The virtual curator in smooth space

Glenn Adamson, writing in American Craft (August/September 2010) points out how Google provides a powerful tool to the curator, as:

"...no curator can hope to keep up with the facts and contacts that Google produces. More and more, curators aren't so much those in the know; they are professionals who shape what we know already (or can know at a moment's notice)."(p66)

He names a number of exhibition where artists have used Google as a tool to form:

"...intuitive associations: connections ranging from the purely visual to the merely coincidental to the positively conspiratorial."

These are exhibitions at actual locations: the Hayward Gallery, the Tate Modern. The Russian Linesman  by Mark Wallinger explored borders and thresholds, and the condition of liminality and included a range of objects from museum collections as well as from websites, such as YouTube. Wallinger developed this show by searching the internet.

It seems to me that these exhibitions are curated using 'smooth space', a curatorial method that allows art not to be limited by its materiality nor the dogma of definitions which attempt to corral works into specific categories such as craft and, thus the unexpected to happen--an opportunity to open up new ways of perceiving rather than to restrict oneself to those that have been before.    


Adamson, Glenn: Google Curates, American Craft August/September 2010, 66-7