Week 3 Thinking Through Curatorial Power and Ethics
🫧Thinking Through Lecture and Workshop
This week’s lecture and workshop really helped me understand curatorial structure and ethics more clearly. When curating, we often start with basic questions: what, why, when, how… But once we look a bit deeper, there are also very practical concerns, like space, budget, and especially influence. Influence, for me, always feels like the hardest part to plan and control, because it involves how the public receives the work, what messages they take away, and what power the curator holds in shaping that experience.
I now understand how strong curatorial influence on the public can be, and how much power curators hold. As Maura Reilly argues, curatorial decisions are never neutral; “the decision to participate in such initiatives is, in essence, a political act” (Reilly, 2018, p. 215). Also, Martinon further expands this notion of curatorial power beyond exhibition-making, defining curating as an act of selecting and critically evaluating culture itself (Martinon, 2020, p. ix). Through deciding what content audiences encounter, how it is presented, and which artists are made visible, curators shape public understanding in ways far greater than I had previously realised.
This raises an important question for me: what kind of content is appropriate for public display? It becomes essential for curators to establish our own ethical standards. Through critical reading, dialogue with peers and mentors, and ongoing self-reflection, we can build the rule and differ the rightness and wrongness.
Therefore, curatorial practices should actively challenge sexism, racism and other forms of exclusion. Curation now should not adhere to the existing white male-dominated frameworks, but rather follow our own new principles. Precisely because curators wield such significant power, ethics become paramount. When one determines what others see and what messages they receive, the ability to distinguish rightness from wrongness becomes paramount.
If an exhibition targets children, it inevitably plays a role in shaping their understanding of the world. For Martinon, ethical responsibility emerges precisely at the moment of judgement. He argues that ethics is already a given and only requires an ability to judge (Martinon, 2020, p. xi). I believe from this perspective, curators cannot claim neutrality. If an exhibition fails to fully embrace diverse artists, or continues to reproduce racism and sexism, it risks further tilting the balance of representation and perpetuating global injustice.
Reference
Reilly, Maura. Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.
Martinon, Jean-Paul. “Introduction.” In Curating as Ethics, ix–xii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
