Crosswords, problems and expectations of the curator of contemporary art exhibitions: a personal experience from the project Economy: Picasso

Abstract

The present investigation project is an attempt to try to deepen in the vicissitudes, in the curatorial decisions and in the ways to dialogue in an exhibition carried out by Valentín Roma, with the purpose to explore critically which are the roles, the working lines and the responsibilities of a curator of contemporary art. Because its complexity and its longitude in the time, the show chosen as a study case, that was entitled Economy: Picasso and which different phases were held in the Museu Picasso of Barcelona between May 2011 and February 2013, offers an authentic panoptic of each and every one of the problems (design, managing, production, and mediation) that affect the curatorship, for what it constitutes, as well, a perfect example where we can observe the dynamics of the cultural policies and its difficulties to fit in from of the institutional frameworks until the ideological usages of the artists, audiences and curators. In order to contextualize this study we have elaborated a short chronological assay about the recent history of the curatorial practices since the seventies to our days. From another hand, and to help defining Economy: Picasso, we performed four interviews with the different agents involved in the project. Besides realising a very exhaustive analysis, this investigation work aspires to establish a certain pattern of analysis about the contemporary art exhibitions that could be extensible to other exhibition cases and to other curators.

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