Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception undertakes a unique critical survey and analysis of prevailing group exhibition-making practices in Europe, the UK and North America. Drawing on curatorial literature and two in-depth case studies of group exhibitions, Bertrand advocates for a mode of curatorial practice that secures the content of artworks, in contrast to prevailing open-ended, indeterminate approaches. Proposing a third exhibition type beyond the current binary exhibition ontology that opposes art historical narratives to curatorial installations or Gesamtkunstwerk, the book directly tackles the enduring critique of curating as a mediating activity that produces sameness in group-exhibition contexts by establishing artistic equivalences. The book relies on the principles of analytical philosophy to assess how different exhibition-making approaches fix reference and determine artistic reception, reintroducing a standard to evaluate exhibitions beyond personal taste and thematic coherence. Bertrand ultimately proposes an alternative conception of practice that affirms the renewed relevance of the institutional group show in the present context. Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception will be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in museum and curatorial studies, visual cultures, art theory and art history programmes. Art theorists and critics, as well as curators of contemporary art with a research-based practice, should also find much to interest them within the pages of the book.

Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum investigates the art museum as a space where the contemporary is staged – in exhibitions, collecting practices, communication, and policies. Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum traces the art museum back to the postwar era. Including contributions by established and emerging art historians, academics and curators, the book proposes that the art museum is engaged in the contemporary in a double sense: it (re)presents contemporary art, while the contemporary condition itself also has a significant impact on art and the museum that houses it. Presenting a diverse range of international cases of exhibitions and curatorial practices, which hail primarily from Europe and Scandinavia, the essays examine the politics of staging “national”, “international”, and “global” framings of modernism, as well as the new public spaces shaped in digital practices and changing political frameworks. The book investigates both the seminal and the unknown exhibitions and institutions that created contemporary art as we know it today. Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum provides a historical perspective on the museum of contemporary art. It constitutes a step towards differencing the canon of modernist and contemporary art and a more complex understanding of the politics of curating the contemporary in the art museum, why it will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, curating, exhibitions, and art history.

This book presents over 20 authors’ reflections on ‘curating care’ – and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life and for more ‘caring curating’ that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving. Social and ecological struggles for a different planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life are reflected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and non-human interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in different global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care. Practising curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today’s general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency differently.

From aesthetic promenades in noble palaces to the performativity of religious apparatus, this edited volume reconsiders some of the events, habits and spaces that contributed to defining exhibition practices and shaping the imagery of the exhibition space in the early modern period. The contributors encourage connections between art history, exhibition studies, and architectural history, and explore micro-histories and long-term changes in order to open new perspectives for studying these pioneering exhibition-making practices. Aiming to understand what spaces have done and still do to art, the book explores an underdeveloped area in the field that has yet to trace its interdisciplinary nature and understand its place in the history of art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, exhibition history, and architectural history.

Scenography has been acting as a transformative force to reform the traditionalexhibitionary complex. This has led to an unprecedented intersection wherescenography meets contemporary curating, which further informs a radical ideologicalshift in the frontier of the exhibition scene. This book aims to exploit a new land ofdiscussion to look into this intersection between scenographic practice andcontemporary curating, its mergence and the subsequent revolution it has caused. Byseeing museums and exhibition spaces as metaphorical stages, it fundamentallyreconfigures the infrastructure of curating practices, in terms of a shift in authorship,architectural embodiment of ideas, field of experience, layered narrative, dramaturgy andthe hybrid expressions of new media. Three case studies will demonstrate scenography’swide-ranged methodologies in dealing with contemporary issues. Cases include: BMWMuseum (Reopened in 2008), Cultures of the World (Opened in 2010) and Leonardo’sLast Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway (2008, 2010). The discussion cuts throughmajor discourses, both responding to the rise of the experience economy and theexpanding notion of curating, in parallel.

In this highly original study, Vanessa Russ examines the gradual invention of Aboriginal art within the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This process occurred as the social histories of Australia expanded and recognised Aboriginal people, through wars and political shifts, and as international organisations began placing pressure on nation states to expand, diversify, and respect multicultural perspectives. This book explores a state art institution as a case study to consider these complex narratives through a single history of Aboriginal art from early colonisation until today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and Indigenous studies.

This book examines the history of American exhibitions of Russian art in the twentieth century in the context of the Cold War. Because this history reflects changes in museological theory and the role of governments in facilitating or preventing intercultural cooperation, it uncovers a story that is far more complex than a chronological listing of exhibition names and art works. Roann Barris considers questions of stylistic appropriations and influences and the role of museum exhibitions in promoting international and artistic exchanges. Barris reveals that Soviet and American exchanges in the world of art were extensive and persistent despite political disagreements before, during, and after the Cold War. It also reveals that these early exhibitions communicated contradictory and historically invalid pictures of the Russian or Soviet avant-garde. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and Russian studies.

Enriching the existing scholarship on this important exhibition, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (1950–53), this book shows the dynamic role art, specifically sculpture, played in constructing both Italian and American culture after World War II (WWII). Moving beyond previous studies, this book looks to the archival sources and beyond the history of design for a greater understanding of the stakes of the show. First, the book considers art’s role in this exhibition’s import—prominent mid-century sculptors like Giacomo Manzù, Fausto Melotti, and Lucio Fontana were included. Second, it foregrounds the particular role sculpture was able to play in transcending the boundaries of fine art and craft to showcase innovative formalist aesthetics of modernism without falling in the critiques of modernism playing out on the international stage in terms of state funding for art. Third, the book engages with the larger socio-political use of art as a cultural soft power both within the American and Italian contexts. Fourth, it highlights the important role race and culture of Italians and Italian-Americans played in the installation and success of this exhibition. Lastly, therefore, this study connects an investigation of modernist sculpture, modern design, post-war exhibitions, sociology, and transatlantic politics and economics to highlight the important role sculpture played in post-war Italian and American cultural production. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, museum studies, Italian studies, and American studies.

Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions spans exhibition histories as anti-apartheid activism within South African community arts; collectivities and trade unions in Argentina; Civil Rights movements and Black communities in Baltimore; institutional self-critique within the neoliberal museum; reframing feminisms in USA; and revisiting Cold War Modernisms in Eastern Europe among other themes. An interdisciplinary project with a global reach, this edited volume considers the theme of exhibitions as political resistance as well as cultural critique from global perspectives including South Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, USA and West Europe. The book includes contributions by ten authors from the fields of art history, social sciences, anthropology, museum studies, provenance research, curating and exhibition histories. The edited volume finally examines exhibition reconstructions both as a symptom of advanced capitalism, geopolitical dynamics and social uprisings, and as a critique of imperial and capitalist violence. Art historical areas covered in the book include conceptualism, minimalism, modern painting, global modernisms, archives and community arts. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of audiences including art historians, curators, gallery studies and museum professionals, and also to scholars and students from the fields of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and history. It would also appeal to a general public with an interest in modern and contemporary art exhibitions.

This volume explores how Italian institutions, dealers, critics, and artists constructed a modern national identity for Italy by exporting – literally and figuratively – contemporary art to the United States in key moments between 1929 and 1969. From artist Fortunato Depero opening his Futurist House in New York City to critic Germano Celant launching Arte Povera in the United States, Raffaele Bedarida examines the thick web of individuals and cultural environments beyond the two more canonical movements that shaped this project. By interrogating standard narratives of Italian Fascist propaganda on the one hand and American Cold War imperialism on the other, this book establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. The central thesis is that, beyond the immediate aims of political propaganda and conquering a new market for Italian art, these art exhibitions, publications, and the critical discourse aimed at American audiences all reflected back on their makers: they forced and helped Italians define their own modernity in relation to the world’s new dominant cultural and economic power. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, social history, exhibition history, and Italian studies.