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- David Barrie recently gave a thought-provoking lecture entitled "A Bigger Picture: why contemporary art curators need to get out more". He describes why a heritage-oriented mindset can result in constrained collections, noting that: "Despite our long colonial history and our rich links with countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean [...] visitors to museums and galleries in the UK have remarkably few opportunities to see art that is being produced in countries that lie outside the narrow confines of the so-called 'international contemporary art world'." He also skewers the myopic tendencies of some curators who "... neglect art that does not fit comfortably into their intellectual categories". He calls for curators to "get out more", escape the bonds of insularity, and be brave by broadening their own horizons. The text is simultaneously a call to action and an examination of conscience.

- A great interview with Carolee Thea by Richard J. Goldstein that reveals some of her thoughts on the biennial ("an exhibition structure beyond itself, an event that allows for very difficult subject matter"; "Its function, as defined by planners and curators, is to add intellectual capital"; "a component in spreading visual literacy"; etc) and the art market ("artists and curators are unavoidably affected by the onslaught of art fairs and consumerism"). (Thea's recent book of interviews with prominent curators, On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators also looks quite good.)

- "I'm not against the market. It's just that I'm against the way the market is overdetermining the art complex at the moment," Vasif Kortun says. "At the same time, we know full well that we provide almost a recruitment ground or a research and progress for the market at the same time. It would be quite ridiculous to say that the biennale is completely alien and independent of the market and its interests."

- Francesco Bonami once said "In theory now you could curate a whole Venice Biennale using only the Internet". The Guggenheim takes a few steps in that direction with YouTube Play, a contest to find the best online video works. Submitted videos will be assessed by a jury and the winners will be exhibited at Guggenheim Museums around the world, and of course, on YouTube.

- An article by Janine Armin on the New York Times articulates the current precarious position freelance curators find themselves in, and identifies the growth of biennials as a particular bright spot in opportunities for freelancers. I found Nicola Trezzi's article describing the growth of artist-curated exhibitions in FlashArt a good complement to Armin's article. While Armin's article quoted established curators explaining why freelancers are still very much necessary (even if it is difficult to be one), Trezzi's article can be viewed as taking those statements even further, reminding us of the multiplicity of reasons why or how someone would curate an exhibition, how it's a creative act in itself, and the value of the artist-curator viewpoint.

Welcome to this month's Pick 'N Mix.

- "Everyone's a Curator" is the theme of a recent item over at Bad at Sports. As they say: "Even Umberto Eco. I love what the Louvre is doing by signing him on as guest curator (as they have previously done with writer Toni Morrison and composer Pierre Boulez)". I've blogged about this exact thing at this exact place happening before, where I speak in a sombre fashion about the "rather serious role of cultural arbiter" that curators play.

- Everyone's a curator, which I suppose makes everyone stressed? File this under "slightly strange finds": an article on CNN Money ranking curator as one of the most stressful jobs around.

- Ah, no, I've got it wrong, the stress comes from all the ways there are out there to be ranked and turned into list-fodder! There's been lots of buzz (both positive and negative) about the ArtReview Power 100 list and Hans Ulrich Obrist, superstar curator, takes the number one spot. Meanwhile, Hyperallergic blog did a spoof list of the Top 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World, wryly listing "assistant curators living off $27,000 salaries, with $80,000 in grad school debt from a fancy curatorial studies program" in 7th place.

- The issue of private collector's exhibitions, especially in these uncertain financial times, won't go away. I read about it first on Tyler Green's blog. He quotes the position of AAMD executive director Janet Landay: "We assume that our members bring the same curatorial purpose to these exhibitions as they do to any other, ultimately to answer the question: 'Does this presentation support our mission and benefit our audiences?' Moreover, these exhibitions often have works of art not frequently seen by the public. So, the museum is providing an opportunity for audiences to experience and enjoy new objects that they otherwise wouldn't have the chance to see." Green says that: "Landay's comments miss the point. It is virtually impossible for shows from single private collections to have the same art historical or scholarly purpose as curator-generated exhibitions because they rely on a single, narrow source. Fluff shows are the opposite of curatorial purpose because by narrowly restricting a curator's view they limit curatorial freedom, investigation and inquiry. They are the primary means through which art museums devalue their curatorial departments." I have to say that I agree with Green, however the question is why are these exhibitions becoming more and more the norm rather than ostracised because of the impact they have on curatorial freedom that Green notes?

- There is a new issue of On Curating, check it out! The whole issue is terrific but my highlights were the essays "Avant-garde Institute" by Joanna Mytkowska and "Kinoapparatom presents: Other Spaces of Cinema" by Simone Schardt and Wolf Schmelter.

- I was also absorbed by "Curatorial Responsibility and the Exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian Political Art in Europe" an essay that was written for the catalogue of "Overlapping Voices, Israeli and Palestinian Artists", by curators Karin Schneider, Friedemann Derschmidt, Tal Adler, and Amal Murkus. I find their working difficulties sobering, and in the end their questions put top 100 lists and the opinion of CNN Money very much in perspective.

In like a lion, out like a lamb... welcome to March's Pick 'N Mix, a real mixed bag of treats this month:

- First of all, a postscript of sorts to last month's Pick 'N Mix, the "credit crunch edition": You've all surely read it by now, but in case you haven't, Holland Cotter's article, "The Boom Is Over! Long Live the Art!" in the New York Times is well worth a read. Complementing some of Francis McKee's comments that I quoted in last month's edition, Cotter writes: "Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing." Also, over at New Curator, there's an article on creative use of "slack spaces", which are some of the thousands of retail shops that have been vacated due to the credit crunch and not rented. As Pete at New Curator writes: "What better way to encourage economic stimulus than making sure commercial properties don’t fall into ruin and improving the image of the surrounding area?"

- I'm contemplating writing a whole article about "guest" curators and freelance curators, and their place in the market. Until then, maybe you can just read what I'm reading: an article on the American Association of Museums website called "The Stranger Among Us: Managing the Guest Curator Relationship", and an article by Sharon Heal entitled "Be My Guest" in the February issue of Museums Journal (sorry, the article isn't online! See if you can sneak a peek at Museums Journal at your local library or museum), the upshot of which is that it's a good idea to bring in outside experts in particular areas (for example, a milliner for a hat show) to curate temporary or permanent exhibitions.

- There's a good interview with the ever-interesting curator Nato Thompson at art:21. Favourite quote: "As much as the onslaught of cultural production over the last fifty years has radically altered capital’s relationship to aesthetics, it has also made us much more aware that knowledge has a form, and that there are a myriad of forms for the delivery of information and the production of knowledge. Basically, knowledge is a performance, whether it is the stage of the classroom, or the aesthetics of a typeface in a book, to the performance in a street, to a multi-channel video projection." A satisfying statement to unpick, which led me to ponder how curators perform knowledge.

- A brief article about the internationalism of the curatorial profession in the Japan Times: "Why Curators Stay at Home". To sum up, it asks why more Japanese curators are not "super curators", zooming around the globe, and the article comes up with the rather predictable answer that in order to be international, one must rack up a few air miles and be willing to exchange. Worth a read for the interview snippets with Fumio Nanjo, though.

- A fascinating piece entitled Whither Curatorial studies? is available on Artworld Salon. This piece rightly interrogates the existence of curatorial degree programmes and what they hope to accomplish and equip their students to do. "Undoubtedly the role of curator has been squeezed too narrowly between administration and dealmaking; but the travesty may be that curatorial studies programs fail to acknowledge this when they recruit students and collect their often sizeable tuitions. Shouldn't we then ask what sort of training curatorial programs are giving their students?" Of course, similar questions could be directed at so many fine art degree programmes and humanities programmes as well -- scores of artists leave art school without even knowing if their work fits into a commercial market or not, and if it does, what to do with that information. However, this essay at Artworld Salon is right to focus on curatorial studies, a field of study that, due the competitive jobs marketplace and varying contexts within which curators can work, demands much of those designing the curriculum.

- ...and, this just in: Nat Muller has reviewed the recent symposium at the Witte de With, "The Curators". A taste: "the curator as the new rock star, the self-proclaimed priests and priestesses of the art scene, the critics’ darlings or foes, the curator as genius, the curator as fascist, the curator as the icon we love to hate, or adore. It’s a lot of pressure…expectations were high."

P.S. Don't forget -- some of these articles don't stay online forever. If you want to refer to them in future, develop your own archiving system or use Evernote.

Welcome to January's Pick 'N Mix. I hope all readers had a great holiday and have big plans for 2009!

- Whether you have big plans for 2009 or not, here are some possible dates for your calendar: March 5-7, 2009. The excellent Witte de With contemporary art centre in Rotterdam is holding a symposium entitled "The Curators". It sounds terrific, especially the way they have balanced the programme of speakers. From their promotional text: "The practice of curating is a much discussed topic within the art world, but is often neglected by the media and thus remains largely invisible to the broader public. With our selection of speakers, we aim to put a wide range of faces to the often elusive and contested title of curator. Invited guests include freelancers, artist/curators and others fulfilling hybrid roles, curators working inside and outside of art institutions, those responsible for major international art events and those working on an intentionally local scale." For more info, check out the Witte de With's website.

- This recent interview with Ami Barak, the curator of ArtFocus 5, is especially relevant given the major news headlines of the moment on the escalating violence between Israel and Palestine. The article states: "When one is curating a large art exhibition in Jerusalem [...] One must deal with the conflicts this city generates for those working in it." Later, the curator says: "All the Palestinians we had invited didn't want to come - those from the territories and those with Israeli citizenships. They told us that they didn't wish to participate in an exhibition being held in 2008, Israel's 60th anniversary, and also because the exhibition was being held in Jerusalem. [...] I'm not criticizing them. They fear being a victim of manipulation and that they would be used for propaganda and demagogy, I can understand that." This is a fascinating interview that highlights the political role of the curator in a very candid way.

- The deadline for the De Appel curatorial programme in Amsterdam is fast approaching - January 31!

- A fascinating discussion about artist/curator ethics has been developing on the CRUMB mailing list. The debate covers the perennial topic of ethics around artists who also work as curators (and vice versa), and the methods of selection for exhibitions that are employed by such hybrid workers. You can read the thread online, although I highly recommend subscribing and also checking out CRUMB's work online!

Politically-aware artists marrying their activist tendencies to their creative expressions is a well-established practice. Festivals such as Artivistic and magazines, journals and blogs such as Art Threat, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and Visual Resistance have sprung up in recent years to support this fusion of politics and art.

Reflecting on this naturally led me to speculate on how curators insert their political visions into the exhibitions and events that they create. One could argue that curating is an inherently political act, especially vis à vis historically established exclusionary curatorial practices, and the larger uses of culture as part of a geopolitical agenda. For this investigation, however, I was solely concerned with how curators explicitly commented on the politics of our times through their exhibitions, not the inherent politics of curating itself. What follows are a few key examples that I discovered.

In 2006, Michael Dupuis curated an online exhibition for rhizome.org. Entitled The New Political Action, the exhibition examines the evolving sophistication of "political action". In fact, though Dupuis is speaking directly about political action becoming "conservative" and "institutionalized", one could extend that statement to address the general phenomenon of radical expressions by curators and artists being softened by conservative systems. Dupuis sees much potential in younger structures, such as the World Wide Web:

So long as the contemporary powers of "political action"� cannot infiltrate the largely decentralized structure of the worldwide web, new media holds immense potential for the advancement of the public discourse and art of a political nature. In this way, one can think of the mainstream media as the primary vehicle for contemporary "political action"� (PACs, 527s, etc.) and new media as a voice for an old style of political activism. This exhibit hopes to present and comment on such new media works in the scope of political action. The following works either embody the notion of political action/activism themselves, or address political action from an outsider's perspective.

Modern Art Notes had a great series of interviews with American curators on the subject of artists' responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Tyler Green interviewed MoMA curator Ann Temkin, Art Institute of Chicago contemporary art curator James Rondeau, and MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. The interviews are excellent and well worth a read. In response to Green's question about particularly effective artworks in response to 9/11, James Rondeau offers this:

Language seems more powerful than images somehow. One of the very best, and most succinct art works pertaining to 9/11 -- I have a version of it on a T-shirt I cherish and wear -- is by the great Kay Rosen. Her work, Missing (2002), seems to consist of the word "remember" doubled and stacked vertically (like the twin towers) but the letter "b" is missing. Admonishing us to not forget, reminding us of an irrevocable, almost invisible absence, the work is so subtle, so smart, so clear, so right.

In an interview with Dr. Kim Hong-Hee on Res Artis, Hong-Hee discussed how a strategy of difference and linking contemporary art to broader global discourses can open up some of the closed, conservative structures of the art world:

...a female curator with the virtue of tolerance and moral consciousness may be able to suggest a new standard of political art to overcome the contradiction of the conventional system of art world, by applying the strategy of difference. This can be realized by means of context-oriented exhibitions which link communal, geo-political and socio-historical elements to contemporary art, escaping from the format of mainstream exhibitions featuring renowned artists, exhibitions dependent on visual effects and techniques, and alchemical exhibitions based on formalism only. It is the ground provided by biennales and alternative spaces rather than museums and galleries where political norms of art can be experimented and embodied.

And last but not least, recently at the ICA in London, a roundtable discussion entitled Political manifesto as curatorial project was presented. The discussion seemed to highlight the power of politics at the centre of curatorial drive:

From the post-WWII era to Vietnam and 'the war on terror', curators have used the political issues of the day to create relevant and provocative exhibitions. The ICA has often been at the forefront of this practice, playing host to the politically controversial Unknown Political Prisoner exhibition in 1953, offering solidarity in the early 60s to LA artists protesting against Vietnam, and most recently inviting artists' proposals for a Memorial to the Iraq War (2007). In a time which is often described as apathetic, but which has also seen some of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever, should contemporary politics be the domain of the curator?

I believe the last question, "...should contemporary politics be the domain of the curator?" should unquestionably be answered in the affirmative. Curators are often uniquely positioned on the boundaries between conservative and radical worlds, and so their position to exact change and act as "translator" between worlds is immensely valuable. Or, as Dr. Hong-Hee put it, "a curator can raise certain issues and problems whereto an artist can react and respond thus generating a collaboration process".