THE JOURNAL OF ARTS MANAGEMENT,

LAW, AND SOCIETY, 40: 2742, 2010

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright
ISSN: 1063-2921 print / 1930-7799 online
DOI: 10.1080/10632921003638337

The Curator as Arts Administrator?

Comments on Harald Szeemann
and the Exhibition When Attitudes
Become Form
Christoph Behnke
Leuphana University Luneburg, Luneburg, Germany

In one of the first German language publications on arts management (the BadenBaden Kunstgesprache, or Art Talks, from 1959) the question was discussed, Is
modern art managed? The critics implied that the supposed managers of art had
managed the introduction and dominance of abstract art in Germany, which
was equivalent to saying that the commercial interests in the art trade had led the
managers to offer only this kind of art (in this case, it was Tachisme) in the market,
and particularly to have it shown in art institutions. That at any rate was the thesis put
forward, for example, at the documenta II by Hans Sedlmayr, who was one of the best
known German art critics in the 1950s and a prominent opponent of modernism (cf.
Sedlmayr 2006). Among those who rejected this thesis were Theodor W. Adorno,
Max Bense, and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. They argued that before art is sold in the
marketplace there is the nonmarket related activity of the artist, focused exclusively
on questions internal to art, and that this moment is not endangered by management.
In order to simplify this topic somewhat, which from todays perspective seems
quite complex, I would like to ask: Is modern art managed by curators? And
to further restrict the topic, I would like to concentrate on the specific historical
constellation around the year 1969. But first, if we are going to be able to judge
whether curators manage art, a few comments need to be made on the use of the
term arts administrator.
KEYWORDS artistic field, arts administrator, curator, deprofessionalisation, field
theory, Habitus, Harald Szeemann

Address correspondence to Christoph Behnke, Leuphana Universitat Luneburg, 21335 Luneburg,

Germany. E-mail: behnke@uni.leuphana.de

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The figure of arts administrator makes its historic appearance in the 1960s
in the U.S. Peterson (1986) contrasts it to the impresario, an individual often
lacking in professional qualifications who nevertheless, as a charismatic leader,
is able to bring about the reproduction of cultural institutions. His function was
to buffer the art world, where questions of aesthetic evaluation are primary, from
the world of business (ibid., 161). DiMaggio, making use of the terminology of
Peterson, completed the first empirical study of managers of the arts (DiMaggio
1987). He posited three different orientations or frameworks of action: an aesthetic
orientation, which reflects the specific symbolic capital of the art (in the sense of
Bourdieu), a managerial orientation, which is based on efficiency, market orientation, growth, and measurability of action, and finally, a social orientation, which
refers to education and the public (ibid., 74). Palmer (1998) used this typology to
examine how these orientations are distributed in private for-profit (PFP), private
not-for-profit (PNP), and public (PUB) institutions. In a more recent study that also
looks at the change from classical managerialismor Fordismto concepts based
on entrepreneurship, Mulcahy put forward a typology that partially overlaps with
DiMaggios but also has new elements. He distinguishes four types that are based
on two dimensions: coalition building and skilful use of rhetoric and symbols
(Mulcahy 2003, 176).1 The intendant, to apply the word Mulcahy has used, performs the traditional tasks of high culture, which are related to the reproduction of
cultural traditions; in the sense of Weber he is traditionally oriented; the impresario ensures the financial survival of an institution with the goal of short-term
successes and popular appeal: he acts charismatically; the managerialist tries
to improve the institutions financial situation and takes advantage of marketing
techniques, or tries to ensure the predictability of processes, with aesthetic innovations being pushed into the background (legal-rational); the entrepreneur seeks
to mobilize symbolic rhetoric to forge broad coalitions of stakeholders ready to
protect and promote the individual and societal values of the arts and culture as well
as their aesthetic integrity (ibid.). In this sense, entrepreneurs are, according to
Mulcahy, advocates of culture. We should note that this typology determines the
respective goal orientation of an actor and in a conflict could be opposed to each
other. A not inconsiderable advantage of such an empirically-based typology is that
under the umbrella arts administrators there are by no means only managerialistic personalities, but alsoand realisticallybehavioural objectives that escape an
economic mindset. There is then no such thing, in this perspective, as an arts administrator acting only as a manager. The entrepreneur, in particular, is not specifically
interested in profit maximization, but in the accumulation of artistic recognition.
Mulcalhy uses his typology of administrative leadership in cultural institutions
in order to analyse the role of arts administrators within different concepts of
cultural policy or support models for cultural production. In this typology, the arts
administrator is always at the same time a cultural policymaker. As a contractual
intermediary (ibid., 176) he is at the interface of different interest groups, each of

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29

whose language he must be able to speak. From a field theoretical perspective,2

the arts administrator primarily moves in three fields: first, the political field,
which is here a subfield of cultural policy; second, the field of cultural production
and each of the subfields such as, for example, the field of contemporary art
and, finally, the economic field together with the subfield of philanthropy, which
is especially important in the U.S. In order to gain a complete overview of the
activity sequences in arts management, Mulcahys typology would have to be
reformulated to account for these three fields, each of which follows its own logic.
In many respects curators of contemporary art are, according to these studies,
described as arts administrators, even though they would not use this term in
their own everyday language. Their sphere of action is found at the interface of
heterogeneous social subsystems such as culture, state, economics, education and
media; their range of work is that of a cultural entrepreneur (ibid., 175) and not
least as advocates of culture(ibid.). They must rise above their administrative
work and be able to see the big picture in order to develop a vision. In order
to take a first step in the analysis of the specific conditions of arts management
in the area of curating contemporary art, I would like to examine a particular
career narrative (that of Harald Szeemann), then posing the question whether this
career can be analysed with the tools of the sociology of professions and in which
relationship the professional roles are to the institutional framework that we find
in the curatorial practice. I then introduce a theoretical frame of reference to help
understand the most noticeable change processes at the end of the 1960s. In a
final section, I return to Mulcahys typology, paying particular attention to its
compatibility with field theoretical representations.
HARALD SZEEMANN CURATES WHEN ATTITUDES
BECOME FORM
Although biographical or person-centered representations are contested in the sociology of art, in the case of Harald Szeemann, the temptation is great to do just
that. The exhibition he curated in the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 entitled, When
Attitudes Become Form (Szeemann 1969), marks the beginning of a new format
in the history of curating, which became a kind of prototype for a new element of
exhibition practice of contemporary art. The revaluation of the curator, as a result
of Szeemanns curatorial practice, among the division of labour among artists,
gallery owners, critics, art institutions, and auction houses has been maintained
until today, even if the role of the curator in recent exhibitions is, due to the varied
demands of individual segments of the artistic field, a highly differentiated one.
When asked what his profession was, Szeemann answered: I am an administrator,
sensitive art lover, writer of prefaces, librarian, manager, bookkeeper, animator,
conservator, financial expert, diplomat and so on (Grammel 2005, 11). This gesture of distinction toward the bourgeois profession system based on specialization,

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and the clear signal that the curator Szeemann did not want to be exclusively active
as an arts administrator, should be considered in relation to his reinvention of the
curator as creator (Altshuler 1994, 236), with the exhibition When Attitudes
become Form as an example.
As Bourdieu said of Duchamphe moves in the world of art as a fish in
waterso too Szeemann, after his long stay in Paris, knew the whole field of
art, not only contemporary art but also the fraying of the art typical for the
1960s (Theodor W. Adorno). He invited 69 artists from the U.S. and Europe to
the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bern, which had appointed him in the early 1960s
at the age of 28 as the youngest museums director in the world (Muller 2006,
5). What was special about this new exhibition format was that it undermined
the studio-gallery-museum triangle: At the beginning of the 1960s it was still
usual that museum curators woulddressed in grey suits with ties in the style of
the organization man of William Whyteappear in ateliers or galleries and by
pointing his finger at a work of art show the artist what he wanted to exhibit (Szeemann 2007, 27; Heinich and Pollak 1996, 236). Szeemann invented the invitation
exhibition where not works of art, but artists, are chosen for an acknowledged
institution of the visual art world. In a five-day production and set-up phase, the
Kunsthalle was transformed into a production hall in which artists themselves
were responsible for the quality of their work. The exhibition is remembered for
the works of art that were so controversially discussed, also in the press, including
Michael Heizers Berne Depressionhe used a wrecking ball to destroy part
of the sidewalk in front of the Kunsthalle; the poster illegally put up by Daniel
Buren, which led to his arrest on opening day; Joseph Beuyss grease corner;
a three-day hike by Richard Long in the Bernese Highlands; Lawrence Weiner,
who removed a square meter of wall space; and works from Richard Artschwager,
Mario Merz, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, etc. (Szeemann 1969; Altshuler
1994). An amazing percentage of the artists in this exhibitionmany of them
at the time emerging artistswent on to an international career in the following
decades. Not the least of which was participation in the famous documenta 5,
which Szeemann curated as General Secretary, now however with a modified concept in which the laissez-faire approach towards his artists was replaced with
the controlling operations of his direction (Szeemann 2007, 27). Attitudes was an
artistic spectacle, with over a thousand visitors at the opening and not a day in the
following weeks passing without a heated debate in the newspapers.
In order to understand why Szeemann chose this format for the invitation
exhibition, we would have to take a closer look at the art that came for the first time
to a recognized institution of the art system for exhibition in the Attitudes show.
It was also unusual that apparently completely heterogeneous artistic positions
could appear together in a common exhibition: minimal art, land art, conceptual
art, arte povera, antiform, to give just the most important names circulating at
the time. The most intellectually demanding art, which in the following decades

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31

could claim for itself a leading role in the whole art system, was represented
by the conceptual artists. By rejecting any sort of referentiality of art with such
dictums as Art has nothing to say, attracting attention and reviving a tradition
in the art of the 20th century that Duchamp had commenced with his attack on
the hegemony of the visual, they forced a break with an aesthetic oriented
toward an everyday perception. A number of conceptual artists were educated in
philosophy and through their readings of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty arrived
at a linguistic definition of artistic practice. Art works were to be understoodin
the words of Joseph Kosuthas analytic propositions (Kosuth 1990), allowing
art objects to lose their fetish-like status and foregrounding the processual aspect
of art. Seth Siegelaub, who strongly influenced Szeemann (Grammel 2005, 23),
also curated exhibitions in the form of publications containing descriptions of
the art objects (Altshuler 1994, 238). Art history talks about dematerialization
when characterizing this phase of avant-garde art (Foster et al. 2004, 534; Lippard
1973). Szeemann, with his new exhibition format, gave leading artists of the day
the chance to present their idea of art, with the presentation inevitably turning
into an event or situation. The objects may have been presented but they rejected
their meaninglessness due to fetishizing. Meaning has been created through the
process character of artistic production. This production itself became the object
of the reception.3 The artistic strategy was directed not least against the illusion
of the pure gazein the sense of a naked eye (which) is an attribute of those
who wear the spectacle of culture and who do not see that which enables them
to see, any more than they see what they would not see if they were deprived
of what enables them to see (Bourdieu 1993, 217).4 An important effect of this
new form of presenting art was that the interest in the reception of the exhibition
was not in the individual artist but in the exhibition maker, Szeemann, who was
the person in charge and so was able to become the object of a personality cult
(Szeemann 1991, 218). Although he incurred the wrath of the bourgeois public,
this event was the beginning of a possibility of viewing the curator as a cultural
prophet (Bourdieu). At the time of the Attitudes exhibition, Szeemann was still
employed by the Kunsthalle Bern. After the altercation about the exhibition, a
committee of local artists was set up to control Szeemanns activities. And a short
time later they refused to allow him to put on a solo exhibition with Joseph Beuys.
Szeemann handed in his resignation and became a freelance curator, founded the
Agency for Intellectual Guest Labour, and began an extremely successful career
as an independent curator of contemporary art. An important detail that is seldom
mentioned in art historical or art theoretical studies of art in the 1960s concerns the
financing of the exhibition. Szeemann reported that people from Philip Morris
and the PR firm Ruder and Finn came to Bern and asked me if I would like to
do a show of my own. They offered me money5 and total freedom. I said yes,
of course. Until then I had never had an opportunity like that. Usually I was not
able to pay the shipping costs . . . so getting this funding for Attitudes was very

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BEHNKE

liberating for me (Altshuler 1994, 254). Asked about the motives for financing the
exhibition, the president of Philip Morris Europe answered that (the) key element
shared by the new art and the business world is innovation. More than this he
saw the support of experimental art as an integral part of his firms commercial
function(ibid.). Without Philip Morris there would have been no exhibition, the
title of which by the way was a suggestion by the PR agency Ruder and Finn
engaged by Philip Morris (ibid., 244). Not only did the Attitudes exhibition, with
its innovation in curatorial presentation exhibit, concept art for the first time in a
legitimate art institution, it was also the first exhibition in which the art sponsoring
concept was tested for contemporary art.
From the perspective of an internal reconstruction of the conditions of the
artistic field as outlined above, the curatorial activities of Szeemann are based on
his deciding, through his familiarity with the artistic positions of the 1960s, to
cooperate with a group that still needed to be established in the field. For this
group he found an appropriate exhibition format and at the same time achieved
a revaluing of the position of curator, making him more publicly visible, which
was then codified in an institutionally independent, freelance role, similar to
one of artistic freedom. In terms of Bourdieus field theory one could formulate
that when conceptual art entered the subfield of restricted cultural production, the
specific symbolic capital of the artists needed to be multiplied by an event-oriented
curatorial practice if the visibility of their artistic production was to be guaranteed.
That was the chance that Szeemann seized. At the centre of his curatorial activities
is the construction of an artistic event based on the intimate knowledge of the
artistic field. That he was successful with this exhibition is shown not least in the
actors at the centre of the art field dealers, museums, and art critics travelled to
Bern in order to witness the birth of a new art (Szeemann 1991, 218). In order to
establish such a practice, Szeemann increasingly avoided working together with,
or using the infrastructure, of art institutions, instead offering the exhibitions as
a package to the very same institutions. By realizing projects with his own
institution (Agency for Intellectual Guest Labour) and with his team, he took on
tasks belonging to an arts administrator.
DEPROFESSIONALISATION OR PROFESSIONALISATION?
In their article, From museum curator to exhibition auteur, inventing a singular
position, Natalie Heinich and Michael Pollak surprise their readers with the
thesis that, considering the large, multidisciplinary exhibitions in Centre Pompidou
since 1977, the position of the curator has undergone a deprofessionalisation,
making out of the curator a creator (Heinich and Pollak 1996, 238). Their rather
positive evaluation of this process results from their view that while the rules
of the professional system described by Parsons and Weber had in this case lost

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33

their influence, a new occupational role had instead been made possible, one
that they called, with reference to French film production, exhibition auteur.
They advance two main arguments for this deprofessionalisation: easier access
regulation and changed career patterns. Among the most influential morphological
factors that have changed the area of curating are, according to Heinich and
Pollak, the rising number of posts, the extension of the recruiting criteria, and the
circumstance that the number of exhibition venues has greatly increased since the
1960s. The changed scope of duties in curating is related to the increased demand
for exhibitions, one that can be met with the format of temporary exhibitions.
While the traditional work of the curator involved the conservation and archiving
of cultural heritage, the development and enlargement of collections, scientific
research (production of knowledge about the collection), and finally presentation
of the collection (Heinich and Pollak 1996, 235), his work shifts to exactly the same
degree as the institutions of art are forced to increase their exhibition activities,
especially their temporary exhibitions. However, since museum curators consider
presenting the collection as more of a lower activity in their profession, it is done
in a rather careless fashion and the new demands placed on this work cannot
be rejoined with the traditional professional role of the curator. The career was
defined by the progress in scientific research and an encyclopedic recording of the
collection inventory. The curator has now to not only select artistic work, undertake
organizational tasks to acquire the works and install them, but also to give a
conceptual framework, manage employees and finally publish an encyclopedic
catalogue. The polyvalence of these functions with a focus on presentation is
related to an enlarged administrative role (Heinich and Pollak 1996, 236), which
explains why the recruiting rules for curators specified by the institution museum
have also been extended, permitting, according to Heinich and Pollak, a group of
career changers to enter exhibition work from other professions, especially in the
area of contemporary art.
If you compare what I consider to be the prototypical Attitudes exhibition with
the descriptions that Heinich and Pollak give of the exhibitions6 that were typical
in the decades afterwards, then it is evident that the change process they describe
as deprofessionalisation could already be found in the Attitudes exhibition. The
classic museum curator commits himself to an institution and expects in return a
certain career as determined by the professional system.7 In the case of Szeemann
the exhibition format of Attitudes established the freelance position that he was
later to take up. From the perspective of a freelancer, the rigid recruiting rules for
the career of a curator are suspended. Although Szeemann had earned a PhD in art
history, during his stay in Paris he was primarily interested in theatre, and before
his appointment in Bern he had little experience of a curatorial sort.8 With Attitudes
Szeemann established, in the best sense, the position of exhibition auteuran
authorial position of the curator (Grammel 2005), in which the institution as core
of the professional system fades into the background. In addition, the construction

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of the exhibition as an eventan idea that emerged from the context of conceptual
artis an affront to the institution as a container for cultural sacred goods
(Weber), which are to be integrated into encyclopedically ordered collections. The
hierarchical institution recedes and becomes a stage for the exhibition makerfor
documenta 5, for example, Szeemann showed his Individual Mythologies; the
format of the temporary exhibition is in this sense not just a way of increasing
the frequency of exhibitions, but as a specific event, it no longer needs to be
compatible with the collection inventory of the house.
Finally, the external intervention of Philip Morris brought a further actor into
the game, one who also questioned the traditional system of reproduction by institutions of high culture, namely by subverting the monopoly that state institutions
had in holding exhibitions. The Attitudes exhibition would not have been possible
without the generous financial support of Philip Morris. It is also possible that
Szeemann would not have had the perspective of a freelance career without this
experience.
Important changes in the art world are basedas could be seen in our example
of the invention of the curator as creatoron morphological restructurings.9
As a rule when there is a change in size, the result is a professionalisation of the
actors or a reinvention of posts that have not yet been completely regulated. The
exhibition auteur is such a reinvention, which can first be understood in its own
special characteristics when the particular logic of contemporary art at the end of
the 1960s is taken into consideration. Szeemann presents a new professionalism,
which continues as the old figure of the impresario that Peterson saw at an end
in the 1960s, no longer as part of a division of labour with the artistic director
(buffering the art world), but as an exhibition auteur with an impressive
array of knowledge about the art world at his command. Also in this regard,
talk of a deprofessionalisation seems to me misleading in that the profession
of museum curator, especially in France, was until the 1960s only minimally
restricted by regulations (Bourdieu and Darbel 1990, 96ff.), so that the exhibition
of contemporary art often was not a part of the work of this group. From this point
of view an exhibition practice that was a part of a classical professional system and
was particularly able to serve contemporary art was only sporadically developed.
Szeemann took this responsibility and as an impresario made this exhibition
possiblenot in the name of an institution but as an entrepreneur himself. How
this new impresario fits into a typology as arts administrator will be addressed
in the last section of the paper.
A NEW HABITUS ARISING
I would now like to make an attempt to place the changes in curatorial practice
initiated by Szeemann in a more general context. The methodological decision

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35

at this point is to present his actions not only as the result of a rational goal
orientation but to reconstruct his strategic interests from a correspondence of the
habitus with the situative conditions. As we shall see, we are in a phase when the
habitus is realigning as a result of changed social conditions. This means trying out
a method that is rarely encountered in a discipline still dominated by the rational
choice model. In other words, the reasons for Szeemanns creative activities are
to be located in his personal make-up (disposition), as well as in reference to his
specific context (position).
In a reply to a text by Benjamin Buchloh on conceptual art with the title, From
the Aesthetic of Administration to Institutional Critique (Buchloh 1990), Seth
Siegelaub, whose important role for Szeemann has already been mentioned, wrote:
It is hard to imagine how one can deal with that period without mentioning . . .
for example, May 68 or the U.S. War in Vietnam, which marked the period,
even the art world (Siegelaub 1990, 257). I would like to use this criticism
of a formalistic art history as an opportunity to point out a further aberration
concerning the events in art at the end of the 1960s. Artists in the tradition of
aesthetic modernism/postmodernism are used to realising their art without external
demands. Siegelaub maintains that there was such an influence in this period of
time. It was a time in which rule violations and an increase in the level of criticism
took hold of all of society. In retrospect, we can speak of an elective affinity
(Weber) among all of these activities, which had a starting point in the schools
and universities (Bourdieu 1990, 161ff.).10 One of the best known theories in
sociology to explain elective affinities is the habitus theory of Bourdieu, which
profited from Erwin Panofskys work on gothic architecture. Panofsky spoke of
mental habits, which he saw as based on a whole body of fundamental schemes
that had been assimilated beforehand (Bourdieu 1974, 143; cf. also Holsinger
2005, 94ff.). Panofsky was searching for the modus operandi that would allow
him to connect the thinking of theologians with the Gothic building style. In more
general terms, a system of interiorized dispositions determinesaccording to this
theoryall typical thoughts, perceptions, and actions of a society, and only of
this society. Are there then in the case of Szeemann dispositions that make him a
certain kind of manager of the arts and that we can at the same time consider to
be typical mental habits of the 1960s, and that do not originate exclusively from
the inner logic of the artistic field?
Rule violation, because it departs from the practiced script, seems to be a
counterexample of the determining power of habitus. We are discussing here an
example of a how doxic certainties can be shaken, how a heretical protest against
cultural hierarchies is raised (Bourdieu 1990, 279), denouncing status authority
and proclaiming self-fulfillment and creative power as new leading values. For a
short moment in history, it seemed that the corset of habitus could be loosened,
as if an individual freedom was actually both possible and practicable, one which
cultivated a violation of rules. The actual social revolution, however, was not in an

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erosion of habitus, but in an adaptation of habitus to the new social demands. This
change in mentality was analysed decades later in Boltanski and Chiapellos 2005
study of the new spirit of capitalism taking into account the particular importance of
the artistic population. In their sociology of criticism, which distinguishes between
artistic and social criticism, it becomes clear how important the productivity of
criticism was in the 1960s and the following years was, especially for the world
of management, and that it is today still a crucial part of the habitual constitution
of the economic elite.
Which role did art, that is, the curator, play in this dispute, which can also
be seen as a struggle between overlapping habitualized schemata? Art became
interesting for a broader audience not only because of rising levels of education,
but also because the art of the 20th century is characterized by a permanent disruption, which as a symbolic practice gained particular importance in the 1960s in
other social fields. So far, the increased interestand especially in contemporary
artcannot only be grounded in education effects. It is also due to a structural
homology, which made art interesting to actors who would otherwise not have
sought access to it. On the other hand, the art world reacted to the habitual upheavals in the society. The thesis of Siegelaubwhich I shareis that conceptual
art is affected by political events, that it could only have developed its specific
characteristics in this climate of habitual radical change. Conceptual art is in its
beginnings antiinstitutional, because it rejected the museum of classical art works
and instead celebrated the event of art and so destroyed its relationship to the
collection. It is antibourgeois, because it rejects the education elites expectations
about the reception of the pure gaze. It foregrounds the artistic production and
thus the ideas of self-fulfillment and creativity that are opposed to the authoritarian
educational apparatus, and ultimately, conceptual art serves the type of attention
economy (the situation) that had formed in the protests of the student movement
(for example, in the happening). But the institutional apparatus of art was caught
up for a short moment in the turmoil.11
In the Attitudes exhibition, we can find all of the motives of conceptual art
that I have sketched here. Szeemann represents as a person the special conditions of the habitual orientation in the period of time being discussed here. In a
dialectical formulation, Bourdieu speaks of the events of May 1968 as having a
triggering effect because a habitus capable of being affected by that event gave
it that power to effect it (Bourdieu 2004, 190). During his studies, Szeemann
did prepare himself for a career in an institution,12 however, apparently his artistorientated activities add up in a habitual schema that finds the ordering function
of the institution as a restriction of personal freedom. Szeemann thus changed at
the beginning of the 1960s from the necessity of positioning in a cultural field to
the need to practice a bohemian lifestyle such as he learned in Paris. The atmosphere of criticism and subversion finally led him to develop these dispositions of
his person in an environment of contemporary art. This meant that his interpretation

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37

of the role of a curator was anti-institutional, antibourgeois and above all emancipatory. He stresses the homology between artistic and curatorial work and sees his
staging of art as an artistic event itself, which is why the model of self-fulfillment is
not only valid for the artist but also for the curator as creator (Grammel 2005, 28).
In this sense Attitudes is not only about the inner attitude of the artist, which is
elevated to the object of the reception, but also the attitude of the curator. This helps
us to understand how Szeemann was able to unite the many professional roles we
mentioned aboveby means of a production schema that always structures, like
a compass needle in a particular direction, the practically important knowledge
and thus also routinizes in a time dimension. With reference to the events of May
1968, he interprets the role of the curator as self-fulfillment, allowing him to be
an advocate of culture, a scholarly impresario who as an entrepreneur is able to
initiate a reinterpretation of the role of the curator as artist-curator.
THE VARIOUS GAMES PLAYED BY ARTS
ADMINISTRATORS
I now go back to the discussion of the typology of the arts administrator. The micrological perspective taken here of a particular scenario in the history of curating
cannot be more than a small building block that might be used to reconstruct patterns of professional roles in arts administration. Just by enlarging our perspective
to include all of the exhibitions curated by Szeemannas opposed to only focusing
on the Attitudes exhibitionwould complicate our findings greatly. In this article,
I am attempting to determine in which context management in art takes place and
with which methods we can best analyse it. Typologies can be helpful in this context in order to distinguish role types. Finally I would like to relate the activities
of Szeemann with the four types of arts administrators put forward by Mulcahy.
The arts administrator as intendant, who safeguards the cultural tradition of a
particular aesthetic canon, is personified in the classic museum curator described
by Heinich and Pollack. Szeemann questions this position. Strengthened by the political events of the 1960s, Szeemann organizes, in a short time, the transformation
of the museum into a place of production of art. From a field theory perspective, the
intendant in the logic of the cultural field satisfies the interests of the established
avant-garde, while in the political field he represents the rhetoric of preserving
tradition. In the struggles for artistic recognition, the position of the intendant is
challenged by the bohemian avant-garde, in which emerging artists gain visibility. The success story of conceptual art in the following decades clearly shows
that Szeemann does not essentially defy the rules of the game in the art worldon
the contrary, he ensures the stability of the cultural heritage, in a rule-violation
strategy typical for the art of the 20th century, only to become himself a part of
the established avant-garde in the art system without, however, taking on the

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role of the intendant as he was a freelance curator, even if in his later years he had
an institutional relationship with the Kunsthaus Zurich. The intendant is mainly
oriented towards the cultural field and only acts in the political and economic field
when there are strategic reasons that make such an engagement necessary.
The arts administrator as impresario, who above all finds financial resources
to support cultural institutions and projects, describes part of the activities of
Szeemann. In particular, his contacts with potential sponsors made it possible for
him to put on a great number of exhibitions. While the impresario, as described
by Peterson, is well acquainted with dispositions that are used in the spheres of
high culture, he lacks the aesthetic competence to be an actor who is able to
take decisions on his own concerning the exhibition policy of an art institution. By
contrast, Szeemann represents the type of a scholarly impresario, whose network is
primarily made up of knowledge of artistic currents and less of a group of wealthy
philanthropists from the upper class. In this sense Szeemann functions primarily
as an impresario for the artists. His role as a charismatic leader is made possible by
the new format of exhibitions and the needs of the attention economy, which made
him the object of a personality cult. The impresario of earlier times acted on the
basis of a network in the political field, while the type epitomized by Szeemann
draws his potential from his connections to the artistic fieldand especially from
his knowledge of the segment of emerging artists. This changed context results in
a changed relationship with the institution. While the impresario as described by
Peterson ensures the continuity in the work of a cultural institution, Szeemann as
artist impresario introduces a nomadic use of the institution. He professionalizes
the impresario by allowing him to act on the basis of his aesthetic competence.
The arts administrator as managerialist also describes part of the activities
of Szeemann. In particular, the idea of letting an agency offer exhibitions as a
service in a process similar to outsourcing (Attitudes initiates this process though
it is still organised under the roof of the art museum in Bern) entails work that
involves increasing efficiency, lowering costs, marketing, etc. The choice of organizational form is not, however, mainly due to the goal of acting in a managerial
fashion. The de-institutionalising of the curator from the museum is an artistic decision with the consequence that certain organized processes that had previously
been overly-bureaucratized can now be dealt with in a managerialist fashion. The
arts administrator who is equipped with managerialist competences enjoys in the
political field greater recognition than in the cultural field, where management
techniques cease to be understood as a threat to the status quo. Szeemann personifies a part-time manager who through his aesthetic competence gains a capacity
to act in the cultural field.
Finally there is the role of the cultural entrepreneur, which can perhaps be best
associated with Szeemann, whereby in this case the profit maximization consists
in the accumulation of artist recognition from his peers. Szeemann incorporates
the entrepreneur in the history of curation, for the first time and prototypically.

THE CURATOR AS ARTS ADMINISTRATOR?

39

His work involves conceptual, project-oriented thinking and the entrepreneurial

management of the project. As the art world in the 20th century has developed its
dynamic through innovation, the special contribution of Szeemann as entrepreneur
was the invention of the artist-curator, who in relative independence from museums
could stage the innovation potential of art in a new fashion. It should be emphasized that this figure of entrepreneur, insofar as it incorporates self-realization,
authenticity, creativity, mobility, and flexibility, is one of the achievements of the
recoded habitus of the 1960s and thus cannot be understood exclusively as an
invention arising from the inner logic of the art field; but at the same timein
the special way it was affected by the events of the 1960sit had repercussions
in other fields. In the art field the role of the entrepreneur is familiar, because
artists in aesthetic modernism have alwaysto the extent that they had to create
something newacted as entrepreneurs. That the curator could act in a similar
way is something new. While Szeemanns reinvention of the curator in the political
field at first brought forth feelings of uncertainty, the political field today uses the
rhetoric surrounding the entrepreneur in order to find a role model in art for the
capitalism of creative destruction described by Schumpeter.
The museum as institution loses in this context its monopoly of presenting an
art based on the canon of art history and lets the curator as creator stage a personcentred, event, or spectacle-orientated exhibition of art, in which the recipient is
no longer obliged to follow the imperatives of the institution but is guided by
his own subjectivity. We are in the middle of what in the Parsonian tradition is
called the expressive revolution (cf. Turner 2005). Self-realization, creativity,
and authenticity enter society and the dispositions of its actors are seen as new and
positively connotated values. This is the point where the Attitudes exhibition is defined. Szeemann creates a structure of artistic production and distribution, in which
these new leading values can be clearly seen, pervading society and thus gaining
further attraction. Sedlmayrs objection to the supposed managers of the arts, who
pushed abstract art out of economic interests, reveals himself displaying, in the
light of our analysis, a resentment against aesthetic modernism, formulated in ignorance of the specific conditions of the artistic field, in which economic motives
are notat least in the example we have describedpredominant.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author is grateful for the translation from German to English by Paul Lauer.
Notes
1. Mulcahy has borrowed these dimensions from Jameson Doig and Erwin Hargroves
edited collection of biographical studies of bureaucratic leadership. See Leadership and
Innovation: A Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government (1987).

40

BEHNKE

2. I here refer to the pertinent publications by Pierre Bourdieu and the impact of his
field theory on arts sociology (Bourdieu 1996, 21477; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992,
94114).
3. . . . never was the inner attitude of the artist so directly turned into a work (Szeemann
1991, 214). This change in the object status of art has been discussed for the first time in
connection with minimal art as theatralisation of art. In the formulation the event aspect
of art is emphasized. Cf. Michael Fried. 1968. See Art and Objecthood in Minimal Art:
A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock, 11647. New York: E. P. Dutton.
4. The opposite conclusion that conceptual art does not need decoding has been rightly
called nave by Benjamin Buchloh: The extremely radical naivety of concept art is based
on the illusion that the transformation of art work in a linguistic and textual intervention
would necessarily involve more readers and a more complete politicisation of cultural
practice (Buchloh 1997). It is hard to believe that an art that knew better than any other
direction that art itself is produced in the moment of perception did not take account
of the break with the everyday perception of the recipient and could not anticipate the
hermetic, and to some extent esoteric, effect on the mass public.
5. The financial support amounted to a total of 100,000 Swiss francs (cf. Szeemann 1991,
218)
6. Their article was based on a more precise analysis of the exhibition VienneNaissance
de Si`ecle, which took place in the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1986. See Heinich and
Pollak (1989).
7. In Germany, e.g., in the steps Kustos, Oberkustos, Hauptkustos, Museum Director.
8. Another example is Jean Leering, 19641973 Director of the Stedelijk Van Abbe
Museum in Eindhoven. He came to contemporary art from architecture.
9. Cf. the classic study of White and White (1993) on this subject.
10. In this context, it is not an external analysis of art as it is attempted in a certain variety
of art sociology (e.g. Lucien Goldman, Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser), the attempt to
demonstrate a mirroring of society in art. External determinants within a field take on
specific forms. Mental habits create structural homologies, which can however only with
the help of a refractive effect (Bourdieu) be disseminated in a field.
11. Take for example Takis Vassilakis removal (art jacking) of his own work of art, TeleSculpture, from an exhibition in the MoMA with the title The machine at the end of the
mechanical age. It was taken to the garden of the museum, which had already been declared neutral territory. Or think of the legendary exhibition with the title Information
in MoMA, which was not organised by a curator but by the artists themselves (totalling
140). Not least, artists such as Hans Haacke or Daniel Buren, who today are put by art
historians in the category institutional critique, found their interests not through developments internal to art but because they brought the atmosphere of criticism into art and its
institutions.
12. He concludes his studies with a classical topic from art history: The beginnings of
modern book illustration: The book illustration of the Nabis (1960).

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Copyright of Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd. and its
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