Over a footnote-free 137 pages, he confidently navigates hundreds of years of history and an impressive diversity of cultural phenomena with insight and style. When warning that “excessive fretting over attribution and precedent is paralyzing to dynamic intellectual thought,” Balzer turns out to be as good as his word. It’s a “not-so-covert method,” Balzer says, “to instate, canonize, and brand.” In particular, he observes a pattern in art-critical writing of demystifying some element of art or society only to re-mystify it again with jargon and the theorist’s own aura of authority. His book, he explains, is intended for a general audience and so, unlike much art writing, it “does not employ what has become known as critical theory.” In fact, Balzer goes so far as to argue that the “mismanagement of theory” is typical of the curationist moment. The nature of the series also accords with the author’s choice of tone.

That this series describes itself as “curated” attests to the timeliness of Balzer’s missive. Once curating became more visible, however, it didn’t take long for those same audiences and consumers to seek their own spectators by cultivating and organizing things themselves.Ĭurationism is among the first salvos in a new series from Coach House Books called “Exploded Views,” billed as publications “longer than a typical magazine article but shorter than a full-length book” by notable journalists and critics. As power-curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev told him in 2012, “The curator is the most emblematic worker of the cognitive age.” Institutions and businesses have increasingly relied on credentialed experts to do work that amounts to selecting, organizing, and managing things in a way that is both a form of expression and assurance of value, with the aim of forging a greater connection with audiences and consumers.

Balzer argues that, since the mid-1990s, we’ve been living in the curationist moment.

David balzer curationism