Ways of Curating

Obrist's case is that the modern idea of curating as tasteful object-selection badly undersells what the practice actually does. Drawing on his own path from staging a kitchen exhibition at twenty-three to running hundreds of international shows, he argues that curating is fundamentally about connection-making — between artworks, between historical moments, between disciplines like science and art, and above all between people who wouldn't otherwise be in the same room. The word's Latin root, curare, means to take care, and Obrist treats that etymology as a mandate: the curator exists to serve the artist's vision, not to compete with it or override it with a personal thesis.

The book matters because "curating" has become a nearly meaningless buzzword applied to everything from playlists to retail displays, which Obrist sees as diluting a discipline with real intellectual and historical weight — one that runs from seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities through the twentieth century's shift from object-based art to conceptual and immaterial work. Recovering a serious sense of what curators actually contribute, he argues, matters for anyone trying to understand how ideas move from private inspiration into public experience.

Who should read it

This suits practicing or aspiring curators, artists wondering how to collaborate productively with institutions, and anyone curious about how major exhibitions get made behind the scenes. General readers hoping for a tidy how-to guide may find its anecdotal, name-dense style more memoir than manual.

About the author

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss curator and writer, co-director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, who has organized several hundred exhibitions and conducted thousands of hours of recorded conversations with artists and thinkers.