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The artist has a precarious status, while the curator and his/her staff have fix salaries. The curators in these positions of power often "forget" to answer the letters and the calls of the artist, who's left to his/her own devices in a profession with very few rights, political representatives and unions... This reflects not only an imbalance between two positions, but also shows how the managerial side of production is granted a much larger importance than the creative side. The venue's responsibility therefore also lies in helping to set up the conditions to remain creative, and giving the artist the time to voice their concerns or make a proposal in an artistic manner. Moreover, the language used in the symposium to speak about the fantastic institution was not so fantastic: it was rarely poetic and endlessly unsatisfied. It was perhaps intelligent, but at the same time heavily entangled in managerial detail. It therefore seems that it would be necessary for curators to adopt some of the tools artists have developed to make works, and thereby not solely remain in a "make it function" type of dynamic.
The language of the institution
So what about the artist in the curator? Why should their be such a division anyway? Nowadays artists are very educated: they move through institutions that provide them with academic language, which results in the creation of pseudo-scientific theories of art and discourse on art. The language these schools produce, as well as oftentimes being obscure and hermetic, as well as offering some beautiful insights, is a language of content. It does not hold within it the lightness of art. Rather, it is a language impregnated by knowledge and definition, aiming at categorisation, identification and definition by means of taking short cuts. With this language it's easy for artists to become the sad managers of their work, proud but unsatisfied. This goes hand in hand with the relatively new practice of defining the works before they are made, the so called "projects" all artists have to write up a year or two ahead of their inception. When the making of art becomes a circumvolution, it gets lost in
doubt. At the symposium they encouraged us to stay with the trouble. The trouble is to stay light, and not succumb to the weight and worries politics has laden us with. Institutions should follow and experience this lightness alongside the artist. It seems this is also part of the fantastic institution: to remain in the mist, the blurriness of artistic trouble. A clear, reassuring language, is therefore not necessarily adequate for art. There's enormous potential for the fantastic institution to reinvent the language it uses: how it speaks and shakes words, how it talks to people, how it invites them in, how it expresses what it's doing. The fantastic institution should continue being fantastic through its expression, its catalogues, its books, its magazines, its website, or in other ways: street art, gorilla posters, concerts in hot air balloons, manifestos...
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