FOR WHO: For those who want to be curators, this is a must-read book

WHY: This book, developed in the form of a course, enables you to do it knowledgeably. It explains what mistakes to avoid and skills to develop in organizing an exhibition.


WHEN: A reading to accompany other more challenging ones. In short, enjoyable to read .


LANGUAGE: Italian
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"Become a Curator" is an introductory course to the contemporary art system that develops around the figure of the curator, the one who has assumed a privileged role within the contemporary art scene . While this role was once reserved for large institutions, today even galleries or art fairs employ curators to ensure their quality standards. But what does it take to become one, what mistakes to avoid and skills to develop in order to be able to organize exhibitions in a museum, foundation or even just organize content in a blog.
This short course is taught by industry professionals with experience in organizing exhibitions and events.
This book brings together several talks on the art of curating, a short introductory course to the many changes that the figure of the curator has undergone in the last thirty years. It is a preparatory course for curatorial practice, curating now being a job with many facets and specializations, which transcend the art world itself, going to broaden the range of new professional types at a time of profound transformation in the world of work.
The figure of the Ausstellungsmacher curator to which so many epigones of Harald Szeemann and Hans Ulrich Obrist still look becomes an obsolete character.
Boris Groys's essays, his ongoing analysis of art and the art system, make us realize how much the world has changed and how much an alchemist and free-lance curator, a free hitter with respect to the policies of collections and programming, goes up against a world that follows different policies thanks to which even institutions-not only companies-set any initiative pursuing entertainment and consumption. All contemporary art can be considered essentially as an exhibition practice within which it is very difficult to distinguish the tasks of the traditional figures of the old art system, but the curator embodies a new figure of intellectual/immaterial labor that is no longer marginal, but is fully part of that reorganization of immaterial and affective labor that we are witnessing. "To curate is to produce knowledge and truth," as Dorothee Richter suggests, whether organizing an exhibition, selecting information, or enacting social relations, the curator (like the artist) must make sure that he or she does not simply remain a content provider of an art that is increasingly a mass cultural practice (Groys) and of which the curator should organize the direction. The curator thus shifts from being someone close to the artist and guarantor of a system to organizing content in an expanded, multi-author mode within which, rather than merely "compiling" works or events, he or she should continue to ask "what do we really produce?"

The third edition contains essays by: Cecilia Alemani, Matteo Balduzzi, Cristina Casero, Alessandro Castiglioni, Fabio Cavallucci, Elena Filipovic, Massimiliano Gioni, Boris Groys, Francesca Guerisoli, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Roberto Pinto, Adrian Paci, Domenico Quaranta, Andrea Quartarone, Dorothee Richter, Gabi Scardi, Roberta Valtorta.