ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the first study of curating within the field of arts marketing. It historically grounds the contemporary curator as emerging out of the 1960s art world, and charts an emerging and expanded field of curating within a broader culture of “curatorial production”, made up of audience autonomy, customisation, self-expression, user-generated content, the reproduction of cultural products, and new forms of economic exchange, which have emerged in light of Web 2.0 and social media, and are set to expand with the advent of Web 3.0. The chapter connects these cultural shifts with the proliferation of identity politics and social silos as part of the so-called “culture wars”, and illustrates how new “art worlds”, made up of online communities with in-group values (both taste and ideological), are emerging as a result. The chapter concludes by highlighting the implications of these new forms of curatorial production for arts marketers, particularly in regards to understanding advanced (online) visual cultures, and highlights the role and importance of institutional curatorial practices, and in turn arts marketing, that lead to open rather than closed encounters.
