The Curator as Arts Administrator? Comments on Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form”
In one of the first German language publications on arts management (the Baden-Baden 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, an...