Curators are now the real artists, and artists are weak. But this needs to be reversed

As has been the case for many years for the “elected” curator on duty, the newly appointed curator of the Venice Biennale 2026 International Art Exhibition, Koyo Kouoh, is presented as if she were a super-director, a super-author, but in reality the art curator is not supposed to create anything: she is supposed to select, flank, facilitate and write.

Over the past three decades, the art curator has had an important function in selecting and sorting a multitude of artists and being able to assure the patrons of the best possible project. This strong personalization, in the presence of so many artists who are often weak because they are homologated and interchangeable, has resulted in weak exhibitions and projects where the result is a substantial void. This is because, on the one hand, the curator is not an artist, he is not a “creative author” who creates his own content, and on the other hand we have so many artists who are going through a transitional phase, a neo-Mannerist phase in which derivative and predictable languages fail to affect and be truly meaningful. What do you remember about the last big international exhibitions like Biennales, Documenta and Manifesta? Basically we only remember the name of the curator or curators. The works, which should be the protagonists, are lost in our minds in a big installation cauldron where nothing can be distinguished.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the curator played a fundamental role, because after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the opposition between the Soviet bloc and the Western bloc, from all over the world, as it happens in the political field, we see the growth of so many individualities, in our field, in particular, of artistic individualities that had to be managed and ordered in order to be able to realize the exhibition project. With the two crises that contemporary art went through in 2001 and 2008, the incidence and language of artists weakened enormously, and thus the art curator, while losing relevance in favor of the art gallery dimension (a new concentration camp of cultural and commercial instances), remained crucial in order to baste an art project or exhibition according to the demands of the client, whether public or private.

In early 2024 the new president of the Quadriennale di Roma, Luca Beatrice, who is also an art curator, was introduced; then in the spring the six curators who will produce as many exhibitions in 2025 were introduced; then a press conference was held to introduce them, but without yet naming a single artist; then again in the fall very glamorous black-and-white videos began to circulate on the Quadrennial’s social channels where the president and curators presented their idea of art and contemporary art, but still no sign of works and artists.

As was the case with the last Venice Biennale, the last Documenta in 2022, and the last Manifesta exhibitions, the Quadrennial will be presented with a very long list of artists that in a few years no one will remember. But we will probably distractedly remember the name of the curator and curators. Given the figures of the last Venice Biennale (out of 700,000 admissions, only 4,476 catalogs were sold), no one even buys the catalogs of these major events anymore, relegating the works and artists even more, if any were needed, to complete oblivion.

Warning: this is not about waging war on curators. The art curator can play a vital role in stimulating and facilitating artists and the best presentation of works. Often, I say this from my own experience, he or she becomes a key antithesis to the artist’s thesis, enabling them to arrive at excellent syntheses that the artist alone could never have found. Nevertheless, the figure of the curator cannot be confused with that of the film director or super artist, simply because it is not. Instead, one must focus on the reasons for the “weak” artist who is characterizing the last decade and how to get out of this transitional and neo-mannerist phase, but that is another matter.

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