part of practitioners in the artistic and
cultural fields, while presenting the simultaneous challenge and opportunity to adopt a critical
rather than a complicit stance in exercising their practice.

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Already in 1935, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction27” Walter
Benjamin prolifically illustrated how the technological means of his time had the power to
destroy the aura of the work of art through infinitely reproducing its image. As for our
nowadays’ digital age, the proliferation of the image runs more rampant than ever before,
particularly since its distributive networks are favourably designed for circulation among a
global audience. The digital user-generated image encapsulates current modes of consumption
and self-visualisation where individuals expect to derive aesthetic value from all their lived
experiences, including art, in order to incorporate the images, they take within a personal visual
narrative, that communicates their identity. The work of art and the art exhibition are all the
more finding a place within this sort of image boards where the subject of the image loses its
autonomy.

Moreover, the curatorial traits present in the process of producing, selecting, editing and
uploading images to social media in response to the need of standing out as individuals and
taking part in cultural production, clearly indicate that curatorial principles have proliferated
into populist ideas to the extent that “everyone curates” and rather that the aura of curation, it
is the professional curator that is eliminated from the picture. It is interesting and perhaps not
coincidental that the current mass curatorial impulse that seems to throw the identity of the
professional curator into a state of ambiguity comes at a time where there is an increased focus
on the multi-directional possibilities presented by this profession that have yet to be explored
and employed to their fullest potential.

Having approached the subject of contemporary curating from a sociological point after
spending time observing the audience flowed around the exhibition space, it has led me to
consider curating as a social as much as it is an artistic and cultural practice. Through their
technological devices, it has become possible for the contemporary exhibition audience to
approach and document art on their own terms, rather than using only official material such as
exhibition catalogues. This is significantly due to the fact that the proliferation of user-
generated content and popular opinion on social media are not only increasingly determining
what is “good art”, but have moved much of the conversation and exchange of ideas
surrounding the exhibition online. In this scenario, the contemporary curator is frequently
required to participate in such conversations in order to lead, moderate and add insight to these
streams of information.

27
Benjamin Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Broché, 2010

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Despite the negative connotations attached to immaterial labour due to it being widely
considered as a mechanism of commodification employed by capitalism, the availability of
visual information on such a large scale that is easily accessible on social media such as
Instagram could be an invaluable research tool. The study of images opens up unprecedented
insight into how contemporary art audiences are experiencing the content they are presented
with. Instagram in particular, offers the exiting opportunity to delve into how the artistic
experience not only finds a place within the individual’s personal narrative, but also how it is
received and documented by the audience collectively by conducting simple hashtag searches.
In a time when audience engagement is so highly prioritised, having access to these modes of
documentation creates ample scope for curators to adopt a more pro-active and creative stance,
as cultural producers of our time, in how they conceptualise, author, design and execute in
working towards their outcome.

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