Cultural Management

2024/2025

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

3

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Department of Philology

Course type:

Compulsory course

When:

2 year, 3 module

Course Syllabus

Abstract

Curating is one of the most recent professions to emerge within the modern art system. A curator’s principal medium is the art exhibition, which enables him or her to engage creatively and recognisably in various public discourses on art and culture; to make arguments; to represent trends or highlight or connect particular developments; to promote a specific agenda; and, to make intellectual claims and professional stakes in the field. Stemming from the museum world, curating as a profession took shape in contemporary art in Western Europe during the socially turbulent late-1960s. This course considers how the curatorial profession emerged and has evolved over the last fifty years, including its social, institutional, artistic, and economic foundations and implications. It explores how this professional practice presently reproduces and (critically) theorizes itself through educational institutions, specialised periodicals, and public forums. The course begins with a historical and theoretical introduction to the emergence and modernisation of an art exhibition as a social practice within the larger development of the modern art system in the West and Russia. Each seminar includes a historical/theoretical section, during which students will discuss texts (articles, chapters, reviews and the like) on the subject, provided in advance by the course tutor. In addition, Seminars 2–5 will incorporate examination of significant examples of different types of curatorial exhibitions (‘Case-studies’). Each student will need to decide in advance whether he or she will contribute to the discussion on the side of the curator or the critic of the exhibition in question, and will need to prepare his or her presentation accordingly. In preparing presentations, students will be required to employ catalogues, promotional materials, readers, conference papers, interviews, and critical reviews related to each exhibition in question.