#OpenCurating

The rise of a collaborative Web 2.0 and an increasing expectation of participation and transparency is transforming the political, social and cultural climate of our times. What relevance does this have for contemporary art, exhibition making and curatorial authorship?

Building on concerns explored by Latitudes' 'The Last Newspaper' project (New Museum, New York, 2010), and drawing on the emerging practices of so-called 'open journalism' – which seek to better collaborate with and use the ability of anyone to publish and share – #OpenCurating is a research project which investigates how contemporary art projects can function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue in ways which might be more fully knitted into the web of information which exists in the world today. #OpenCurating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.

The Guardian's Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger has offered ten speculative principles of Open Journalism, which offer a guide for #OpenCurating in terms of contemporary art and how contents are aggregated and distributed, and by whom. Taking these principles, what happens if we change 'journalism' for 'curating' and 'publishing' for 'exhibition making'? What are the possibilities – as well as the problems – associated with the related expectation of participation and transparency?

The #OpenCurating research is structured around three strands: as a series of ten new interviews with curators, artists, writers and online experts published as free and downloadable digital editions via Issuu; as a Twitter discussion around the hashtag #OpenCurating, and as an open live discussion with Yasmil Raymond (Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York) at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).

This research examines new behaviours – not merely new technologies – which have implications for artistic practice and exhibition making as well as communications, pedagogy, and political form. Instead of the curator as an insider-pundit presenting exhibitions as a proprietary form of endorsement (monologue), #OpenCurating looks at shared enterprises between artists, curators and publics (dialogue), abolishing the dichotomy consumer/producer, professional/amateur. Where the notion of a single narrative or an agreed upon set of facts has seemingly been abandoned, and instead it is a question of refereeing or moderating diverse interests within the architecture of public knowledge, how does one define an ethics of curatorial leadership?