Month: February 2025

💡 This week’s key words: Co-creation, decentralization, curatorial responsibility

🌱 Curatorial team Progress: lucky number 11:11

This week, our curatorial group finally has an official name—11:11 ✨! The inspiration for this name came from one of my personal quirks—I always see 11:11 as a lucky moment. When I realized that our group had exactly 11 members, the name just felt right!

Why 11:11?

In the occult, 11:11 is known as an angelic number, symbolizing good luck, inspiration, and guidance.

The name reflects our vision for curating—we want to create an open, positive, and collaborative atmosphere, where everyone’s ideas can shine and contribute to something greater.

Curating is not just about exhibitions, it is about co-creation between people, and our group itself is an experimental space for collective growth.

My friend Yiran Gu and I both felt it was a great idea, so we brought it up to the group! 🎉

In addition, I helped further refine the group’s Mission Statement, which I proposed:
“Curating for the Future”
Curation is responsibility. From material selection to energy consumption, we integrate Sustainability into our curatorial practices, ensuring that our exhibitions are not only conceptually forward-looking, but also operationally consistent with environmental justice principles.

🚀 Personal curatorial project progress:

In terms of personal curatorial projects, I continue the vision of last week and continue to promote the research of Decentralized Curation. The focus of this week is to make my curatorial ideas more specific, gradually from concept to practice! 💡

🔍 What’s Next?

1️⃣ Deepen research on curatorial models based on blockchain

This week’s reading of Rugg & Sedgwick’s (2007) Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, which explores how curatorial power structures affect audience experience, got me thinking further:

Does decentralized curation really empower the audience, or is it just a “democratizing” strategy for curators?

At the same time, I’m looking at the case of the Zien Foundation, which uses the NFT to let the audience vote directly on the content of the exhibition, rather than the curators alone. This model is enlightening, but it also makes me wonder if “co-curating” is really fair. Or will it be dominated by economic capital?

2️⃣ Outline the exhibition layout & interactive tools

This week, I started thinking about how to make the audience really become part of the exhibition.

How can technology improve interaction? I studied Refik Anadol’s AI-generated curatorial experiment and wondered if AI could be a “digital curator” to help visitors generate a personalized exhibition experience.

How does NFT fit into the exhibition? I hope that every decision of the exhibition can be recorded on the blockchain, forming a “Living Archive”, so that curation is no longer static, but a process of continuous evolution.

🖼 Exhibition visit: Glasgow Kendall Koppe Gallery

This week I went to Glasgow to see The sun and the sun’s reflection at Kendall Koppe Gallery.

Rather than the exhibition itself, I am more interested in how it presents time, memory and longing. The exhibition raises an intriguing question:

Is memory a comfort or a constraint?

Is our obsession with the past an attempt to find ourselves, or an escape from reality?

The exhibition made me think about the other side of Archival Curation – curation is often the reproduction of history and memory, but if we have been immersed in memories, will we miss new possibilities? It also made me reflect:

Can my concept of “fluid curation” make the exhibition free from the “burden of the past” and become a space that is always evolving? 🤯

📌 Key Focus for Next Week

1.Continue to deepen the research on decentralized curation, especially the interactive model co-created by NFT and the audience.

2.Design interactive aspects of the exhibition, such as allowing the audience to vote on the content of the exhibition.

3.Explore the role of AI in curating and test the curatorial relationship between curator, audience and AI.

Bibliography

Rosen, Aaron. 2021. “The Impact of NFTs on the Art Market: A Decentralized Approach.” Art Market Journal 15 (2): 45–58.
Smith, John, and Emily Johnson. 2022. “Decentralized Curation: How Blockchain is Transforming Art Exhibitions.” Journal of Digital Art Economies 4 (1): 29–52.
Thompson, Sarah. 2023. “NFTs and the Democratization of Art Ownership.” Cultural Policy Review 12 (3): 112–117.
Williams, Mark, and Laura Stevens. 2024. “Challenges and Opportunities in Decentralized Art Curation.” On Curating 56: 78–95.
Brown, David. 2025. “Top Auction Houses Courted the Crypto Crew — Is It Enough to Save Them?” Financial Times, January 22, 2025.

Feb 9, 2025

W3-Rethinking My Curatorial Project: From Symbolic Power to Decentralized Ecologies

By Hanyun Xue

On 3 February 2025

In ✨ Individual Curatorial Project: Fluid Curating, 📚 Curatorial Theory & Literature Reflection

🎨 Introduction: A Shift in Perspective

Over the past week, my curatorial approach has gone through a major transformation. Initially, my project was an extension of last semester’s research, focusing on value construction and symbolic power in the art market 🎭, particularly how auctions shape the perception of cultural value. This was a familiar territory for me, something I had explored during my time at Sotheby’s.

But after diving into this week’s readings 📚—especially on archival studies, decentralization, and participatory curation—I started to realize: my curatorial approach could be bolder, more open, and more experimental.

I found myself increasingly drawn to decentralized curation and the NFT market 🔗💡—especially how they challenge the traditional role of curators and redefine audience participation. This realization pushed me out of my comfort zone , but it also led me to a more dynamic, experimental direction that better connects with my background in the art market. So, I decided to shift my curatorial framework and develop “Fluid Curating: Experimenting with Decentralized Art Ecologies and Archiving” .

💡 What Changed My Thinking?

Throughout my readings, a few key texts and ideas significantly influenced my thought process:

1️⃣ Curation is a Dynamic Process, Not a Static Product

Reading The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating by Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) really struck a chord with me. I was particularly drawn to his idea that curating is not just about putting works of art together, but a constantly changing, continuous process of generation. This got me thinking, why can’t the exhibition be more “fluid”? Could it be a space shaped by multiple forces, rather than a framework decided unilaterally by the curators? 🤔

2️⃣ Curation as a “Living Archive” Instead of a Static Record

In Living Archives (Färber, 2007), I saw a new way of curating – that archives could not only be static records but also evolving active ecology. It dawned on me that curation could actually become an open “archival system” in which audiences, artists, and even AI could contribute to its evolution.🏛️➡️💻

3️⃣ NFTs and the Decentralization of Curatorial Power

I used to think of NFTs mainly as digital collectibles, but after reading Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Rugg & Sedgwick, 2007), I began to think: Can NFT be a curatorial tool? If the way artworks are displayed can be recorded via blockchain, then the exhibition itself becomes a transparent, traceable process, giving the audience greater decision-making power.🤯

4️⃣ The Potential of AI in Curating

Refik Anadol’s work and Algorithmic Curation (Golding, 2011) made me rethink AI’s role in exhibitions. AI can analyze market trends, generate curatorial texts, recommend artworks, and even predict future artistic movements 🔮. What does that mean for curators? Could AI become a co-curator rather than just a tool?

“Fluid Curation” : My new curatorial concept

“Curating on the Move: Experiments and Archives in Decentralized Art Ecology” is an experiment in future curatorial approaches. This project combines the NFT art market, AI curatorial models and audience co-curation to create an exhibition model that is not restricted by traditional institutions. Its key features include:

🔹 Living archival curation

Every curatorial decision will be recorded on the blockchain, resulting in an open and transparent curatorial history.

The exhibition will not be fixed, but will evolve with the contributions of the artist and the audience.

🔹 Audience as co-curators

Viewers can vote on which works are shown or removed.

Interactive installations allow visitors to generate curatorial texts either on-site or online.

🔹 AI combined with NFT market

AI analyzes NFT market trends and predicts future art genres.

Exhibition works circulate directly on the NFT market, making the exhibition not only a display space, but also a trading space.

🔹 Experimental market curation

Viewers and collectors can trade art directly through smart contracts.

Set up a real-time bidding system to test how the market influences curatorial decisions.

🚀 Next Steps: Making This Vision a Reality

🔍 What’s next?

1️⃣ Deepening my research on blockchain-based curatorial models to refine the decentralization aspects.

2️⃣ Sketching out exhibition layouts and interactive tools to create an immersive experience.(leveraging technology partnerships for implementation 🤝💡)

3️⃣ Sharing my ideas in group discussions to explore potential challenges and refine my approach.

✨ Final Thoughts:

The process of writing this blog has made me more clear about my curatorial direction. I hope my project is an exploration of future curatorial possibilities. Through NFT, AI and audience co-curation, I wanted to see: How can curators work in a more decentralized curatorial model? How does the dynamic nature of the art market fit into the exhibition?

📌 What are your thoughts on decentralized curation? Feel free to discuss in the comments! 💬

📖 References

Brown, Stephen, and A. Patterson. 2007. Imagining Marketing Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde. Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury.

Färber, Alexa. 2007. “Exhibiting ‘Science’ in the Public Realm.” In Exhibition Experiments, edited by Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald, 211–232. Blackwell Publishing.

Golding, Johnny. 2011. “Fractal Philosophy (And the Small Matter of Learning How to Listen): Attunement as the Task of Art.” In Deleuze and Contemporary Art, edited by Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn, 37-72. Edinburgh University Press.

Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2013. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Bloomsbury Academic.

Rugg, Judith, and Michele Sedgwick. 2007. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Intellect.

Feb 3, 2025