Written by: Kathy-Ann Tan
The title of my talk today is “Taste, Vision, and the Politics of Curating.” Those words – taste and vision – invoke sophistication. They evoke the curator as a kind of connoisseur, someone with refined aesthetic sensibilities. As someone who works outside major institutions and runs a non-profit, independent art space in Berlin, however, taste and visionare not purely abstract or intellectual qualities to me. Rather, they are deeply political, deeply material, and always entangled with questions of power, access, and survival.
I want to address three key questions with you:
- How do curatorial taste and vision function within today’s institutional art landscape?
- Are curators of large-scale exhibitions and biennales really agents of change, ormere figureheads who maintain systems of racism, patriarchy, and structuralinequality?
- When institutional frameworks prove resistant, what kinds of curatorial “guerrilla”tactics might one engage in to open up spaces for transformative justice?
I will speak from my own position – as an independent curator, as someone who does not have the “protection” or visibility of a major institution, and as someone committed to practices of care through artistic research and community engagement. As you’re listening to me today, I’d like you to keep one guiding question in mind: What do your own taste and vision do in the world? Not just what you like or what you believe in, but what your likes and beliefs enable, legitimize, or exclude.
In classical art history, good curatorial taste was often framed as the ability to be a connoisseur: the trained eye that could distinguish “good” from “bad” art, the authentic from the fake, the masterpiece from the mediocre. This supposedly “neutral” eye was shaped in the 19th century in elite schools, salons, and museums that were overwhelmingly white, male, Eurocentric, and upper-class.[1] That history does not serve merely as a backdrop; it still forms the basis of what we call “good taste” in the present. Even today, when institutions speak of “excellent,” “cutting-edge,” or “gallery-quality” work, they often rely on inherited notions about form, aesthetics, and legibility that come from that same history. “Good taste” thus tends to recognize and reward what looks familiar to those in power: certain types of conceptual minimalism, certain modes of criticality that are legible to art-world insiders, certain ways of speaking about identity and politics that feel “insightful” or “sophisticated”, but not too uncomfortable or “too much.”
Thus, taste is never just about personal preference. It organizes attention, money, and visibility. It decides which artists are “ready” and which are still “emerging”, which forms of emotional expression can be framed as “powerful” and which as “vulgar”. It justifies why certain issues – like accessibility, inclusivity, labor or care – appear in the exhibition text but are not reflected in the institution’s practice in terms of who is hired, remunerated fairly, or permanently supported. From my perspective as an independent curator, I see how taste can function as gatekeeping in at least three ways:
- Aesthetic gatekeeping: certain themes and issues are read as “serious” or “critical, ”while others are dismissed as “too personal” or “too community-based”
- Linguistic gatekeeping: if you cannot describe your work in a certain kind of intellectual English or “artspeak”, it is often judged as less sophisticated – even if the lived and embodied knowledge it is based on is profound
- Affective gatekeeping: artworks or practices that bring grief, anger or trauma too close to the surface can be framed as “too much” or “inappropriate” for a prestigious exhibition or biennale
So, when institutions celebrate the “unique” taste and predilection of a star curator, perhaps we should pause and ask: whose tastes are being centered here? Whose sensitivities? And whose discomfort is being carefully managed?
If taste has to do with what we value, vision has to do with how we set the agenda: which issues we foreground, how we approach them, what we want to change, and what kinds of futures we imagine. In the last two decades, curators of large-scale exhibitions and biennales have increasingly been framed as creators or even as brands. The curator is expected to have a visionary theme, a strong conceptual framework, and a recognizable and inimitable style. Their name carries the show: “curated by X” becomes a guarantee of critical value.
On a certain level, this can be empowering. Curators from marginalized or minoritized backgrounds can use that visibility to push certain issues into the international spotlight: colonial histories, racial injustice, climate crisis, Indigenous sovereignty, queer and trans life, etc. Many recent biennales and documentas have explicitly foregrounded decolonial, feminist and intersectional frameworks. Of course this matters. It shifts critical discourse, helps influence funding decisions, and paves the way for future projects. However, vision can also become branding. Institutions often hire curators with “radical” reputations because it looks good on their resumes. A large-scale international exhibition framed around “decolonization,” “care,” or “solidarity” can attract critical acclaim and federal, municipal and corporate funding without requiring the institution itself to change structurally (cf. Documenta 15, aka lumbung one, with the Indonesian collective ruangrupa). In such instances, the curator’s vision becomes a layer on the surface – moving, strong and impressive – but underneath, the same hierarchies stubbornly remain.
The key question, then, is whether this curatorial vision is genuinely structurally anchored – or whether it remains as a discursive layer on top. More specifically, are hiring practices changing, so that racialized and marginalized artists are not only invited as short-term “guests” but become longer term decision-makers?[2] Are budgets distributed equitably, so that artists and cultural workers receive fair pay rather than merely symbolic exposure? Do partnerships built with communities continue after the exhibition ends, or are they one-time extractions of stories, networks and labor? If the answer to these questions is mostly “no”, then we must ask whether curators in these positions are truly agents of change – or whether they function, unintentionally or otherwise, as figureheads who make the institution look progressive while leaving its fundamental core unchanged.
Let’s take a minute to sit with this tension more directly: Are biennale and large-scale exhibition curators truly agents of change or mere figureheads? The reality is: they are often both. Their ability to make impactful and long-lasting changes depends on factors such as their own standing and position in the art world (cf. the Power 100 of Art Review); the infrastructures and solidarities they build beyond the institution; the governance structure of the institution; and the level of risk that funders and boards are willing to take. Many curators enter these roles with genuine commitments to transformative justice. They negotiate fiercely, push for better artist fees, challenge decisions made by the board of directors, and bring in artists who would never otherwise get that level or scale of international exposure. They create moments of real rupture and recognition, of reflection and connection. In return, they often pay a personal price: burnout, heightened public exposure, institutional powergames, and so on. So, at the end of the day, how much actually shifts within the institution?
A powerful, very current example is the 61st Venice Biennale curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, who sadly passed away just months after her appointment. Her framework for the main exhibition, titled “In Minor Keys,” explicitly centers artists and practices that are relegated to the margins and whose forms of resistance and resilience operate in a quieter tone. In her curatorial statement, she writes that this is an invitation to “Take a deep breath,/Exhale,/ Drop your shoulders,/ Close your eyes”, slow down and listen carefully to “the songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds”.[3] Kouoh insists on art’s emotional, sensory, and subjective dimensions. As the first African woman curator (the first African curator was Okwui Enwezor, who curated the 56th edition in 2015) appointed to direct Venice’s main exhibition, her concept pushes against the Biennale’s Eurocentric masculinist canon by foregrounding African and Black diasporic feminist cartographies as well as the infrastructural questions around sustainability and community that she had long pursued across the two institutions she founded and directed: RAW Material Company in Dakar and Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa) in Cape Town respectively. At the same time, the Biennale exposes the fragility of the curator-as-author/brand model: Koyo Kouoh’s name and vision anchor the edition symbolically, but the long-term governance, funding, and structural mechanisms remain in the hands of the Biennale’s leadership – its President and Board of Directors. The recent resignation of the five-member international jury[4] in protest of the Biennale’s inclusion of the Israeli, Russian and US Pavilions makes visible how, when conflicts emerge, it is the institution’s decision-making structures and political alignments that ultimately determine the limits of what even the most rigorous and expansive curatorial project can do. “In Minor Keys” thus becomes both a milestone of Koyo Kouoh’s decolonial curatorial vision at the symbolic centre of the global art world, and a reminder that even the most committed politics of taste and vision are ultimately mediated and, more importantly, perhaps, regulated by an institutional architecture that absorbs curatorial “radicality” into its infrastructure while carrying out business as usual.
Of course, this does not mean that curators should stop taking up these positions atlarge and well-established art exhibitions. It does mean that we must reframe our expectations of what one individual curator, or even one curatorial team, can do within a deeply entrenched system of power and financial patronage – a system that, ultimately, the global art world is mired in.
Instead of asking: “Why couldn’t this curator deliver the revolution we wanted?”, therefore, we might ask: What were they structurally allowed to do? Where did they push beyond those limits, fully knowing the risk of doing so? How were they supported – or not – by the organisation, artists, and the public? Where could we have intervened collectively, rather than leaving them alone on the front line? This reframing is important because it helps shift our focus from one individual’s vision to the workings of a more communal and, therefore, shared, field of imagination and responsibility. It also opens the door to thinking about what is possible outside of the institution.
As an independent curator and founder of Mental Health Arts Space in Berlin, my politics are not a branding exercise. They are about how my space is configured, who it is for, and what forms of assembly and expression it makes possible. They are about how artists are paid, even in precarious conditions like the current extensive budget cuts in the arts. They factor into how we schedule events, taking chronic illness, care duties, and emotional capacity seriously. They determine how we host conversations that can hold pain and conflict without replicating institutional violence. Finally, they influence how we sustain relationships beyond a single project or grant cycle. When you work outside institutions, of course your leverage is different. You may not have huge budgets or global visibility, but you can often make decisions without asking for permission from a board of directors or patrons. This autonomy allows curatorial politics to seep into every layer of practice: from the wording of the concept and exhibition text, to holding space for marginalized groups through, e.g. BIPOC and queer-empowerment events, to how you carry out mediation with an artist or participant who has experienced conflict during the project.
Of course, there is the danger of romanticizing independence or “self-organized” forms of curating. Working outside of institutions and the “security” that institutional structures provide also means less financial safety, an increased chance of self-exploitation and burnout, as well as limited access to resources that could materially be re-distributed to support underrepresented or marginalized artists and communities. So, individual politics matter, but they operate within specific material conditions.