Idle Arts: Reconsidering the Curator

In this article, I propose a way for philosophical aesthetics to make sense of the curator's work and specifically its claim to creativity and value making. My thesis is that selecting art should be thought of as a fine art in itself. This thesis, in various formulations, has been a source of controversy for art historians, critics, and theorists for more than a century. Even though philosophers have barely addressed the issue, philosophical aesthetics has been complicit in the prevalent modes of resistance. The unspoken reason that various figures of the artworld find it problematic to identify curators as artists is that the divisions of labor they protect are inherently normative. The inadvertent application of this normativity in equal measure affects curators who style themselves as artists. I offer a critique of the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this normative picture, which sets the stage for a reconsideration of curatorship and its stake on a place among the rest of the fine arts.