a beautiful, useful, and timely book' - Scrivener Creative Review Best Art Books of the Year - Sky Goodden, National Post 'Game-changing' - moMus 'A fast but deep account of the rise of the curator through the art world into popular culture' - The Globe and Mail 'A polemical account of what curators do and why not everyone is one' - Monocle Magazine 'Curationism is increasingly persuasive as it nears the present. He is currently Associate Editor at Canadian Art magazine. He has contributed to The Believer, Modern Painters,, The Globe and Mail and others, and is the author of Contrivances, a short-fiction collection.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.ĭavid Balzer is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and teacher. Balzer was born in Winnipeg and currently resides in Toronto, where he makes a living as a critic, editor and teacher. A good read, if you don’t mind reading things that you don’t want to know.’ Dave Hickeyĭavid Balzer has contributed to publications including the Believer, Modern Painters,, and The Globe and Mail, and is the author of Contrivances, a short-fiction collection. Balzer traces the history and current hegemony of curationism, a practice of jumped-up interior decorators who double as priests explaining the gospel to the unlettered masses.

It is a book you should read and one that you can.

Everyone, it seems, is a curator.īut 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, revelatory and original study, David Balzer travels through art history and around the globe to explore the cult of curation, from superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s war with sleep to Subway’s sandwich artists.’ Recalling such landmark works of cultural criticism as Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Curationism will change the way you look at art and maybe even the way you see yourself.

Curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and the business world is adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows and biennials in a way that can eclipse and assimilate the contributions of individual artists. Now that we curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?Ĭurate’ is now a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese.

Curationism by david balzer