In Talking Contemporary Curating, Terry Smith is in conversation with 12 curators, art historians and theorists deeply immersed in reflecting upon the demands of their respective practices; the contexts of exhibition making; and the platforms through which art may be made public, including Zdenka Badovinac, Claire Bishop, Zoe Butt, Germano Celant, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, Mami Kataoka, Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Mari Carmen Ramírez.

"'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.

Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.

Explores how the ancient world shaped innovative American sculptor Isamu Noguchi's inspirational vision for the future.

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

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.

'A terrific and important book . . . it's a great, fresh take on how the 21st century is transforming the way we select everything from food to music' David Bodanis, author of E=MC2 In the past two years humanity has produced more data than the rest of human history combined. We carry a library of data in our pockets, accessible at any second. We have more information and more goods at our disposal than we know what to do with. There is no longer any competitive advantage in creating more information. Today, value lies in curation: selecting, finding and cutting down to show what really matters. Curation reveals how a little-used word from the world of museums became a crucial and at times controversial strategy for the twenty-first century. Today's most successful companies - Apple, Netflix, Amazon - have used curation to power their growth, by offering customers more tailored and appropriate choices. Curation answers the question of how we can live and prosper in an age of information overload. In the context of excess, it is not only a sound business strategy, but a way to make sense of the world.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

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.