Under Superheteronomy
I
An exhibition may still be taking shape when decisions around it begin to take effect. An artist may be working when the catalogue has gone to print, while a revised budget, a withdrawn loan or a request for clearer public messaging alters the project before its form is known. Institutional priorities can change midway. A political event can alter the meaning of a work already selected. A sponsor, board, ministry or commissioner may ask for something to be reconsidered, added or omitted. Public interpretation may begin with the first press release. None of this is exceptional in itself. Exhibition-making has never belonged to the curator alone. Yet when these demands gather at speed and begin acting upon one another, the harder question is no longer simply when adjustment becomes concession. It is whether the line between them remains legible at all.
Curating has never been autonomous in any absolute sense. Artists, institutions, money, architecture, politics and audiences have always shaped what can be made. Heteronomy already describes part of this condition. In his 2026 essay on curating and politics, dramaturg and curator Yi-Wei Keng defines its curatorial operation simply as “how non-curatorial factors affect curatorial practice.” Victoria D. Alexander, writing on British arts organisations, similarly examines how external state demands can penetrate a relatively autonomous cultural field. The question, then, is not whether curating is heteronomous, nor whether these forces are historically new. It is what happens when they become denser, faster and harder to separate from curatorial judgement itself.1
Superheteronomy describes this compounded condition. The prefix does not simply mean more interference. It marks a situation in which several demands enter exhibition-making at once, act upon one another and may be anticipated before they are expressed. Concern about public response can alter institutional confidence. That uncertainty may affect communications. Communications may press a proposition to settle early, while funding criteria or national expectations make certain choices appear more viable than others. The pressures do not remain separate. Their effects can enter judgement without first appearing as instructions.
None of these pressures is new, and none by itself constitutes superheteronomy. What has changed is how routinely they now arrive together, already embedded in the terms by which major projects are proposed, selected, funded and defended. Relevance, representation, accessibility, sustainability, audience reach, risk and public response may all be established as expectations before an exhibition has found its form. Some reflect necessary changes in institutional responsibility. Others register the political, social and emotional temperature of the moment, alongside organisational and market interests. Together they form the field in which the condition becomes possible. The distinction lies in whether they remain recognisable as external conditions or are absorbed into curatorial judgement.
This matters because much curatorial work now begins inside systems of proposal and selection. Curators pitch to committees, work within funding requirements, respond to institutional briefs and, in national projects, negotiate representational prerogatives. National-pavilion selection processes make this structure unusually visible. Calls for the Italian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale and the Australian Pavilion for 2028, for example, assess curatorial propositions through varying combinations of conceptual strength, national relevance, feasibility, sustainability, audience engagement and international discourse.2 These are legitimate considerations, but they show how several kinds of judgement are already present while an exhibition remains a proposal.
The widening of proposal criteria also raises a question of professional remit. Curators may reasonably be expected to understand the financial, communicative and public conditions in which an exhibition must operate. More ambiguous are invitations to offer “fresh”, “different” or “unique” approaches to fundraising, marketing or communications while the curatorial proposition itself remains under assessment. Such requests may be posed lightly, as matters of perspective rather than expertise. Yet within a competitive process their weight cannot be known in advance, and curatorial attention is drawn into fields with their own specialist knowledge, training and practice.
Proposal criteria do more than gather information. They disclose what a selection process is prepared to recognise as curatorial strength. Intellectual and philosophical force, judgement in relation to artists, artworks, place and audience, command of material conditions, and experience at the relevant scale may then sit beside competencies properly developed in specialist fields. When these are folded into the same test, institutional fluency may substitute for curatorial strength. The candidate most adept at packaging a project across multiple institutional demands may appear stronger than the curator with the more consequential proposition.
Curators are not merely acted upon by these systems. They learn their grammar. A proposition may become more selectable, fundable, nationally legible or publicly defensible without anyone explicitly asking that it do so. Much of this is simply professional competence. But the same fluency can allow external conditions to enter judgement as anticipation. These pressures are especially visible in proposal-driven projects, but they are not confined to biennials, museums or national representations. Smaller organisations encounter their own configurations of funders, hosts, artists, peers, communities and publics.
Public interpretation adds another temporal condition. It need not wait for opening day, and institutions no longer control the principal account of their own exhibitions. Images, statements and fragments circulate through the same platforms used by critics, artists, institutions and commentators. Several studies make the consequences of this shift more tangible. Sophia Bakogianni’s research into responses to MoMA’s social-media posts on racism and social injustice examines what users “think, feel, and how they respond” to museum positions on social issues. Neil Wilkin, Duncan Garrow and Chris Ryder, analysing more than 1,000 visitor-generated images and 50,000 words around the British Museum’s The World of Stonehenge, argue for social media as a means of “critiquing and rethinking exhibition design, marketing and the ethics” that underpin contested displays. Peter Booth, Anne Ogundipe and Sigrid Røyseng, drawing on 82 museums in Norway, describe museum engagement with social media as “a form of organizational change.”3
Audience response is no longer simply an aftermath of exhibition-making. It has become part of the environment through which institutions understand reception, communication and their own capacity to respond. Curators may therefore anticipate how a phrase, image, association or omission will circulate and adjust accordingly. Such anticipation can reveal blind spots or bring knowledge into the exhibition. Imagined reception becomes consequential when it acquires the force of instruction before an encounter has occurred.
Institutional measurement adds another layer. Museum management increasingly works through formal indicators of performance, although what such measures can adequately capture remains contested. Sue M. Davies notes that KPIs are widely used in museums while “how effective they are in managing and improving museum activities is debatable.” Her study argues for a more holistic set of meaningful indicators. The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport makes the structure more concrete. Its annual framework for government-sponsored museums records visits, website users, audience profiles, learning and outreach, visitor satisfaction, regional loans and self-generated income. Eleonora Belfiore places this within what she describes as an “instrumental turn” in British cultural policy, where the demand to demonstrate outcomes can shape how cultural value is articulated.4
These measures rarely remain at the level of institutional accounting. They can reappear as expectations around audience reach, accessibility, partnerships, communications, programming or demonstrable impact, entering decisions about what kind of exhibition appears viable or worth pursuing. The stakes change when criteria designed to evaluate institutional performance shape artistic or curatorial choices whose value cannot yet be known. A difficult work, an unfamiliar proposition or a less immediately legible encounter may then appear harder to justify against outcomes defined in advance. The measure precedes the value it claims to assess.
Private wealth introduces another condition for curatorial judgement. Art historian Wolfgang Ullrich has argued that collectors increasingly deprive public institutions of interpretive authority over art because, in his formulation, “they have the money and the museums do not.” Kathryn Brown describes the “extension of influence from the realm of private taste to that of public institution” as a hallmark of contemporary artworld philanthropy, while sociologist Alain Quemin identifies ways prominent collectors and high-end galleries can “intervene in museum institutions’ choices” and strengthen their role in the creation of artistic value. Their significance lies less in direct obedience than in the field in which curators select, borrow, acquire and exhibit, already shaped by unequal capacities to own, finance and circulate art.5
That inequality becomes concrete in curatorial practice through availability and feasibility. An artist supported by a gallery, collector or foundation may arrive with an infrastructure that makes work easier to borrow, transport, commission or produce at scale. A donation can place work within a museum collection and its future exhibition history. The market practice known as “buy one, give one” makes the feedback loop unusually visible. Collectors have gained preferential access to sought-after works by purchasing two and donating one to a museum, giving the artist institutional validation while the collector retains another work. At the 2026 Venice Biennale, private foundations, collectors and galleries also appear on the official donor list and in support credits for individual artist presentations. These arrangements shape the field before a curatorial choice is made. Curatorial agency therefore concerns not only the freedom to choose, but consciousness of how the field of available choices has already been produced.6
Superheteronomy does not describe a corrupted state of curating. No exhibition is made without negotiation, and negotiation can improve the work. Public criticism can expose ignorance, funding conditions can impose useful accountability, and artists or communities can overturn assumptions the curator had failed to examine. The concern lies in the curator’s capacity to distinguish what has informed judgement from what is determining it. The condition becomes consequential when that distinction is difficult to make, even for the curator.
II
Superheteronomy can also enter through inherited ideas, references and professional languages whose authority precedes the exhibition itself. Curators do not approach proposals, commissions or international discourse without already knowing what seriousness, relevance and feasibility are expected to sound like. That fluency becomes consequential when the authority of a recognisable source begins to substitute for thinking through the premise itself. A title drawn from a canonical poem, a celebrated theorist or an established critical vocabulary can provide a magnificent runway, carrying intellectual authority accumulated elsewhere before the exhibition has shown what it can make of that inheritance. The runway is not the problem. The exhibition must generate its own necessity rather than continue to travel on borrowed authority.
Theory and citation remain part of curatorial thinking. Curating would be impoverished if every exhibition were required to pretend that it had no intellectual ancestry. The issue is whether an inherited idea is worked through or merely carried forward under the protection of its existing authority. Art historian Jaleh Mansoor warns of a theorist’s name standing “like a label or logo on an otherwise empty bottle of perfume” when recognition substitutes for demonstrated concepts. Writer Emiliano Battista similarly asks us to attend to how artists and curators “take up, deploy, read, misread, distort, or commodify concepts.” George MacBeth situates the same condition within an artworld in which theory can become an ambient professional language. Together, they shift attention from whether theory belongs in curating to what curators actually do with it.7
Major exhibitions often draw their first intellectual coordinates from existing literary or theoretical sources. The more revealing test is how inherited authority is carried into another time, place or exhibition.8
Sharjah Biennial 15, Thinking Historically in the Present (2023), makes the stakes of inheritance unusually visible. Conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor and realised after his death by curator Hoor Al Qasimi, the biennial took Enwezor’s titular proposition and his thinking around the postcolonial constellation as points of departure. Al Qasimi interpreted and re-envisioned that proposal through Sharjah’s own histories, sites and contemporary conditions. Critic Ben Eastham nevertheless found that “the exhibition is weakest when venerating his past achievements rather than adapting his thinking to the present.” An inherited idea does not carry its original necessity automatically into another time, place or exhibition.9
Other examples show different uses of inheritance in curatorial labour. Curator Ralph Rugoff’s 2019 Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, foregrounded the counterfeit provenance of a phrase long misattributed as an ancient Chinese curse, making its falseness part of a proposition concerned with fake news, alternative facts and unstable terms of reference. At documenta fifteen in 2022, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa worked differently again. Lumbung, the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn, did not operate simply as a theme but as a practice of sharing resources, decision-making, time and knowledge that shaped the exhibition’s organisation as well as its public language. In one case, borrowed language was interrogated. In the other, language arrived with a practice that the exhibition was required to enact.10
A different pressure appears when certain terms already carry institutional approval. ICOM’s 2022 museum definition, for example, requires museums to be “accessible and inclusive”, to “foster diversity and sustainability”, and to operate “with the participation of communities.” These commitments are now part of the profession’s formal definition. Their institutional recognition does not make them less necessary, but it changes what curating must do with them. A critical term that once challenged an institution can later become part of the language through which that institution presents itself as responsive and legitimate. The curator must then judge whether the exhibition is doing the difficult work these terms demand or merely becoming recognisable through their use.11
A related mechanism operates through scholarship. A proposition for a major exhibition may first have to persuade selection committees, boards, funders and institutions of its intellectual coherence and contemporary relevance. Established literature and philosophy can help demonstrate that seriousness, but they also shape what a curator learns a persuasive proposition should sound like. Borrowing then becomes more than citation. It can provide intellectual assurance before the exhibition has established its own. No instruction is required once the expectation has been learned.
Borrowed language can, however, arise from within the histories and practices under examination. The 2023 Islamic Arts Biennale, Awwal Bait, under architect and artistic director Sumayya Vally, drew its organising terms from practices formative to Muslim life. Vally writes that “Movement is at the heart of an Islamic form of thinking.” Qiblah and Hijrah therefore operated not simply as thematic labels but through direction, migration, ritual and gathering, with the Western Hajj Terminal in Jeddah integral to the proposition. Here the language did not arrive primarily as external certification, but from forms of orientation and movement already embedded in the field being examined.12
The distinction is not simply between borrowing and originality, but between using a source and allowing its existing authority to carry the argument. A source may complicate a proposition, unsettle it or reveal something the curator had not yet understood. It may also lend an argument seriousness without materially changing it. What matters is whether the source has been worked through in relation to the particular exhibition, rather than carried forward on the strength of its reputation alone.
Borrowing touches superheteronomy when prior legitimacy shapes what a persuasive curatorial proposition is expected to resemble. The pressure lies in what a curator has learned will be recognised as scholarly, relevant or responsible, particularly when a proposition must secure confidence while much of the exhibition remains unresolved. An intellectual choice may appear entirely self-directed while still carrying assumptions formed elsewhere into the curatorial process. The curator still has to make the idea necessary to the exhibition.
III
Some forms of heteronomy are easier to see because the source of intervention is visible. A commissioner revises a requirement. A ministry objects. A sponsor withdraws support. A board asks for a work to be reconsidered. However contested the decision, its source can usually be traced. More difficult are pressures that gather without a single instruction and shape judgement through anticipation.
Studies of museum practice make this mechanism easier to see. In interviews with museum professionals in the United Kingdom, Poland and Germany, Julia Leser, Alice Millar, Marlena Nikody and Pia Schramm record one participant saying “you start censoring yourself” and another anticipating that a proposed exhibition “would be hell for our social media team.” In Leander Gussman’s 2026 survey of 23 museums in the United States, respondents described exhibition edits made “to avoid escalation” or “to prevent headlines.” Together, these accounts show how anticipation can enter professional judgement until the source of a concession becomes difficult to recover.13
Public response complicates this further because there is no singular public whose judgement can simply be obeyed or rejected. Commentary may expose things the institution has failed to recognise and interrupt professional consensus. It can also produce waves of condemnation, premature moral certainty, uncritical praise or interpretations whose visibility exceeds their depth. Institutional responses can differ sharply. In 2024, the Academy Museum announced modifications to Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital after public criticism of its framing. In 2023, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden defended Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul & Funk amid coordinated online backlash and briefly suspended its Facebook page. Neither response offers a template. What reaches the curator is not a coherent mandate but a field of competing claims, expectations and pressures, not all compatible or equally persuasive.14
The curator remains publicly identified with the exhibition even when authority over it is distributed across institutions, funders, communities and publics. Many of these demands may be legitimate, but legitimacy does not relieve the curator of judgement. Curating approaches constituency management when the primary task shifts from judging what the exhibition requires to balancing what different constituencies are prepared to accept. Responsiveness remains necessary, but accommodation cannot itself become the organising intelligence of the exhibition.
The dispute around artist Gabrielle Goliath’s proposed South African Pavilion for the 2026 Venice Biennale offers a clearer form of intervention. Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo had been selected by a five-person independent panel to present a new iteration of Elegy. South Africa’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie, objected to its Gaza-related section and requested changes. They refused the requested changes. The ministry cancelled the pavilion, and the official South African space was ultimately left empty.15
Whatever one’s position on the dispute, responsibility was comparatively easy to trace. The source of the intervention was clear, as was the decision to refuse it, and the consequences could be debated in public. Power remained visible because its actions could still be located.
Superheteronomy is harder to discern when pressure is anticipated and absorbed before it is made explicit. A concern introduced elsewhere may be recast as curatorial reasoning, enter the exhibition’s language and later appear to have belonged to the proposition from the outset. The line between judgement and accommodation then becomes difficult to recover, while public authorship remains with the curator despite the altered conditions of its exercise.
Curatorial judgement is not sovereignty. Curators can be wrong, and intervention can expose exclusions, avert harm or improve the work. What matters is whether substantial influence remains answerable. When others materially alter what an exhibition can say or do, the issue is no longer only whether the intervention was justified, but whether the altered distribution of agency remains visible. The curator may still carry responsibility after agency has moved elsewhere.
IV
Anticipation does more than shape what is selected. It can also settle meaning too early. Under anticipatory pressure, curatorial language may contain possible readings before they occur, surrounding an exhibition with increasingly elaborate context. Yet greater discursiveness does not necessarily produce greater intellectual openness. Wall texts, curatorial statements, captions and public framing can regulate interpretation, narrowing the meanings the exhibition is prepared to accommodate.
Writer and editor Rahel Aima’s account of “vaporwave curating” identifies a related tendency in which familiar languages of community, care and crisis, coupled with poetic ambiguity, can produce an atmosphere of seriousness while specificity recedes. As she puts it, “There’s a safety in not saying what you mean, even if it means ultimately saying nothing at all.” Any language can become a shelter once recognition begins to substitute for consequence. Such language becomes especially consequential once it has established the proposition’s legitimacy. Revising the proposition can then appear to abandon the very terms through which the exhibition first became legible.16
The exhibition is where that early settling can be challenged. Curatorial language cannot stand as its final intellectual articulation. A premise may establish a point of departure, but the works should not become evidence assembled to confirm what has already been written. Curatorial thinking continues through selection, juxtaposition, sequence, scale, duration and installation, where the proposition meets conditions it could not fully anticipate. The exhibition should remain capable of revising the thinking that brought it into being.
Installation makes that test material. Connections persuasive in writing may lose force in space. An intended anchor may recede. Another work may unexpectedly reorganise the exhibition around itself. Revision at this point is not a failure of consistency but a response to what the exhibition has made newly apparent. What must then be judged is whether a late change arises from that encounter or merely gives spatial form to a demand introduced elsewhere.
Two reviews are useful here as diagnostics. They show how the authority of a proposition can diverge from what the exhibition is able to sustain.
In his review of curator Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, art critic J.J. Charlesworth questioned whether the breadth of its representational framework left enough room to judge the works beyond the ethical value of inclusion. Pedrosa organised the exhibition around multiple figures of the foreigner, extending the term across migration, queerness, Indigeneity and forms of artistic marginality. Charlesworth frames the difficulty as one of deciding “how to look, and what to value, and whether this can be shared.” Art critic and editor Mark Rappolt found almost the reverse in his review of the 2025 Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. The exhibition drew its structure from three recurring objects in Taiwanese literature and cinema, a puppet, a diary and a bicycle. Rappolt described it as succeeding “despite its layered manifesto and over-embedded conceits” because it “triumphs on the strength of the works themselves.”17
The criticisms move in opposite directions but return to the same test. A curatorial proposition can be persuasive, ethically serious and intellectually coherent, yet still produce an exhibition narrower than the argument from which it began. The reverse is also possible. An overworked proposition may be exceeded by the works and the connections they establish in space. Whatever intelligence the proposition possesses, the exhibition must be allowed to discover an intelligence of its own. The task is not to preserve the proposition intact, but to leave enough intellectual space for encounter to revise, complicate or even contradict what the curator believed at the beginning.
V
The answer to superheteronomy cannot be a fantasy of absolute curatorial autonomy. Exhibition-making has never been free of external conditions, and attempting to recover such autonomy would mistake independence for isolation, as though curatorial strength depended on remaining untouched by the forces through which exhibitions are actually made. The more exact question is what those conditions should be allowed to change. Curatorial judgement lies in deciding what to accept, revise, resist and, at times, refuse. These decisions may be constrained, negotiated or shared, but they remain consequential.
Authorship, agency and answerability cannot always be assumed to coincide. Authorship concerns whose name and thinking the exhibition publicly carries. Agency concerns who can materially alter what is shown, said or withheld. Answerability concerns whether those changes can still be explained and responsibility for them recognised. When they diverge, public authorship may remain concentrated in the curator while agency is distributed through commissioners, departments, funders, boards, ministries and other institutional actors.
That distribution does not necessarily imply concealment or bad faith. Those involved may be acting within their own mandates, responding to superiors, procedures, budgets, political obligations or organisational risk. They may not understand themselves as intervening in curatorial judgement at all. A communications concern can become an institutional requirement. A funding limitation can become a question of feasibility. A political sensitivity can arrive as advice about public framing. By the time such considerations reach the curator, their origins may already be difficult to recover.
Agency can move through an institution without answerability moving with it. Decisions may pass through several actors until no single actor experiences the curatorial effect as their responsibility. Leander Gussman’s 2026 study of pressures facing museums is useful here. He concludes that “what matters is not only whether specific exhibitions survive, but how decisions about them are made, recorded, and explained.” The issue is not always who is responsible, but whether the path of a decision remains intelligible. Where did a requirement arise? Through what institutional reasoning did it acquire force? At what point did it begin altering what the exhibition could become?18
Attribution alone is insufficient. Some interventions are explicit and their source can be located. Others emerge through chains of ordinary institutional action in which responsibility is genuinely distributed. Superheteronomy becomes hardest to discern when these pressures are absorbed into the curator’s own reasoning and the resulting exhibition appears to have arrived there by curatorial intention alone.
This is why superheteronomy cannot be understood simply as intensified heteronomy. Its significance lies not in the number of external pressures surrounding curatorial work, but in the difficulty of knowing when their accumulated force alters judgement from within. Proposal systems, funding criteria, selection structures, national prerogatives, institutional risk, market conditions and public commentary are ordinary parts of curatorial work and are unlikely to recede. None is inherently illegitimate. Nor does every negotiation meet that threshold. The term becomes useful where these conditions become sufficiently entangled that accommodation, anticipation and curatorial judgement are no longer easily distinguished.
Because not every pressure leaves an external trace, some durable account of how judgement changed becomes important. This need not be a conventional curatorial text. It may take the form of writing, correspondence, a recorded lecture, a documented conversation or later reflection. The curator’s reasoning should not rest only in memory. Such an account can retain a proposition’s point of departure, what altered it, what could be accommodated, what had to be refused and what remained unresolved. It can also preserve discrepancies between intention and outcome that hindsight might otherwise smooth away. Its purpose is neither exhaustive documentation nor justification after the fact. It keeps the circumstances in which judgement was exercised available for examination.
The curator should be able to say what altered a decision and why. Did a work disclose something the proposition had missed? Did the site, an artist or new knowledge require the thinking to change? Or had anticipated approval, reputational caution, institutional convenience or eligibility already begun to settle the decision? These distinctions will rarely be pure.
Part of what makes this condition difficult to recognise is its normalisation. In smaller or privately funded organisations, where specialist roles may not remain separate, curators are often expected to move between curating, development, management, communications and public-facing work. Managing these demands successfully can become evidence of professional competence. But delivering an exhibition intact is not the same as producing a compelling one. Managerial competence concerns whether the project can be delivered within its constraints. Curatorial intelligence concerns what those constraints are allowed to do to the proposition, the works, their connections and the exhibition that finally takes form. The two may coexist, but one should not be mistaken for proof of the other.
Working under superheteronomy is consequently a capacity developed largely through practice. It cannot be acquired entirely through method, policy or professional instruction. The judgement it requires is shaped through repeated encounters with institutional authority, financial limitation, political sensitivity, public expectation and competing responsibilities. Yet experience offers no guarantee. It can refine judgement, but it can also train the curator to anticipate institutional expectations until accommodation begins to feel like instinct.
The practical demand is simple to state and difficult to sustain. Curators need to notice pressure earlier and distinguish more carefully between encounter and anticipation. What should be resisted is the retrospective conversion of every concession into apparent intention. The task is not to remove influence from curating, but to prevent influence from becoming invisible to the person exercising judgement.
An exhibition need not emerge untouched. Few ever have. What matters is whether, after the negotiations, anticipations and revisions of its making, the curator can still stand behind the decisions that remain and explain why they were made. If an intervention leaves the curator unable to stand behind the resulting exhibition, the question is no longer how to accommodate the change, but whether their authorship can still honestly attach to it. Withdrawal should not, however, erase the curator’s authorship of the proposition from which the project began. The distinction matters. A curator may cease to author what an exhibition has become without ceasing to have authored what set it in motion. Authorship can therefore divide across time, between the proposition first set in motion and the exhibition that finally takes public form.
The aim is not less heteronomy, but enough clarity about its workings for judgement to remain active and responsibility to find its proper address. The exhibition need not prove that the curator was free. It should show that judgement remained possible.
ENDNOTES
1. Heteronomy is established in the sociology and politics of art, but its curatorial application is especially pertinent here. Victoria D. Alexander, “Heteronomy in the arts field: state funding and British arts organizations”, The British Journal of Sociology 69, no. 1 (2018): 23–43, examines how state demands attached to funding penetrated a relatively autonomous British arts sector. Julia Bethwaite and Anni Kangas, “Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale”, New Perspectives 27, no. 2 (2019): 29–61, analyse interactions among art, commerce, the state and media at the Venice Biennale. Yi-Wei Keng, “Curating and Politics: Two Basic Formulae and Their Interpretations”, trans. Joanna Chung, Curatography 18 (2026), explicitly describes heteronomy through non-curatorial factors acting on curatorial practice. The present essay extends this vocabulary towards a compounded curatorial condition. ↩
2. National-pavilion calls make these evaluative structures explicit. Italy’s Ministry of Culture, “Padiglione Italia 2026 – Open Call”, required a proposal capable of addressing contemporary Italian artistic research, urgent social and cultural questions, international debate and environmental sustainability. Creative Australia, “Venice Biennale 2028 Expressions of Interest”, assesses proposals through quality, viability and alignment, including relevance to contemporary international discourse and audience considerations such as accessibility and inclusivity. These examples are not offered as criticism of the criteria themselves, but as evidence that conceptual, national, logistical and public expectations can coexist at the proposal stage. ↩
3. Sophia Bakogianni, “How social media users experience museum posting on social issues”, Museums & Social Issues 16, no. 2 (2022): 152–170, published online 23 November 2023, uses surveys, online interviews and user comments to study responses to MoMA’s social-issue posts. Neil Wilkin, Duncan Garrow and Chris Ryder, “From overlooked objects to digital ‘icons’: evaluating the role of social media in exhibition making and the creation of more participatory and democratic museums”, International Journal of Heritage Studies 31, no. 1 (2025): 102–122, analyse more than 1,000 visitor-generated images and 50,000 words around the British Museum’s The World of Stonehenge. Peter Booth, Anne Ogundipe and Sigrid Røyseng, “Museum leaders’ perspectives on social media”, Museum Management and Curatorship 35, no. 4 (2020): 373–391, draw on 82 museums in Norway to examine social-media use as organisational change and differences in institutional readiness. ↩
4. Sue M. Davies, “The Challenge of Measuring Performance in Museums: an exploratory study in creating a holistic set of key performance indicators”, Museum & Society 23, no. 1 (2025): 128–139, considers the practical usefulness and limitations of KPIs in museums. The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, DCMS-sponsored Museums and Galleries Annual Performance Indicators 2024/25, published 23 April 2026, records indicators including visits, website users, audience profile, learning and outreach, visitor satisfaction, regional loans and self-generated income. Eleonora Belfiore, “Auditing Culture: The subsidised cultural sector in the New Public Management”, International Journal of Cultural Policy 10, no. 2 (2004): 183–202, situates cultural measurement within the spread of New Public Management and the instrumental turn in British cultural policy. ↩
5. Wolfgang Ullrich, “Mit Geld und Leidenschaft: Kunstsammler in Deutschland”, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 29 June 2016, argues that the greater financial capacity of wealthy collectors increasingly shifts interpretive authority away from public institutions. See also Wolfgang Ullrich, Siegerkunst: Neuer Adel, teure Lust (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2016). Kathryn Brown, “Private Influence, Public Goods, and the Future of Art History”, Journal for Art Market Studies 3, no. 1 (2019), describes the “extension of influence from the realm of private taste to that of public institution” as characteristic of contemporary artworld philanthropy and traces collector influence through museum boards, loans and the selection of national representatives at international exhibitions. Alain Quemin, “The market and museums: the increasing power of collectors and private galleries in the contemporary art world”, Journal of Visual Art Practice 19, no. 3 (2020): 211–224, examines how prominent collectors and high-end galleries can intervene in museum choices and strengthen their role in the creation of artistic value. ↩
6. Julia Halperin, “The rise and fall of ‘buy-one, give-one’ art sales”, The Art Newspaper, 16 March 2026, describes arrangements in which collectors gained access to sought-after works by purchasing two and donating one to a museum, with institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ICA Miami and the Columbus Museum of Art reported as recipients. The article also records curatorial concern that such arrangements can create an “odd dynamic” for museums. For the wider ecology of private support around major exhibitions, see La Biennale di Venezia, “Donors”, 61st International Art Exhibition, 2026, which lists private foundations and individual collectors among supporters; and the official Uriel Orlow artist page, which credits additional support from foundations, public arts bodies and commercial galleries for a specific presentation. These examples establish material interdependence, not proof that private support determines curatorial selection. ↩
7. Jaleh Mansoor, “W/hither Theory: Notes on the Status of ‘Theory’ in the Arts”, e-flux journal 155, June 2025, examines how theoretical names can become signposts detached from the problems or concepts they are meant to carry. Emiliano Battista, “Art and Theory: What Relationship?”, e-flux Notes, 30 January 2026, argues for studying specific operations through which artists and curators mobilise theoretical concepts rather than treating Art and Theory as abstract blocks. George MacBeth, “Have No Theory”, e-flux Notes, 23 June 2026, considers theory as professional language and branding within the contemporary art field. ↩
8. Gwangju Biennale, “2018 Gwangju Biennale ‘Imagined Borders’ EIP Announcement”, 2018; La Biennale di Venezia, Cecilia Alemani, “Statement by Cecilia Alemani”, 2022; Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, “Find out more about the history behind the title of the 34th Bienal”, 14 April 2020. Gwangju explicitly referenced Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities; Alemani took The Milk of Dreams from Leonora Carrington and developed themes of metamorphosis and changing definitions of the human; the São Paulo title comes from Thiago de Mello’s 1960s poem and was reconsidered for a changed historical moment. Another instance is the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, whose curators cite Toni Morrison, Max Roach and David Hammons as prior uses of the phrase. ↩
9. Sharjah Art Foundation, “Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present”, 7 February–11 June 2023. The biennial was conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, who interpreted and re-envisioned his titular proposal and the postcolonial constellation within Sharjah’s own context. Ben Eastham, “Sharjah Biennial 15, ‘Thinking Historically in the Present’”, e-flux Criticism, 21 February 2023, provides the critical formulation quoted in the text and contrasts adaptation of Enwezor’s thinking with reverence for his prior achievements. ↩
10. La Biennale di Venezia, Ralph Rugoff, “Introduction by Ralph Rugoff”, 2019. Rugoff makes the phrase’s English invention and false attribution as an ancient Chinese curse part of a discussion of fake news, “alternative facts” and unstable terms of reference. documenta fifteen, “lumbung”, 2022, and “documenta fifteen and lumbung practice”, 18 June 2020. ruangrupa describes lumbung not simply as a theme but as a practice of collective resource-building, equitable distribution and shared decision-making that shaped documenta fifteen’s organisation. ↩
11. International Council of Museums, “Museum Definition”, adopted 24 August 2022. The definition formally incorporates accessibility, inclusion, diversity, sustainability, ethical communication and community participation into the profession’s institutional terms. See also International Council of Museums, “Report of the ICOM Working Group on Decolonisation Now Available”, 16 June 2026, which develops recommendations on decolonisation while acknowledging continuing debate around the term. ↩
12. Diriyah Biennale Foundation, 2023 Islamic Arts Biennale, Awwal Bait, 23 January–23 May 2023. Under artistic director Sumayya Vally, the biennale was organised around Qiblah and Hijrah at the Western Hajj Terminal. Vally’s account of the curatorial framework and the sentence quoted in the text are published by her practice Counterspace in “Islamic Arts Biennale, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia”. ↩
13. Julia Leser, Alice Millar, Marlena Nikody and Pia Schramm, “Right-Wing Populism and Museums: Findings from an Interview Study in the UK, Poland and Germany”, Museum & Society 23, no. 2 (2025): 109–125, draw on 39 interviews with museum professionals and document anticipatory self-censorship before exhibitions are realised. Leander Gussman, “Present Tensions: A Snapshot of the Pressures Facing U.S. Museums”, Exhibition 45, no. 1 (Spring 2026), reproduced by the American Alliance of Museums on 9 May 2026, draws on a small, self-selected survey of 23 U.S. museums and documents internal edits, narrowed topics and anticipatory changes made under pressure. ↩
14. Benjamin Sutton, “Amid backlash, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will modify exhibition on Hollywood’s Jewish founders”, The Art Newspaper, 11 June 2024, reports that the museum announced revisions to Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital after criticism from Jewish activists. Senay Boztas, “Dutch exhibition on Black culture and ancient Egypt faces social media backlash”, The Art Newspaper, 19 May 2023, reports coordinated online criticism of Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul & Funk, an influx of one-star reviews, the museum’s temporary suspension of its Facebook page, and its public defence of the exhibition. The cases point to different institutional responses rather than a single causal pattern. ↩
15. Charles Leonard, “South Africa’s Venice Biennale artist appeals to president after pavilion cancelled by minister”, The Art Newspaper, 14 January 2026, and “South Africa pavilion will be empty at 2026 Venice Biennale, culture ministry says”, The Art Newspaper, 20 February 2026. The first report records that artist Gabrielle Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo were selected by a five-person independent panel and that Minister Gayton McKenzie requested changes to the Gaza-related section of Elegy. It also records a presidential spokesperson stating that South Africa’s position on Gaza remained unchanged. The second report confirmed that the government-backed pavilion would remain empty after the High Court dismissed Goliath and Masondo’s urgent application. ↩
16. Rahel Aima, “The Rise of Vaporwave Curating”, Frieze, 31 July 2025. Vaporwave emerged as an internet-based music and visual culture built from slowed-down samples, corporate Muzak, obsolete digital aesthetics and nostalgic commercial imagery, often producing a mood of suspended familiarity detached from its original context. Aima extends this logic to curating, describing a mode in which poetic ambiguity, proliferating references and familiar languages of community, care and crisis can accumulate atmosphere without arriving at a clear position. She characterises this as “curating in the passive voice”, where diffuse framing can offer a form of safety while specificity and consequence recede. ↩
17. Adriano Pedrosa, “Introduction”, 2024 Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere. J.J. Charlesworth, “60th Venice Biennale Review: Who Can Judge?”, ArtReview, 19 April 2024, questions what criteria of judgement remain available when cultural inclusion and distinct identities become dominant curatorial claims. Taipei Fine Arts Museum, “The 14th Taipei Biennial 2025 Announces its Theme Whispers on the Horizon and Artist Lineup”, 20 March 2025. Mark Rappolt, “Taipei Biennial 2025 Review: Curious Eroticism and Endless Yearning”, ArtReview, 23 January 2026, argues that the strength of the works exceeds the exhibition’s layered curatorial frame. ↩
18. Leander Gussman, “Present Tensions: A Snapshot of the Pressures Facing U.S. Museums”, Exhibition 45, no. 1 (Spring 2026), reproduced by the American Alliance of Museums on 9 May 2026. Drawing on a small, self-selected survey of 23 U.S. museums, Gussman argues that institutional pressure matters not only in itself but in how its effects are distributed and recorded. He identifies scope, timing, funding and attribution as four practical levers for distributing exhibition risk, and concludes by stressing how decisions are made, recorded and explained. ↩