Resistance to Theory: The Ideology of 'The Curatorial' and the History of Exhibitions

The number of books and PhD dissertations dedicated to the history of exhibitions in art history is constantly growing. Most of these publications originate from curatorial studies, a field that is only loosely connected to the discipline of art history. A striking feature of these texts is that “art works” are almost entirely absent, and more or less the same can be said for “the exhibition”. Instead of discussing the exhibition as such, these authors are interested in biographies (most of the time in fact hagiographies) of curators or descriptions of exhibitions, while avoiding theoretical questions about the status of exhibitions. My article deals with what I consider a major problem with these texts, i.e. the absence of a theory of exhibitions and the substitution of such a theory by the vague construct of “the curatorial”.I offer a symptomatic reading that looks at how different actors in the field of exhibition-making establish an understanding and discourse concerning exhibitions. This reading focuses on “the cura-torial”, which, even though it does not qualify as a theory in the proper sense, nonetheless performs the function of a theory in curatorial discourse. To be sure, the texts (by authors such as Beatrice von Bismarck, Maria Lind, and Jean-Paul Martinon) that I analyse do not constitute a cohesive notion of “the curatorial”, but they do exhibit some unifying aspects: the distinction between “curating” and “the curatorial”; the expansion of “the curatorial” to fields other than the exhibition; the claim of autonomy; and the understanding of “the curatorial” as an act of institutional critique. In this article I argue that the concept “the curatorial” functions less as an explanation of a certain prac-tice than as the reproduction of a certain consent and, accordingly, serves to regulate discourse. I analyse both the epistemological impact and interest of the construction of “the curatorial” as well as the context in which texts focusing on this concept are produced (which includes asking what consequences they have for art history proper).