A curator is a junction-maker, not just an arranger of objects

Obrist borrows a definition from novelist J. G. Ballard: a curator makes junctions. He expands this into a framework covering four kinds of connection a curator can build — between physical objects, between immaterial or conceptual works that emerged after art moved beyond objects in the 1960s, between what philosopher Michel Serres calls quasi-objects (things that only gain meaning through interaction), and between hyperobjects, phenomena like climate change that exceed ordinary scales of time and space.

He adds a fifth category of his own: junctions between people. Growing up as an only child in a geographically confined Switzerland, Obrist developed what he describes as an early, almost compulsive drive to connect people who wouldn't otherwise meet — artists with architects, scientists with poets. This social junction-making, he argues, is at least as central to curating as anything done with physical artworks.

Takeaway: Judge a curator's contribution by the unexpected connections they surface, not just by the objects they display.