This bestseller is now available in its 6th reprinted edition!This publication, now in its 6th reprinted edition, is dedicated to pioneering curators and presents a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist: Anne d'Harnoncourt, Werner Hofman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén, and Harald Szeemann are gathered together in this volume.The contributions map the development of the curatorial field, from early independent curating in the 1960s and 1970s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and in the USA at this time, through Documenta and the development of biennales.This book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writings.

Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains.

Drawing on his own experiences and inspirations - from staging his first exhibition in his tiny Zurich kitchen in 1986 to encounters and conversations with artists, exhibition makers and thinkers alive and dead - Hans Ulrich Obrist's Ways of Curating looks to inspire all those engaged in the creation of culture. Moving from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter and Gilbert and George) to the creation of the first public museums in the 18th century, recounting the practice of inspirational figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps, skipping between exhibitions (his own and others), continents and centuries, Ways of Curating argues that curation is far from a static practice. Driven by curiosity, at its best it allows us to create the future.

Reconsiders complex questions about how we imagine ourselves and our political communities

Examines how scientific objects in museums and other collections act as inspiration to contemporary art practice, its histories, curating and aesthetics. Cross-disciplinary essays from leading arts professionals explore how scientific encounters in museums provoke new modes of creative thinking about art, science and curating. 84 col. illus.

"'Thinking contemporary curating' is the first publication to comprehensively explore what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought. In five essays, art historian, critic, and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current discourse; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in present, recent, and post art; describes the enormous growth world-wide of exhibitionary infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the phenomenon of artist-curators and curator-artists; and assesses a number of key tendencies in curating - such as the reimagined museum, the expanded exhibition, historicization and recuration, infrastructural activism, and engaged spectatorship - as responses to contemporary conditions." -- book cover.

Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?