https://artouch.com/artouch-column/content-13249.html

“Curating is simple. What’s difficult is deciding where to curate an exhibition.”

This seemingly careless statement already opens up several fundamental questions. First, is the production of an exhibition equivalent to what we currently understand as curating? Does the mere combination of a space, artists, and a “curatorial statement” suffice to constitute “curating”? Second, does the site in which an exhibition takes place carry symbolic and distributive power in terms of resources and authority? Does the political–economic disparity between exhibiting in a private apartment and exhibiting in a highly visible art institution shape how curating itself is perceived?

The issues raised by the curatorial open-call controversy at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) extend across multiple layers. For both the curatorial team at the Jut Art Museum and the applicant teams involved in this open call, it was indeed difficult to accept either of the two official statements issued by the opposing parties. As a benchmark institution within Taiwan’s art world, TFAM’s actions—however small—inevitably influence the unwritten norms that quietly structure the art industry.

The production of an institutional exhibition is a collective outcome of the institution’s members. Organizational divisions of labor clearly define internal roles, yet constraints governing external collaborators and partner organizations rely largely on contractual agreements—loan contracts, one-off exhibition contracts, collaboration or sponsorship agreements—or, at times, on verbal trust. The controversy at hand does not merely concern professional ethics or moral judgment as derived from the career trajectories of selected candidates—nor only the question of how individual choices are regulated by social systems and community norms to ensure fair play. It is not limited to how decision-making standards are applied when preliminary and final review criteria contradict one another, nor to the long-standing calls for transparency in application and jury systems. All of these issues stem from an unwritten, taken-for-granted understanding of what curating is.

In some ways, this resembles the problem of food labeling. Within the process of production, we might divide the term “curating” into “actual production” and “nominal attribution.”
“Actual production” encompasses the labor of everyone involved in an exhibition—from research, writing, administration, installation, and public relations to education and outreach. These dimensions all bear the traces of labor by those who are not the nominal holders of curatorial credit. Exhibition team lists function as sites where these forms of production are named, yet their legitimacy is distributed by the “nominal holder.”
The “nominal holder” may be an art institution or an independent curator, each operating within different organizational structures or project-based collaborations to allocate curatorial authority for a given exhibition. Any action that oversteps this established reality risks crossing ethical boundaries related to curating and the division of labor.

The so-called “creative question” of what curating actually is largely disappeared after Marcel Duchamp exhibited Fountain, along with the proposition that anyone could be an artist. Fountain opened up an infinite horizon of artistic freedom, yet it also left behind unresolved consequences. Even within professional art communities, this question continues to provoke heated debate. We must ask: has the problem truly disappeared, or does it remain suspended in a time and space we never personally experienced?

Idealized slogans such as “the possibilities of art” often distort concepts drawn from Pop Art and appropriation, transplanting them across incompatible historical contexts to justify an “anything goes” mentality. In defining curatorial legitimacy, attention frequently fixates on fragments of production (writing, administration, execution, promotion) or on forms of recognition within the art community (exhibition history, professional experience, social networks). Such conditional definitions inevitably narrow the scope of curating, while overlooking its foundational dimension: curating as a form of creation.

A familiar joke captures this distortion well: a curator needs only to produce a piece of “composition writing” and find artists willing to be included in that composition, and voilà—curating is done. For artists, participation in exhibitions is often motivated less by an understanding of what curating actually entails than by the resources and influence held by the curator or institution itself.

Defining curating has never been something that one individual can decide. Individual opinions, when unable to be integrated into shared understanding, remain nothing more than a cacophony of voices—this article included. That said, the anxiety surrounding “curatorial studies” in Taiwan should not be placed entirely on art academies or public institutions, even though these entities occupy more publicly legitimate positions within social structures.

In practice, most curators who are active and well known within the art community are employed by state institutions, with a smaller number working in private institutions or alternative spaces. Does the institutionalization of curators also shape how curating is understood? Can curators, as individuals, ever form something like an annual assembly to build collective consensus?

“Anyone in a museum who handles exhibitions counts as a curator—because in practice, that’s what they are doing.”

This comment emerged casually in a conversation with a friend who works in a museum. I would like to use it to distinguish between the individual dimension of curating and organizational structure.

The first clarification needed is this: a curator entering an institution, and a person within an institution whose primary responsibility is curating, are not defined in the same way organizationally. The former describes an identity prior to entering the institution; the latter describes an identity assigned after entry. These are not equivalent.

This distinction parallels the earlier division between “actual production” and “nominal attribution.” Individual understanding concerns how one defines what curating is; social understanding concerns how a community consolidates consensus around that definition. If this distinction is blurred, then the claim that “everyone is a curator” becomes perfectly valid. Taken to its extreme, even the individual perspectives involved in the TFAM controversy—lacking consensus around established facts—could be considered “not wrong,” could they not?

If members of a benchmark institution are themselves unable, in moments of crisis, to clearly distinguish between these concepts, it is hardly surprising that those who identify as non-mainstream communities—institutions or individuals lacking discursive power—freely coin new uses of the term “curating.” If TFAM’s handling of the controversy is reduced to a mere procedural oversight, missing the opportunity to examine conflicting decision standards between preliminary and final reviews, and missing the chance to clarify what curatorial work actually entails, that would be deeply regrettable.

In contrast to the independent curator, the institutional curator requires a different evaluative framework. A formally appointed institutional curator (sometimes titled artistic director) is not the same as a person with curatorial experience who enters an institution. Even if both are engaged in “exhibition-making,” and even if the latter retains a curatorial identity at the individual level, institutional curators should be evaluated based on institutional outcomes, not on individual exhibitions alone.

This requires breaking away from the assumption that curatorial production equals exhibition output. Instead, we must examine curating as a form of cultural production within the institution itself. The value of an institutional curator should be assessed in terms of their impact on the institution:
Has the presence of an institutional curator increased public expectations of a museum?
Has a gallery with an institutional curator altered its family-based production model?
Has an alternative space with an institutional curator exceeded the constraints of its legal status?

Evaluating institutional curating is inseparable from evaluating institutional growth. It involves cultural reproduction through institutional practice—whether that reproduction takes the form of continuity or internal transformation. Measuring curatorial value by counting how many exhibitions someone is nominally credited with inside an institution is ultimately meaningless.

From the perspective of formal organizational structures, institutions with designated curatorial positions are exceedingly rare. Curatorial competence is often treated as a baseline skill, while influence on institutional culture becomes the true criterion for evaluation—alongside decision-making authority. Yet the core issue here is not curating itself. The real issue is that establishing curatorial positions within institutions is fundamentally a matter of organizational management and institutional philosophy.

In public museums, this role may resemble that of a director; in private institutions, it may resemble that of an executive director. Institutional curators do not inherently skew the curatorial ecosystem. What skews it is the institutionalization of curators—that is, whether curators who enter institutions due to livelihood pressures can balance individual agency with organizational division of labor, while sustaining the critical capacity unique to curatorial practice, regardless of whether institutionalization functions as resistance or compromise.

Mechanisms—positions, workflows, supervisors, colleagues, governmental systems, private enterprises—inevitably erode individual autonomy. Yet the ideal of institutionalization lies in how individuals can leverage institutional resources to alter modes of production and gradually recalibrate their environments.

In the wake of the TFAM curatorial open-call controversy, I remain cautiously optimistic about the practical advancement of curating in Taiwan. It need not become another moral trial following plagiarism scandals. Instead, it can function as a case through which curating is more professionally defined. Whether crisis becomes opportunity ultimately depends on how we choose to confront and reflect upon it.