On Curating the Art of the Learning-Disabled and Neurodiverse: A Manifesto

While works by these artists are slowly entering the mainstream, greater efforts must be made to create inclusivity around the critical and curatorial discourse that enlivens and secures the place of this art now and for posterity.

Andrew Hunt • 9/1/25

• Abstract

  Roulette is our section for essays, portfolios, videos, conversations, and more that range across a broader purview of culture and politics, not within our current thematic sections. It is, in a sense, a chance encounter with a subject of interest within the extended realm of visual culture.

  In this essay, Andrew Hunt discusses curatorial strategies for the display and collecting of learning-disabled and neurodiverse art in the context of its recent critical reception. The text makes reference to such artists as Nnena Kalu, William Scott, and Marlon Mullen. It addresses the activities of grassroots organizations such as Creative Growth, NIAD, and Creativity Explored in California’s Bay Area; nonprofits such as White Columns, New York, and Studio Voltaire, London; and museums such as Tate, SFMOMA, and MoMA. And it asks: How can a neuro-normative theoretical apparatus comprehend and process learning-disabled and neurodiverse art, which is typically produced outside of foundational art-historical narratives? As well, the essay raises the question: How might we develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding alongside a range of qualitative judgments that intensify and expand ethical forms of curatorial practice? The ambition of the text’s polemics is to devise a long-term strategy for museums to collect the work of these artists, eventually without a nominative distinction from the work of other artists.

Earlier this year, I helped organize a one-day international conference called “Ancestral Avant-Gardes” in Manchester, UK, by the New York-based British art historian and critic Claire Bishop. The proposal was that a new focus on “ancestralism” among visual artists might hark back to traditional, premodern, or Indigenous forms of collective knowledge, which often take the form of ceremonies, rituals, and invocations that focus on the global climate crisis, white supremacy’s systematic oppression of Black and Indigenous life, and the failures of Western rationalism. The event was an open-minded, experimental, performative, art-school affair. This was important, because through its irrepressible presentations, it threw up issues for ideas of identity and class, but also for qualitative judgments of taste connected to authenticity and historical correctness.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s fall 2021–fall 2022 collection gallery exhibition at MoMA, Luz y fuerza (which translates from the Spanish as “Hope and strength”) was given by Bishop as an example of this. Using shrines or altars, the artist transformed the gallery into a healing space that animated Mesoamerican myths, Salvadoran traditions, and Maravilla’s experience as a refugee fleeing civil war. Bishop’s interest was in the artist’s ability to create a feeling of well-being and simultaneously rouse suspicions of fakery. One of Maravilla’s props, for instance, was a vibrating triangular device that he held above his participants’ heads to offer them a form of psychic balance. He later admitted to Bishop that, rather than being an ancient therapeutic device, it was a mass-produced object purchased on eBay. Her interest in the tension between the subsequent disregard that many curator peers had voiced for Maravilla, and the fact that for Bishop the performance had worked, was the interesting issue—together, of course, with the fact that most curators desperately wanted to believe that Maravilla was for real. One question seemed to be: Might the artist be a trickster, poking fun at a mainly white normative liberal establishment’s desire for shamanic authenticity?

Curating Without Distinctions

The question of authenticity that Maravilla’s work poses is particularly compelling for curatorial practice and how we might continue with the active dismantling and reassembling of art history. This is especially evident, and polarizing, in curatorial projects connected to the increasing presentation of work by artists with learning disabilities. I wouldn’t dare suggest that there is a similar question of strategic authenticity connected to neurodiverse artists or those with developmental disabilities and what we see in Maravilla’s productions. Yet, there is an innate assumption made by cultural organizations to be considered. On the one hand, there is a strategy to display works of art without any distinction regarding “professionally trained” contemporary artists. On the other, self-taught, neurodiverse autodidacts are often presented as an “authentic” corrective to social inequality, and as a leveler for the perceived arrogance of the academy. One position that is clearly missing, over any real or imagined equality or authenticity, is how curators, and in turn critics, might access a toolkit—outside of standard taste acquired with formal training in art—to enable them to apply qualitative judgments of this work without fear of being scolded. After all, there is little substantiation of arguments of taste, be they good or bad. At this stage, it’s important to be clear about the meaning of the terms “neurodiverse” and “developmental disability.” The latter is used to describe a group of conditions that impact a person's learning and behavioral development, or language skills, which are usually formed from an early age, and limit one or more major life activities, such as self-care, mobility, or independent living. The former describes a wider field that can include developmental disabilities, yet refers also to disparate neurological conditions, such as autism and ADHD.

Returning to the issue of judgment of this work, two instances of a lack of substantiation occurred in the British national newspaper The Guardian, concerning the 2025 edition of the Turner Prize earlier this year, in which Nnena Kalu, an artist with autism, was one of the four artists nominated for the honor. Jonathan Jones, who described the prize as an “irrelevant bourgeois ritual,” and this year’s shortlist as “the soppiest ever,” dismissed Kalu’s “multicolored tangles of streamers and strands [hung in] in poetical arrangements” and ignored the idiosyncrasies of the work and the artist’s neurodiverse background. Instead, he focused on the work’s “post-minimalist,” “found yet handworked” appearance, concluding that it was: “nice, academic, dull.”1

Nenna Kalu at work. Courtesy the artist and Action Space.

This unfounded “bad” review was followed by Eddy Frankel’s glowing piece a few weeks later (again in The Guardian). Titled “Her Need to Make Is Off the Scale: Why Nnena Kalu’s Turner Prize Nomination Is a Watershed Moment for Art,” it chose to concentrate on Kalu’s status as the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated. Aside from her “incredible” drawings, Frankel wrote that “it’s her sculptural installations that have garnered the most attention: huge cocoons made of found fabric and VHS tape, wrapped into massive, tight, twisting, ultra-colorful knots. It was an installation of these heady sculptures at Manifesta 15, a pan-European art biennial held in Barcelona last year, that brought her to the attention of the Turner committee.” He concludes: “This is clearly a watershed moment for arts and disabilities, a total shifting of the traditional art paradigm.”2 There is, however, aside from the usual platitudes around rapturous energy, still very little qualification of why the work works.

I’ll come back to this need to acknowledge a more nuanced approach on a critical and curatorial level. However, it’s important to mention a change in momentum in showing neurodiverse and learning-disabled artists in the two years since John Chilver, the British artist and critic, and I co-edited an academic journal on the subject, documenting approaches to collecting, curating, and historicizing these tendencies during the previous decade.3 With contributions from Helen Johnson, Helmut Draxler, Daisy Sheff, Barry Schwabsky, Robert Garnett, and others, it surveyed the terrain as it appeared at the time. What remains fundamental are the curatorial strategies of well-established grassroots organizations for promoting artists with developmental disabilities, and how these are starting to bear fruit with work being shown and collected by museums and cultural institutions.

Recent high-profile examples range from the ongoing persistence of curated activity through supported studios that initially emerged in California’s Bay Area in the early 1970s, such as Creative Growth, NIAD (originally National Institute for Artists with Disabilities, now known as Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development), and Creativity Explored, as well as organizations such as London’s Action Space, Venture Arts in Manchester, and Studio A and Arts Project, respectively in St Leonards and Melbourne, Australia. The nonprofits White Columns in New York and Studio Voltaire in London continue to include a strong presence of artists with developmental disabilities and partner with supported studios. These activities have led to an increased awareness in the institutional mainstream, with exhibitions such as Dan Miller from Creative Growth’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale in 2017; Project Art Works’ inclusion in the Turner Prize at Tate in 2021 and in documenta in 2022; and SFMOMA’s Creative Growth survey exhibition in 2024, celebrating the latter’s fiftieth anniversary; and the solo “Projects” show at MoMA in early 2025. SFMOMA also made a groundbreaking acquisition of a large part of Creative Growth’s archive and works by its artists. As well, at the end of 2024, Venture Arts helped Barry Finan to receive a three-year Hamlyn Award to support his work, one of the most valuable of its kind in the UK.

Installation view, Creative Growth: The House That Art Built, April 6–October 6, 2024, SFMOMA. Courtesy Creative Growth and SFMOMA.

Barry Finan. Courtesy the artist and Venture Arts.

So, yes, maybe we are in a transitional moment, historically speaking. Time, of course, will tell. What we can be sure of is that if we are to continue this momentum, we urgently need an increased curatorial sophistication and a broader set of critical apparatus to help accomplish this curatorial work. Any “watershed” moment has been progressing slowly, since the early 1970s, in any case, when supported studios were first formed to take those with learning disabilities out of permanent incarceration and provide them with creative opportunities. A distinct history, internal logic, set of rules, and validating structures has developed since that time. However, these have remained somewhat discreet to their origins, leading to limitations in the broader critical evaluation I suggest is necessary, whether from museum curators and mainstream journalism, or from the specialist perspective of academia. So often we have a focus on “the need to make,” a nonlinguistic, ahistorical focus that avoids connecting developmental disability with more complex qualitative judgments and historical precedents aside from simple image-making per se.

Going back to what we might term a form of unsubstantiated positivity, the headline for Jonathan Griffin’s review of Mullen’s MoMA exhibition in The New York Times read, “With This MoMA Artist, the Painting Does the Talking.”4 What, for example, is the work “saying” when it’s “doing the talking”? We’re simply left to guess. Mullen, who works with NIAD in Berkeley, has been making reproductions of the covers of Artforum issues donated to the art center for years, which I interpret as providing homage to a world he desires to become a part of, but until recently hadn’t had the support to do so. It’s also my conjecture that this work simultaneously reads as a vivid critique of the power structures of contemporary art, alongside a neurodiverse reflection on professional criticism, publishing, and commercial discourse. Similar to the British painter Simon Linke’s strict depictions of the same subject, minus the deadpan delivery, Mullen’s works contain a jubilant, judicious twist that comes from a perspective that, while not malicious, naturally attacks normative irony. Meanwhile, I would agree that Kalu’s sculpture refers to the Postminimalism Jones mentions—in my view, that of the South American installation of Lygia Pape, and also to Judith Scott’s wound sculpture, which has started to become foundational in the narrative of art by artists with learning disabilities. Similarly, Kalu’s semi-automatic circular drawings have an affinity with Miller’s, which in turn show a strong link with Cy Twombly’s paintings, who once wrote that the act of painting could come out of “one ecstatic impulse.”5 The northern English vernacular of Finan’s text-works, meanwhile, links with the reflexive conceptual language-based work of Terry Atkinson and Art and Language. It’s trying to determine the differences in these kinds of impulses to create a productive synthesis that matters.

Marlon Mullen, Untitled, 2017 (acrylic on canvas, 30 1/4 x 30 1/4 inches / 76.8 x 76.8 cm). 1 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of AC Hudgins. © 2024 Marlon Mullen; Artforum, January 2017: Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (detail), 2008 (acrylic on PVC panel, 72 3/4 × 61 1/4 inches). Courtesy Artforum.

It’s inevitable that works by learning-disabled artists are in dialogue with modern and postmodern art-historical canons, as well as with contemporary artists working today, firstly in terms of their own readings, and then with projected connections made by normative critics. The question is: How do we triangulate, synthesize, and reconcile these readings by artists and normative critics to form a new inclusive language? I would suggest that we need ongoing discussions to provide the possibility for an increased fluency in a horizontal, non-hierarchical discourse. Otherwise, artists with developmental disabilities will continue to be sidelined. Of course, this begs another question: Do artists such as Mullen really want to break into the mainstream anyway? While the answer may be yes, many artists still want to eschew the dominant critical system, so we need to integrate these positions.

Pushing Curating and Criticism

In essence, we appear to be stuck in a present of curatorial enthusiasm yet critical reserve. For example, White Columns’s pioneering exhibitions with William Scott in 2006 and 2009, Nicole Storm in 2021, and Camille Holvoet in 2023, as well as Studio Voltaire’s project with Scott in 2021-2022, celebrate and contextualize artists accurately. They do this with the usual hope that critics will complete the job—which rarely happens, the occasional exemplary exception notwithstanding. The result is that major institutions usually reproduce these messages when they come to show the same artists.

Nicole Storm. Courtesy the artist and Creative Growth.

William Scott in front of his work at Creative Growth’s stand, Independent Art Fair, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Creative Growth.

What might be reasonable and groundbreaking would be to form a global advisory group, consisting of directors and artists from supported studios, non-profits, connected cultural activists, and interested parties such as critics, art historians, academics, curators, collectors, and museum directors to lobby for museum acquisitions. This might also lead to a sustained dialogue to develop momentum on both practice and theory. Although this might sound wildly bureaucratic, developing a series of academic bids to explore the benefits of what we might call a “new institutionalism” around collecting and promoting neurodiverse art, combined with social justice and research on appropriate aesthetic theories—in general, the dominant post-Kantian route of disinterested judgment via Adorno, and those opposing Western Enlightenment tendencies with an eye toward disability—could be extremely productive. With no coherent network or joined-up strategy to unite the activities of supported studios across the world, the knowledge gap filled by this research would be significant. Symposia, conferences, and publications of findings with theoretical and art-historical underpinnings on the subject would be a key component of this body to progress qualitative analysis and judgment on the work itself.

Medicaid and PIP

With proposed cuts to welfare in the US (Medicaid) and the UK (PIP, which stands for Personal Independence Payments) soon to affect disabled people of all kinds, which effectively attacks the most disadvantaged in society, what makes the proposed strategy particularly urgent is that we might articulate future policy and infrastructure coherently, if and when it ever becomes economically and politically viable to government. Trump’s cuts to Medicaid are vindictive; however, the Labour Party’s similarly cruel attitude toward disability benefits in the UK is even more alarming, as they are traditionally the party of the working people. As I write, a major rebellion by Labour MPs has led to a U-turn on their Dickensian cuts to PIP. This was the biggest proposed cut to disability benefits on record, an attempt to save the state £5 billion. Labour’s latest claim after the reversal of their decision is that they are a “government that listens” and cares about “human dignity.” If this is the case, then we need to provide them with an alternative vision.

A Manifesto

It is extremely difficult to separate equality and justice from a discrete theory or set of values with which to evaluate work by artists with disabilities. Attempts at a disinterested, noninstrumental judgment in this contemporary context are fraught with problems, such as the obvious elephant in the room, namely, the critical establishment’s control of communication and interaction, which even with the best will in the world, can provide negative sanctions that enforce normative critical and curatorial behaviour. However, an approach to curating and criticism in which the artist’s backstory is considered alongside their work rather than as the main act, and avoids engendering self-censorship—or a system that eschews one being prioritized over the other—is one way forward. A simple reflection on the hierarchies of critical judgment, as we see in e-flux’s editorial from July 2 of this year, titled “Theory and Practice,” also provides a horizontal approach to power, neutral in its evaluation of artistic accomplishment and its sources.6 If, as the editors state, theory is a “systematized body of knowledge organized according to a set of internally coherent logics,” it should not simply be owned by powerful centers such as the academy. “To make art in an indigenous tradition, for example, is not to work ‘outside’ of theory but within a different set of rules and validating structures.” It isn’t much of a jump to map this onto work by neurodiverse artists of all kinds, whose traditions have their own rules and contemporary systems of logic that at once upend foundational narratives of modern and contemporary art and reflect on some of the most urgent concerns in our culture. 

For example, after the mid-twentieth century tradition of Dubuffet and the Prinzhorn Collection, the work coming from supported studios since the 1970s reflects something distinctly different from its traditional predecessor.7 If Adorno once said: “Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination”—meaning of course that folk art and the self-taught is made partly in response to mainstream oppression in everyday life, as well as culture—then we can apply this to both categories of “outsider” and “learning disabled.”8 Yet, it’s the latter that is increasingly sophisticated and goes beyond a mere response to authority or a rapturous alternative language that confounds normal sense and interpretation. Instead, it contains a knowing intelligence and confidence that undermines conceptual strategic positions developed since the mid-1960s, including institutional critique and socially engaged art. In fact, one could even describe learning-disabled art as fifth-generation institutional critique because it reveals innate prejudices of the contemporary art establishment. In this sense, critics are confronted with this work in much the same way as the young academic in The Innocent Anthropologist, a factual account of how a researcher undertaking fieldwork in Cameroon was tricked into false assumptions by locals wise to his Western perceptions of objectivity; a story similar to Bishop’s experience with Maravilla described earlier.9

If conventional art theory, especially that based in academic institutions—including art schools, art history departments, and curating courses—cannot formulate a coherent system of analysis, we need to educate those institutions as well as those in government so that a reasonable and coherent system of understanding is developed.

One practical example that presents a direct path from grassroots organizations to museums is SFMOMA’s decision under the leadership of Christopher Bedford, previously noted, to acquire archival material and over a hundred works by Creative Growth with the intention to bring it to the attention of the public today and for posterity. Bedford’s custodial approach is that any historical and theoretical sophistication connected to qualitative judgments will take place, as is traditional, over a long period connected to the practical matters of collecting. This is a contemporary version of Alfred Barr’s famous diagram of his “torpedo in time,” from his 1933 “Report on the ‘Permanent Collection,’” written for MoMA. When I interviewed Bedford last summer, he mentioned three important elements to this strategy:

1. Short-term: To collect work by neurodiverse artists and those in supported studios—initially with distinction from other contemporary genres—in part with an activist impulse to rewrite art-historical narratives and to initiate a new category of contemporary art.

2. Mid-term: To consolidate collecting work by neurodiverse artists with the aim that, over time, this will promote a growing and sophisticated critical understanding and distinction of this genre alongside “normative” forms of contemporary art.

3. Long-term: To underscore the conscious, active, positive collecting of work by artists with disabilities in order to erode the distinctions between abled and disabled, and professional and self-taught, and with the idea that genres such as Postminimal, Conceptual, Folk, Outsider, Learning Disabled and Neurodiverse can be increasingly and productively interwoven—a situation in which work by artists with disabilities will be seen equivalently with others.

To Conclude: Humor, Provocation, and Action

With his usual provocative humor, Jerry Saltz suggested a few years ago, during a talk in Chicago, that all major museums should only show work by Black and women artists for a period of five years, simply to see what might happen.10 After that, he said, they could go back to presenting work by white men with average talent. Adding artists with disabilities to Saltz’s list would hardly be inappropriate and might well instigate a productive discussion. Saltz’s point, of course, is the same as Bedford’s: we must actively push for inclusion of neurodiverse artists in criticism, curating, and art-historical discourse at the highest level. On this subject, it was announced on July 8 of this year that Kate Adams, artist, CEO, and co-founder of Project Artworks, was joining England’s Arts Council collections acquisitions committee. What we need are similar appointments across the board in major collecting institutions, as well as experts in university art school departments.

Kate Adams. Courtesy the artist and Project Art Works.

Although for many cultural activists, there has always been little trust in museums as vehicles for emancipatory struggle—increasingly, for some, they reveal themselves to be among the main administrators of state censorship—we still need to attempt a transition from grassroots organizations’ activities to public cultural institutions. If we really are in a transitional historical moment, aiming at mid- to long-term solutions in the public sector is key, even though we’re in searingly tight times economically. The revelatory work being made is sure to provide energy for the cause. Aside from the vitality and power of this yet-to-be fully articulated genre, Bedford and Tom di Maria (who led Creative Growth for twenty-five years until he retired last year) agree, as should we all, on the fundamental principle that inequalities connected to the work of artists with disabilities are so baked in that the gap is as clear as day and has been for decades. This is an authentic struggle, and there is good reason why we should actively urge people to pursue it.

NOTES

1. Jonathan Jones, “An irrelevant bourgeois ritual: this year’s Turner prize shortlist is the soppiest ever,” The Guardian, April 23, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/23/turner-prize-shortlist-irrelevant-bourgeois-controversial.

2. Eddy Frankel, “’Her need to make is off the scale”: why Nnena Kalu’s Turner prize nomination is a watershed moment for art,” The Guardian, May 19, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/may/19/nnena-kalus-turner-prize-watershed-glasgow.

3. John Chilver and Andrew Hunt (Eds.), Journal of Contemporary Painting, “Minor Painting: Outsiders and Outliers,” volume 8, numbers 1 & 2. Intellect Journals, 2023. 

4. Jonathan Griffin, “Marlon Mullen,” The New York Times, December 22, 2024, Section AR, 13.

5. See https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/in-the-studio/cy-twombly.

6. The Editors, “Theory and Practice,” e-flux Criticism, July 2, 2025, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/6782282/theory-and-practice.

7. The Prinzhorn Collection, housed at the Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany, holds approximately 32,000 works today by neurodiverse artists. Its original collection of about 6,000 works was largely formed by art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933) during the 1920s, and continued afterward, with pieces from 1840 to 1940 created by inmates of psychiatric institutions.

8. Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 204.

9. Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (London: Penguin, 1986).

10. Jerry Saltz, “The Art World Problem,” talk, The Art Institute of Chicago, December 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5if4g7F5pnI.

---

• About Andrew Hunt

  Andrew Hunt is a curator and writer. From 2017 to 2025, he was Professor of Fine Art and Curating at Manchester School of Art. He is currently the director of the contemporary art gallery Moon Grove in Manchester, UK. He was previously the founding director of Reading International (in 2016 with Susanne Clausen), director of Spacex, Exeter (2013–2014), and director of Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2008–2013). In 2012, Hunt was a member of the Turner Prize jury. As a curator and artistic director, his research has focused on the ability of new institutions of all sizes to support artists and transform communities. As a writer, he has contributed to many magazines and journals of contemporary art and culture, including Artforum, Art Monthly, The Burlington Magazine, Domus, frieze, Mousse Magazine, Picpus, and TATE ETC. 

Download PDF

Assembly Theory and Its Adaptation for Curating

What follows is ChatGPT’s description of Assembly Theory, a concept created by the physicist Sara Walker and the chemist Leroy Cronin. ChatGPT was then prompted to adapt its summary of Assembly Theory to the practice of curating.

ChatGPT 5 Pro • 8/16/25

• Abstract

  Roulette is our section for essays, portfolios, videos, conversations, and more that range across a broader purview of culture and politics, not within our current thematic sections. It is, in a sense, a chance encounter with a subject of interest within the extended realm of visual culture.

  Assembly Theory models objects as being built from basic parts, quantifying the minimal construction steps (assembly index) and pairing this with how many copies appear (copy number). High assembly index together with high copy number signals selection-driven processes rather than undirected dynamics, and the index can be estimated empirically from spectral data. Adapted to curating, artworks, and texts become building blocks, curatorial relations (adjacency, motifs, sightlines, programs) are the joins, and the exhibition is the assembled structure. A Curatorial Assembly Index—combining a minimal motif “basis” (structural) and required interventions like walls or didactics (practical)—captures how few moves are needed for coherence, while copy numbers track recurrent themes that act as spines. In practice, curators form reusable “constellations,” pace complexity across rooms, and watch for overburdened bridges to balance coherence and novelty, using the metrics as guides rather than verdicts.

Assembly Theory—what it is (in plain terms)
Assembly Theory is a way to describe how hard it is for the universe to build a given object. It treats an object (a molecule, a polymer, a word, even a gadget) not just as a finished thing, but as something that could be assembled step‑by‑step from simpler building blocks. Two key quantities do the work:

1. Assembly index (AI) – the smallest number of join operations on building blocks needed to make the object (reusing substructures you’ve already built is allowed).

2. Copy number – how many identical copies of that object you actually observe in a sample or environment.

High assembly index objects that also appear in many copies are taken as evidence that some selective, history‑bearing process made them (e.g., evolution or technology), rather than undirected chemistry alone. (Nature)

Core ideas, a bit more formally

• Assembly space. For any object, you can map the network of possible construction pathways from basic building blocks; the assembly index is the length of the shortest such path. In chemistry, the “joins” correspond to forming bonds; in strings, to concatenating substrings. (Nature)

• Selection via abundance. One-off occurrences of a complex object could, in principle, happen by chance. But finding many identical copies of a high‑AI object is unlikely without a directed (selected) process. (Nature)

• An ensemble measure. A sample’s overall “assembly” can be computed from object AIs and copy numbers, for example
  A=∑i=1Neai (ni−1)NTA=\sum_{i=1}^{N} e^{a_i}\, \frac{(n_i-1)}{N_T},
  where aia_i is AI, nin_i is copy number, and NTN_T is total objects. Larger AA indicates more selection is required to explain the sample. (Nature)

Concrete example. In the Nature paper that set out the framework, a specific small molecule (diethyl phthalate) is shown to have AI = 8 under the bond‑formation counting scheme—illustrating how motifs can be reused along the shortest pathway. (Nature)

How the numbers are measured in practice (not just calculated)

• Mass spectrometry (MS/MS). Empirically, the number of peaks in a molecule’s fragmentation spectrum correlates with its AI, letting you estimate AI directly from data. This correlation was validated across diverse real samples and proposed as the basis for a life‑detection test. (Nature)

• IR and NMR spectroscopy. Later work showed you can also infer AI from infrared and NMR spectra (and do even better by combining methods), and provided faster algorithms to compute exact AIs on molecular graphs. (PMC)

What it’s for

• Life detection (“agnostic” biosignatures). The 2021 experiments argued that complex molecules with sufficiently high AI appearing in detectable abundance are strong biosignatures, independent of Earth‑specific biochemistry; this idea has been flagged by NASA’s astrobiology program. (Nature, NASA Astrobiology)

• Linking physics and biology. The 2023 Nature paper reframed “objects” in physics as things with build histories, offering a way to quantify novelty and selection without changing the laws of physics. (Nature)

• Mapping chemical space & discovery. “Assembly trees” group molecules by shared sub‑construction pathways, which can guide searches through huge chemical spaces (e.g., for drug‑like molecules). (PMC)

Debates, limitations, and current status

• Where’s the life‑threshold? Early studies suggested that organic, covalently bonded molecules with experimentally measured AI ≳ 15 do not arise in detectable abundance in abiotic mixtures, motivating a “threshold for life” in those contexts. A 2024 reply emphasized this threshold was experimental and system‑specific, not a universal axiom. (PMC)
  – In 2024, Hazen and colleagues calculated high AIs for inorganic mineral heteropolyanions, arguing that some abiotic structures can exceed the proposed threshold; the assembly authors countered that those were theoretical AIs for different building blocks and that thresholds must be measured for each class. (Royal Society Publishing, PMC)

• Is AT new, and does it explain selection? Critical perspectives argue that AT’s indices reduce to familiar notions from compression/algorithmic complexity and do not, by themselves, identify Darwinian selection; proponents respond that AT’s novelty is the experimentally measurable link between construction history and abundance. For balanced critiques and counterpoints, see Jaeger (J. Mol. Evol. 2024) and two 2024 papers by Abrahão, Zenil and colleagues. (PMC, PLOS)

The take‑home

• What AT gives you: a measurable “how hard was this to make?” score (AI) plus “how many copies exist?” (copy number). High AI + high copy number → evidence of selection/history beyond undirected dynamics. (Nature)

• Where it’s useful now: analyzing complex chemical mixtures, proposing agnostic biosignatures, and organizing chemical space for discovery. (Nature, PMC)

• What to keep in mind: thresholds are empirical and domain‑specific; there’s an active debate about novelty and interpretation; and measurement protocols (MS/IR/NMR) and algorithms are rapidly improving. (PMC)

Below is a practical way to “port” assembly theory into curatorial work—treating an exhibition as something built from parts, with explicit joins and reusable sub‑structures.

1) Map the concepts to curating

• Building blocks → individual works, archival items, wall texts, sounds, architectural elements.

• Joins (operations) → the curatorial moves that connect blocks: adjacency, sequencing, sightlines, shared motifs, material/process links, historical context, public programs, or a text that explicitly yokes pieces together.

• Assembly index (AI) → the smallest number of joins needed to turn a set of works into a coherent, navigable exhibition (at room scale, show scale, or for a subsection).

• Copy number → how often a motif/device recurs across the show (e.g., “repair,” “code,” “weaving,” “diaspora,” a specific sound or color discipline).

• Reuse of substructures → “constellations” or micro‑clusters that can appear (or echo) in multiple rooms—like a triad that recurs with one element swapped.

• Assembly space → the network of all feasible ways the show could be built from the available works and joins.

Intuition: High AI + high copy number of certain motifs/devices signals deliberate curatorial selection rather than a loose grouping; low AI gives a sparse, minimalist hang; high AI with low copy numbers produces a dense, possibly over‑novel experience.

2) A step‑by‑step framework

Step A — Define your join “grammar”

Create a short menu of allowable joins. Example categories:

1. Formal/material (shape, palette, medium, fabrication technique)

2. Process (rules, code, craft method, performance score)

3. Conceptual/thematic (care, borders, extraction, language)

4. Historical/biographical (school, place, period, collaboration)

5. Spatial/phenomenological (line of sight, sound bleed, light conditions)

6. Programmatic (talks, screenings, workshops that connect works separated in space/time)

Step B — Tag the works

For each piece, list 2–4 motifs and rate strength (1–5). You now have a work × motif matrix. Copy number of a motif = how many works carry it.

Step C — Build the “assembly graph”

• Nodes = works.

• Draw an edge when two works can be joined by at least one allowed relation.

• Optionally weight edges by join strength (e.g., the strongest shared motif).

Step D — Estimate a Curatorial Assembly Index (CAI)

Two useful versions:

• Structural CAI: the minimal number of distinct motifs you need to make the work‑graph connected (think: a smallest “motif basis” that ties the show together). You can approximate this with a greedy set‑cover: repeatedly pick the motif that links the largest number of as‑yet disconnected works/clusters until the whole graph connects.

• Practical CAI: Structural CAI plus the count of physical/interpretive interventions required to realize those joins (e.g., partitions, long labels, media zones, program events).

Practical CAI≈∣motif basis∣  +  #(walls+long texts+AV zones+program links)\text{Practical CAI} \approx |\text{motif basis}| \;+\; \#(\text{walls}+\text{long texts}+\text{AV zones}+\text{program links})

Step E — Design constellations (reusable substructures)

• Aim for 3–7 works per constellation.

• Anchor each constellation in a spine motif (high copy number) and include 1–2 bridge works that carry a second motif reaching into another constellation/room.

• Reuse the same constellation in another room by swapping a single work; this reduces overall CAI (you’re reusing built substructures).

Step F — Lay out the sequence

• Place high‑copy‑number motifs near entries as “on‑ramps.”

• Ensure each room has at least two bridges (sightline or text) to others.

• Use the edge motifs (those that appear in both adjoining rooms) to title thresholds—these are literal joins.

Step G — Evaluate and iterate

Use quick proxies for coherence vs. overload:

• Encounter spectrum: list all interpretive “fragments” a visitor can hit (labels, audio stops, screenshots, timelines). If fragments balloon but the graph still has islands, you’re adding explanation without structural joins.

• Bridge centrality: in your assembly graph, check whether a few works are over‑burdened as the only bridges; duplicate that bridge via an additional join or program.

3) A tiny worked example (toy numbers)

Works (W1–W6) with motifs M = {repair, archive, body, code}.

• W1: repair(5), body(3)

• W2: repair(4), archive(2)

• W3: archive(5)

• W4: body(4), code(3)

• W5: code(5), repair(2)

• W6: body(3), archive(3)

Copy numbers: repair=3, archive=3, body=3, code=2 (balanced—good spines).
Edges exist wherever a motif is shared (e.g., W1–W2 via repair; W2–W3 via archive; W4–W5 via code; W4–W6 via body; W1–W6 via body).

• Structural CAI (motif basis): {repair, archive, body} already connects all six works; “code” is optional spice. Basis size = 3.

• Practical CAI: if you need 1 threshold text + 1 AV zone for the code pair, then Practical CAI ≈ 3 + 2 = 5.

Constellations:

• Constellation A (repair spine): W1–W2–W5 (bridge to code via W5).

• Constellation B (archive spine): W2–W3–W6 (bridge to body via W6).

• Constellation C (body spine): W1–W4–W6 (bridge to code via W4).

These three can populate two rooms by reusing A with W5 swapped for W4, echoing ideas while introducing novelty.

4) Heuristics and targets (tune to context)

• Balance spines and rarities. In a 25–40 work show, aim for 3–5 spine motifs with copy numbers in the 20–50% range each; keep a few rare motifs for surprise.

• Limit intervention load. If Practical CAI grows fast while Structural CAI is flat, you’re over‑engineering; look for cleaner bridges in the selection rather than more walls/texts.

• Pace complexity. Start with low‑AI clusters at entry, escalate to higher‑AI constellations mid‑show, and release toward the end.

• Reuse with variation. Repeated substructures create rhythm; change one element to keep attention.

5) The “Exhibition Assembly Canvas” (copy/paste template)

A. Join grammar (max 8 items):

1. Formal/material … 2) Process … 3) Concept … 4) Historical … 5) Spatial … 6) Programmatic … 7) … 8) …

B. Work × motif table (excerpt):

Work ID Media/Year Motifs (ranked) Strengths (1–5) Bridge Notes

W1 repair, body 5, 3 bridges to W6 via body

W2 repair, archive 4, 2 spine for repair

…

C. Metrics:

• Copy numbers: repair=?, archive=?, body=?, code=?

• Structural CAI (motif basis size): ___

• Practical CAI (basis + interventions): ___

• Over‑burdened bridges (works/thresholds to relieve): ___

D. Constellations:

• Constellation 1 (spine motif ___): works ___; bridges to ___ via ___

• Constellation 2 …

E. Threshold titles (edge motifs): Room A→B: ___ ; B→C: ___

6) Adapting by exhibition type

• Monographic: Treat series/process phases as motifs; CAI reveals how few moves you need to make a career arc legible without over‑explaining.

• Thematic group show: Start from a broad motif list, then down‑select to a small basis that truly connects the selection; cut works that require bespoke joins you can’t reuse.

• Collection rehang: Use high‑copy‑number material/process motifs (frame types, techniques, supports) as hidden spines to surface fresh narratives.

• Media‑heavy shows: Count acoustic/light containment zones as interventions in Practical CAI early—these are costly joins.

7) Pitfalls to avoid

• Metric‑worship. The CAI is a design aid, not a verdict on quality. Keep room for intuition and negative space.

• Token bridges. Don’t rely on a single overworked essay or program to connect islands; structural joins should be visible in the hang.

• Motif inflation. Too many low‑copy motifs raise complexity without coherence; merge or drop weak motifs.

---

• About ChatGPT 5 Pro

  GPT‑5 Pro is OpenAI’s advanced ChatGPT reasoning model, built to deliver precise answers and creative help while keeping its chain‑of‑thought hidden. It excels at step‑by‑step problem solving and, when enabled, can use tools such as web research and Python to provide cited, structured outputs for complex tasks. Designed for reliability and safety, it adapts tone and depth to the user’s needs, is transparent about uncertainty, and avoids unverifiable personal claims.

Download PDF

World Questions—For Contemporary Curatorial Education

Terry Smith • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  Roulette is our section for essays, portfolios, videos, conversations, and more that range across a broader purview of culture and politics, not within our current thematic sections. It is, in a sense, a chance encounter with a subject of interest within the extended realm of visual culture.

  In this essay, Terry Smith examines curatorial studies during a period of global "intermission," exploring how curatorial practices can respond to contemporary challenges such as climate change, economic inequality, geopolitical shifts, and technological disruption within what he calls the visual arts exhibitionary complex (VAEC). He argues that while curatorial studies traditionally make modest contributions to culture, reimagining them as a "curatorial form of life education" could bring about new thinking. Recognizing that a unified global mission is unlikely due to ongoing crises and divisiveness, Smith suggests that curators focus on promoting coeval communality in its liberatory potential in addressing the urgent issues the world faces today and in the years to come. Seven key curatorial models are presented with examples, including curating large-scale world pictures, asserting sovereignty, exploring diasporas, localizing dominant narratives, creating exhibitions as thinking machines, engaging with new technologies, and navigating censorship. The core argument is that curators must actively pursue strategies of coeval communality, resisting passive historical narratives and working toward collaborative, context-specific artistic interventions.

What forms should curatorial studies take at a time of “intermission” for contemporary art and for “broader cultural and political realities” today—indeed, for “human history at this moment”?1

I presume the existence of strong relationships between the specifics of making works of art and practices of curating, on the one hand, and, on the other, the large-scale historical sweep, through the present, of the major forces shaping life on this planet. Among the myriad institutions and networks that mediate these relationships is curatorial studies. The discipline of curatorial studies usually makes modest contributions to changing the status quo while also striving to advance the practice of curating art, of exhibition-making, and of caring for artworks and artists as best it can. Curatorial studies, like everything else involved in art and education today, is subject to the stagnation of “intermission.” Nevertheless, there is the hope that art, curating, and curatorial studies, if radically reconceived as “a curatorial form of life education,” can liberate both “humanity and art.”  

If this is a utopian quest, I feel obliged to point out that realism requires a closer look at the concept of intermission, especially the presumption (or perhaps the hope) that we are suspended—not just between two times, past and future (that will always be true)—but between two world orders: that of a no longer viable past, which nonetheless fills our present, and “a big new play,” a freshly imagined, shareable mission.

What would this big new play need to do? It would need to guide us toward solving the main challenges facing life on Earth at this time. Let me list these challenges as questions:

• Will we wean ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels in time to hold down the global boiling that is already making the planet uninhabitable for many living beings—and might soon do so for most of us and eventually all?

• Will we arrest accelerating economic inequality before it precipitates unstoppable authoritarianism, fascism, and/or random insurrection within nations and more conflict between them?

• Will the shift in geopolitics from the international “rules-based order”—led since 1989 by the US—to a “world disorder,” consisting of contention between alliances led by major regional powers such as China, Russia, and India, along with coalitions such as BRICS, ASEAN, etc., be accomplished without continuing attrition, regional wars (as in the Middle East at this time), or total war? The resumption of Donald Trump to the US presidency signals the emergence of a new axis of authoritarianism, making such negative outcomes more likely.

• Will the alliance of market economies with representative governance (Western democracy) survive as a framework for national politics in those countries where it prevails at present?  Can states with central economies and single-party rule manage the planetary, global, regional, and internal challenges of state capitalism?

• Do the current international agencies and non-governmental organizations with international remits offer an adequate basis for the worldly cooperation necessary to meet these challenges?

• Will other modes of cooperation and governance emerge in time to address these challenges in ways that work locally and add up planetarily?

• Will the affordances of new technologies, notably AI, outweigh their negative impacts?

These questions do not afford a simple, all-inclusive answer. But their accumulating force suggests that a big new play, a new, shareable mission, is highly unlikely. Rather, we are likely to remain in a state of permanent transition from the postwar order, and from the decolonizing disorder—those remainders of the modern world order—into the contemporaneity of difference that characterizes our continuous present.

Our current situation is haunted by the paradox that divisiveness seems to have reached unprecedented levels at a time when unity among our differences has never been more essential and urgent. A further persistent paradox is that while knowledge of the world’s processes, of human history, and of technological capacity is vast and deep, conversely the task of imagining futures often cedes to presumptions of continuity or to chance; to an emergent victor or a messianic figure; or to algorithmic possibilities, peripheral glimpses, and generalizing categories. Too often—not least in advanced critical thinking—futurity is avoided altogether.

Curating Our Contemporaneity

What kinds of cultural work, artmaking, and curating become necessary, then possible, in contemporary circumstances?

In my books on curating, especially Curating the Complex and The Open Strike, I map the frameworks within which art curators work and suggest strategies for practice within current situations.2 In well-resourced art centers today, these are the places where art is exhibited:

Curatorial education must include learning about these clusters: their distinctiveness and their interactions, their historical development, their imbrication in other social formations, and their connections with visual arts exhibitionary complexes (VAECs) elsewhere. To mangle Roland Barthes’s already overused distinction in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography: study the studium, absorb it until the puncta that haunt it surprise the curatorial within you and your world.

I will highlight some examples of curators who have pursued art’s liberatory potential in the face of the kinds of challenges I listed above. If a new, shareable mission is unlikely, nevertheless, a workable unity among and between our differences is imaginable—and necessary. A step toward that would be to ask: What can we learn from the constructive, world-building projects that are being urgently embraced by artists, curators, and educators in various places around the world today? How might we build on their achievements, learn from their shortcomings?

I will highlight seven kinds of curatorial projects that I believe are vital today.

1. Curating Large-Scale World Pictures

Very few curators have conceived their work as operating on a worldly scale—that is, as addressing the kinds of world-historical questions I have listed. Okwui Enwezor was one. In 2013, over ten years ago, he conceived an ambitious plan to map the ways in which large-scale sociopolitical and cultural changes were manifest in critical thinking and in art practice since the end of World War II. This was a major enterprise in art-historical revisionism to be conducted through research, publishing, and, above all, exhibition-making. He thought that this would be best done in three big exhibitions: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965; an exhibition provisionally titled The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1965-1985; and a third to be called Postcommunist, 1985 – now.

The first was shown in 2016 at the Haus der Kunst, where he was the director from 2011 to 2018. He began from the question: “How did artists contend with the evidence all around them of the enormous destructive power of the human imagination?” His co-curator, Katy Seigel, noted that “the image of the Atomic Bomb becomes the most recognized image in the world. For the first time, the world is a single place,” in which, she implies, all of us could die together—much like the even larger scale, and more multiple, existential crises facing us today. The exhibition argued that “To address deeper questions of morality, meaning, spirit, many artists rejected the ideological demand to choose either tradition and modernity by fusing realism and abstraction.” Can a similar observation be made today? How would you exhibit it?

The second phase, The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1965-1985, remained unrealized at Enwezor’s death in 2019, but his entire career can be seen as an effort to attack the forces of imperialism and colonization by showing how artists do so: from the 1994 launch of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art through the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale: Trade Routes—History and Geography (1997); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 (2001); and Documenta11 (2002), as well as in such exhibitions as In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center for Photography, New York, 2006). At Sharjah in 2022, Hoor Al Qasimi took up the challenge of the unrealized postcolonial show in her iteration of the Sharjah Biennial, pursuing his injunction to “think historically in the present.”

In his remarks that opened the 56th Venice Biennale that he titled All the World's Futures (2015), Enwezor was explicit about his conception of exhibitions as “machines for thinking” in this critical way about these great issues. He did this by centering that exhibition, literally, around a continuous reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in the main space in the main pavilion; by inviting works such as Isaac Julien’s video Kapital (2015), a discussion with venerable Marxist geographer David Harvey; and by culminating the parcours with John Akomfrah’s The Vertigo Sea (2015). This was the closest he got to showing the Postcommunist phase in his trilogy.

If driving forward Africanist perspectives was always his priority, Enwezor was highly conscious that this was not simply a partisan or regional commitment. Rather, it was an iconogeographical turning, as I call it—that is, a worldwide, world-historical shift; a constellating of several currents into an unstable but powerful configuration. He spelled this out in his 2003 essay, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,”3 and articulated its effects—not least, the definitive experience of “intense proximity of differences” and the overall state of “permanent transition”—in such exhibitions as 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (2006) and the 3rd Paris Triennale,  Intense Proximity (2012).

Enwezor’s legacy is the richest of this kind that we have; a judgment that will be reinforced when the two volumes of his Selected Writings, which I am editing, are published next year by Duke University Press.

And the other six models, briefly:

2. Curating Sovereignty

For artists outside the West, mega-exhibitions such as Documenta and the biennials in Europe, were (and often still are) platforms to negotiate the systemic inequities of imperialism and colonization, to assert a people’s sovereignty, usually through four phases: achieve recognition as existent; secure acknowledgment as equals; arrive at self-acceptance; and create and assert intrinsic value.

Since the postcolonial heyday of the 1990s, biennials have increasingly retreated from the global surveys that were so urgent then and now take incredibly diverse forms. Today we expect a biennial to include as many different kinds of exhibitions as a museum, while museums have become more focused on temporary exhibitions and events.

There has also been a steady stream of exhibitions outside the biennial circuit that shows these changes as aspirations and achieved actualities, including the multiple nuances involved for particular peoples during specific periods.  For example, the anti-colonial, sovereignty-asserting project pursued by Indigenous artists and curators since the 1970s in Australia. Aims: to develop a support and distribution system that would sustain artists working in remote communities; circulate their work nationally and internationally; and encourage Indigenous curators and art writers. Landmark exhibitions include Dreamings (Asia Society, New York, 1988), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (AGNSW, 2000), and Madayin (traveling the US, 2023-24). Self-acceptance and the assertion of the intrinsic value of the work were made by Indigenous artists throughout the world and motivated exhibitions such as Nirrin, Brook Andrew’s Sydney Biennale in 2022. The curatorial voice becomes more and more Indigenous.

A parallel history in Canada moves from exhibitions such as INDENGENA: Perspectives of Indigenous Peoples on Five Hundred Years (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, 1992; now the Canadian Museum of History) through to somewhat generalizing surveys such as Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, 2013) and becomes focused in the work of, for example, Cree Plains curator Gerald McMaster and the Wapatah Center for Indigenous Art, e.g. Artic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity (Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2022).

For some time now in the VAEC, Indigeneity is going global.

3. Curating Diasporas, Transculturality

Within the US, Black aesthetics is flourishing across most of its VAEC, from public art fairs to Gagosian galleries and the leading museums. Definitive exhibitions include shows dedicated to the work of artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa, along with Enwezor’s posthumous Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America that took place in 2020 at the New Museum in New York.

In Africa, there is a long history of local and circulating exhibitions pertinent to the recognition of Black artistic production, a recent example being Kayo Kouoh’s When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration (Zeitz MOCA, Cape Town, 2023), which traveled to the Kunstmuseum Basel this year. Then there are the curatorial projects of Gabi Ngcobo, who co-founded the Centre for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg in 2010, and which describes itself as responding “to the demands of the current moment through an exploration into the historical legacies and their resonance and impact on contemporary art.” Ngcobo has continued her work concerning social justice in various venues, including her curatorial oversight of the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018, titled We don’t need another hero, and her more recent work as the director of  Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam.

4. Provincializing Europe

Models of cooperative coevality, or coeval communality, are essential to the solution of the challenges outlined earlier. They are constantly being envisaged and enacted by artists to the benefit of millions, especially on local levels, throughout the world. Some of them involve curating the VAEC ecology itself: for example, Maria Lind, currently the director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, Sweden, who is a major organizer of lateral connections between alternative spaces in many parts of the world, and who appointed 100 curators from these spaces as Biennale Fellows when she was artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale in 2016, bringing them together in Gwangju. Appointing ruangrupa as artistic directors of documenta fifteen was an even bolder reverse move. Unfortunately, their lumbung model—an effort to display to the Western world what collective creativity looks like throughout the rest of the world—was met with a Berlin wall of bad faith, aesthetic snobbery, and hypocritcal political reaction.4 The good news: polls showed that younger visitors loved the effort that was being made, however imperfect, and that curating by collectives has burgeoned throughout the international VAEC since then.

5. Exhibitions as machines for thinking about curating and for thinking about thinking

There are many examples by artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, and by curators, such as Harold Szeemann and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In recent decades, the Prada Foundation series at the Ca’ Corner in Venice has been remarkable, including When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969, Venice 2013 (2013); Serial Classic (2015); The Boat is Leaking, The Captain Lied (2017); Human Brains (2022); and Everybody Talks About the Weather (2023).

These exhibitions spring from an instinct for curating against the grain: against the grain of conventional understandings of the idea they explore only to explode it, and against received ideas about the exhibitionary form (group shows, one-person shows, theme shows, etc.) that they productively misuse. The exhibition as punctum?

6. Curating the new technologies

A necessary task for some contemporary curating is to display the affordances of the new technologies while also showing their massive consumption of real-world resources and their dystopic social impacts. Striking examples include exhibitions by Trevor Phomepageaglen and Kate Crawford, suchhomepage as From Apple to Anomaly (Barbican, London, 2020) and Training Humans (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2019-20), and Paglen and Crawford with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025 (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2023). Or you can go to the homepage of Ben Grosser to watch him curate communicative platforms in ways that counter how social media platforms such as Facebook, X, and TikTok manipulate our modes of perceiving the world to their economic and political advantage.

7. Conclusion: Curating the secrets, the Open Strike

As censorship, surveillance, and outright repression grow in many parts of the world, how do we bend curating toward liberation, equality, and coevality? In Slovenia in 1993, Zdenka Badovinac and Igor Zabel began the process of turning the Moderna galerija, the national museum of a new nation, into a “museum of parallel narratives” about its modern prehistory from the late nineteenth century up to the 1990s. Then, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Badovinac curated a program dedicated to the multiplicitous conceptions of time, history, place, citizenship and selfhood that have animated art in the region since then. In both institutions, this was exemplary curating of contemporaneity.5 In 2020, the new right-wing government sacked her. The situation has not improved: in 2024, the government summarily dismissed Alexandra Kusá, director of the Slovak National Gallery, and the director of the national theater. Slovenia is moving towards the situation that obtains in several countries, where official approval of all exhibitions, public and private, is required. When Zoe Butt was the director and curator of Sán Art and afterward of the Factory between 2009 and 202, both in Ho Chi Minh City, she found it necessary to prepare four distinct descriptions of every exhibition—one each for censors, an uninformed public, an informed audience, and artists—and to be careful about which version circulated where. She learned a great deal about the enduring power of circles of friendship and communality as the support structure for artmaking in conditions of constraint. Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, since then, she founded in-tangible institute, dedicated to mentoring art communities whose viability is inhibited by state or other actors.6 These are just two examples of ethical responses to the increasingly pervasive problems facing contemporary curating.

I have been arguing that today “intermission” is not a pause between two world orders. The sweep of history is not moving one way only, or even predominantly so, from our several pasts toward “a new, big play.”  It is more like an unfolding Hydra-headed disaster as the wrecking ball of imperialist, colonizing, Western modernity clashes headlong with the storm, blowing not from a paradisical future and its angel of history (as Walter Benjamin famously suggested in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940 when he was on the run for his life from the Nazis) but from all the world’s several futures—many of which are already here, while others to come remain unimaginable figments. We are caught between these tides and currents. And few of us are angels.

Commenting in his recent book, The Benjamin Files, on the question posed by Benjamin in his dissertation, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Fredric Jameson asks: “Do we once again confront the hostile gods (the remorseless laws of planetary geology, the inevitability of Homeric warfare and the finitude and doom of myth), or something closer to the allegorical landscape of rubble and mangled bodies in the midst of which tyrants and usurpers rave, schemers scheme, and saints joyously accept their martyrdom?”7 My ontology of the present says that, in fact, we are being confronted by both in their contemporary costumes, knowing them to be past their times but not their prime time.

Although we might secretly, or even openly, desire the frisson of being swept along as ciphers of history subject to much larger forces, we must resist this comfort. If we wish to curate our contemporaneity, we must learn from the examples I have given and from others like them. We must always pursue political struggles toward coeval communality, aiming at answers to the world’s questions through strategies tailored to our direct circumstances. At the same time, we must focus our artmaking, curating, and criticism on these same values, through artistic, curatorial, and critical strategies. The Open Strike should be at the core of curatorial education.

NOTES

1. This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, for its symposium Intermission: Curatorial Studies/Education?, November 3 and 4, 2024. The text in quotation marks in the first three paragraphs is from the prospectus for the symposium, organized by Lu Jie, Feiran Jiang and other members of ICAST, see https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/634363/intermission-curatorial-studies-education/.
2. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015), and Curating the Complex and The Open Strike, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).
3. Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 57–82.
4. See Charles Esche, “The First Exhibition of the Twenty-First Century—Lumbung 1 (Documenta Fifteen), What Happened, and What It Might Mean Two Years On,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, August 28, 2024, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14434318.2024.2380770?src=recsys. For my views, see “Unintended Consequences: Withdrawal from Documenta,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, June 13, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2024.2358199.
5. See “Zdenka Badovinac: Continuities and Ruptures in Museums of Contemporary Art,” in Terry Smith, Talking Contemporary Curating,162-189; and Zdenka Badovinac, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022).
6. See https://in-tangible.org/about-us/.
7. Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (London: Verso, 2022), 66.

---

• About Terry Smith

  Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh; Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School; and on the faculty at large in the MA Curatorial Practice program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. An internationally renowned author and lecturer, his most recent book is Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation, with Fred R. Meyers (Duke University Press, 2024). Forthcoming from Duke University Press is his edited edition in two volumes of Okwui Enwezor’s selected writings.

Download PDF