New Paradigms of Curating Artworks

No matter what kind of cultural expressions evolve within our transient society, they won’t keep their shape for long. For the first time in our history we are confronted with change as a permanent condition of human life. This evokes another major shift: the material starts to give way to the immaterial, thus facilitating constant cultural flows.

In the following, I am presenting three scenarios of how these developments might influence traditional cultural forms in the near future: The final fullstop has disappeared from books. The author is not any more the prime authority of the editing of a written work. The notion of the book shifts from an object into an open editing platform, with the author as the “host” or provider of this platform. Editing, revising and updating the book is a shared endeavour by the author and his/ her readers. The readers also comment on what they read and compare it to similar works, thus creating new reference systems.
Also artworks shift from object to process. The gap between museums as institutions and museum-goers as individuals is getting increasingly smaller. Curators create new concepts to provide access to artworks. Users are interacting with completed and ongoing artwork, using their individual tags to curate/create private collections which can be taken home or accessed through the Internet. Art can be tagged the moment people see it, and they have the chance to move through linear and non-linear narratives to get to related works.
Communities produce multi-dimensional cultural expressions: while living culture is enacted by an individual or a group of people, it is communicated, preserved and disseminated at the same time. Communities are the curators of their own identity. Those identities are cultivated through a continuous flow of learning and forgetting, of storing and deleting, of interacting and neglecting. Thus, living cultural heritage will have become an integral part of digital culture – and vice versa.
This “vision” is about to shape our present life, as I have shown in the aforementioned examples. Isn’t this development exactly what Manuel Castells describes as a process which “shapes culture and gets shaped by it at the same time”?

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