Some Concerns

On Thursday night, I entered the weekend with a few concerns that I thought I might share. Finally pushing past the residual social anxieties from the beginning of the semester, I'm now getting into the really meaty stuff: concerns about being a curator, how I want to shape my career, how to create an identity for myself in this field now and in the future, etc. Partially, the concerns are stemming from the fact that the first year CURP (as it were) class is so bonded-- everyone's so enthusiastic and entrepreneurial, and I think we've really formed a group identity. All of this is really positive, but now I find myself thinking about forming an identity apart from them, in terms of breaking away and doing my own projects. It will definitely happen, and is starting to happen, and I'm curious to see how things will unfold over the next two years.

Another (much bigger) concern is, basically, that I’m just not good enough. This is something that everyone worries about and that being in graduate school only exacerbates, and in a way the sheer normalcy of this concern makes it almost comforting. But I worry that I don’t have enough ideas about exhibitions and that I might graduate from this program with lots of great tools and connections and possible venues for shows without any real content or substance in mind. The substance is what I’m cultivating outside of class—going to exhibitions, seeing as much as I can, meeting as many people as I can and hopefully visiting peoples’ studios and talking to them about their work. But there’s this constant, nagging fear that it’s not enough and that I have a lot of passion without specific enough ideas. That’s pretty scary.

Another concern this about the nature of what a curator does, at the core of it—which is to interpret and present artwork. Artwork, by definition, is something that’s incredibly important to the artist who creates it, and it’s so easy to misrepresent someone through bad curating. So I worry about the intensely person nature of curating and working with artists. For me, this points to the need for real collaboration between artists and curators (and viewers, as well) in exhibition-making, but that brings up another concern—that I might not truly be as committed to collaboration as I feel that I am or should be. Ideologically, I’m all for it, but when it comes right down to it, many people aren’t very good at it. I’ve felt pretty good about the few collaborations I’ve engaged in, but there’s a concern there too.

Anyway, I haven’t condemned myself as a bad curator or anything, but these are very scary thoughts, and I think it’s healthy to get them out there, just to come clean testimonial-style. That’s it for now.