Curatorial Language as a Cultural Symptom
Discourse, Power, and Value in the Contemporary Art Field
Abstract This article examines contemporary curatorial and critical language not as a stylistic or professional jargon, but as a cultural and institutional symptom. It argues that this discourse no longer primarily serves the understanding of artworks; rather, it performs structural functions within the contemporary art field: legitimizing institutional decisions, reducing risk, maintaining market value promises, and stabilizing asymmetrical power relations among institutions, curators, collectors, and viewers. Across six sections, the study analyzes how curatorial language operates under conditions of overproduction and attention scarcity, how it compensates for aesthetic and conceptual absence, how it delegitimizes judgment and rejection, and how it aligns seamlessly with market logic. The article concludes by outlining the possibility of resistance through an alternative critical stance grounded in simplicity, description, and the renewed acceptance of failure and judgment.
1. Not a Language, but a Symptom Contemporary curatorial and critical language should not be understood merely as a specialized professional idiom. Rather, it is a symptom of a broader cultural and institutional condition. It emerges within a field characterized by an overabundance of artworks, a chronic scarcity of attention, and a growing difficulty in substantiating artistic value through stable internal aesthetic criteria. In this context, language no longer functions primarily as mediation between artwork and viewer. Instead, it operates as substitution. It does not clarify the experience of the artwork but compensates for the uncertainty surrounding it. Curatorial discourse increasingly assumes the role of positioning rather than interpretation, determining which works may circulate as meaningful without committing to explicit aesthetic judgments.
2. The Language of Absence This discourse becomes densest precisely where something is missing: aesthetic risk, formal consistency, or genuine stakes. The fewer concrete decisions a work appears to make, the more expansive and abstract the language surrounding it becomes. Indecision is reframed as openness, inconsistency as complexity, and lack of commitment as process. This is not a matter of deliberate deception. Rather, it is a form of structural adaptation. Language reassigns absence to a different conceptual register in which it no longer appears as a deficiency. In doing so, discourse detaches itself from the material and formal specificity of the artwork and becomes an autonomous system of legitimation.
3. The Criminalization of Understanding Classical art criticism operated on three implicit assumptions: that artworks are in principle understandable, that the right to judgment belongs to the viewer, and that rejection is a legitimate outcome of interpretation. Contemporary curatorial language increasingly undermines all three. Understanding is framed as premature; judgment is labeled reductive or hasty; rejection is recoded as a sign of cultural insensitivity or insufficient openness. As a result, interpretation is endlessly deferred, and judgment is morally delegitimized. Language thus becomes a protective shield around the artwork—less a tool for interpretation than a mechanism for insulation. In this regime, the only acceptable stance is indefinite openness. Critique is replaced by ritualized affirmation.
4. The Invisible Logic of the Market Curatorial language is perfectly compatible with market logic precisely because it avoids risk. It makes no concrete claims and therefore cannot be falsified. It avoids specificity and therefore cannot be held accountable. It refuses closure and thereby sustains the promise of future value. Phrases such as “this work unfolds over time” or “it reveals itself through repeated encounters” function not as aesthetic descriptions but as investment metaphors. Present uncertainty is projected into future potential. The discourse does not advertise explicitly; rather, it provides an infrastructural environment of trust in which value appears stable precisely because it remains undefined.
5. Why It Still Works The persistence of this discourse can be explained by the asymmetrical benefits it distributes across the art field. Institutions gain security by avoiding controversial positions. Curators receive relief from the burden of judgment. Collectors are provided with an intellectual alibi that transforms uncertainty into sophistication. Viewers, by contrast, absorb the costs in the form of anxiety and self-doubt. This asymmetry is not accidental. Advantages flow upward within the hierarchy, while uncertainty flows downward. The system stabilizes itself by making discomfort a feature of reception rather than a problem of production or mediation.
6. The Possibility of Resistance Resistance does not lie in louder critique or more complex theory. It lies in simplicity. In concrete words. In description. In the willingness to judge—and to accept that an artwork may fail. Such an alternative discourse is not anti-intellectual. On the contrary, it reclaims intellectual responsibility. Description restores the primacy of experience. Judgment reintroduces risk. Acknowledging failure reestablishes art as a field of genuine stakes rather than perpetual deferral. In the contemporary institutional context, simplicity is a radical gesture. It interrupts the protective function of curatorial language and returns interpretive agency to both critic and viewer.
Concluding Remark Curatorial language will not disappear; it is too structurally useful. The critical task is not to abolish it, but to recognize when discourse ceases to serve the artwork and begins to replace it. The possibility of resistance begins where language once again accepts responsibility for what it says—and for what it excludes.