ABSTRACT

Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum investigates the art museum as a space where the contemporary is staged – in exhibitions, collecting practices, communication, and policies.

Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum traces the art museum back to the postwar era. Including contributions by established and emerging art historians, academics and curators, the book proposes that the art museum is engaged in the contemporary in a double sense: it (re)presents contemporary art, while the contemporary condition itself also has a significant impact on art and the museum that houses it. Presenting a diverse range of international cases of exhibitions and curatorial practices, which hail primarily from Europe and Scandinavia, the essays examine the politics of staging “national”, “international”, and “global” framings of modernism, as well as the new public spaces shaped in digital practices and changing political frameworks. The book investigates both the seminal and the unknown exhibitions and institutions that created contemporary art as we know it today.

Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum provides a historical perspective on the museum of contemporary art. It constitutes a step towards differencing the canon of modernist and contemporary art and a more complex understanding of the politics of curating the contemporary in the art museum, why it will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, curating, exhibitions, and art history.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum

chapter - I|4 pages

The Curatorial Now

Performing the Museum

chapter 3|11 pages

After Institutions

chapter 5|12 pages

Collaborative Curating

Questioning Value Production in the Art Museum through the Project 7 Walks

chapter 6|14 pages

NowHere

The Curatorial Contemporary

chapter 8|15 pages

Torpedoes and Trees

Staging the Modern Art Collection at the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

chapter 9|14 pages

The Politics of Contemporary Art Museums

Calouste Gulbenkian's Modern Collection in Lisbon

chapter 11|13 pages

Contemporaneity as a Curatorial Approach

Black Models in New York, Paris, and Guadeloupe

chapter 12|11 pages

In the Ruins of the Present

Arte Contemporanea at the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, 1944–45 1

chapter 15|13 pages

Curating Contrasts

Retrieving Solidarity from the Archives

chapter 17|13 pages

“That's Why We Call It a Model” – Restaging Exhibitions and Participation

Palle Nielsen's The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society, 1968/2014