Beware of Curator – Smithson Cultural Confinement

Beware of Curator

2021
Acrylic on cotton canvas
59 × 68 × 5 cm
RT4A2104
Courtesy of the artist


Audio
rt4a, Beware of Curator – Smithson Cultural Confinement, 2022, 08’30” ©rt4a

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Beware of Curator takes the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign and turns it, with humour, towards the museum. Once fixed outside houses, these signs made the dog the guardian of the home. Just as dogs watch over private property, the curator, in today’s sense of the word, has become the guardian of cultural heritage and of intellectual domains.

While protecting artefacts, curators may also, without meaning to, limit the freedom with which those artefacts can be read. Robert Smithson’s ‘Cultural Confinement’ (Artforum, October 1972, vol. 11, no. 2) asks the same question. Read by different AI voices, the text takes on many points of view, like the many readings that art invites and is often denied. It is as if these voices, each distinct, were all looking for a space of freedom, an escape from the ‘confinements’ of single narratives.


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