Curatorial counter-rhetorics and the educational turn

ABSTRACT

This essay will seek to introduce the broad context of this ‘educational turn’ in recent curatorial production. It will give particular attention to the associated curatorial counter-rhetorics, which seek to resist both a newly dominant economic instrumentalism and an older romantic humanism and their shared emphasis on heroic individualism. The discussion moves in three stages. It begins with an overview of experimental arts pedagogies within the academy that provide a backdrop against which to identify the recent emergence of an ‘educational turn’ within curating. The discussion then moves to a consideration of the counter-rhetorics set in play by the ‘educational turn’. Finally, the discussion concludes by identifying the challenge presented by the attempt to rhetorically construct collective agency within the highly contested reputational economies of contemporary culture.

KEYWORDS:

• educational turn
• curatorial rhetoric
• romantic humanism
• economic instrumentalism
• experimental art pedagogy
• reputational economies
• contemporary culture