Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Encompassing a whole field of knowledge relating to the conditions and relations of the appearance of art and culture, the curatorial has developed as a field of overlapping and intertwining activities, tasks, and roles that were formerly divided and more clearly attributed to different professions, institutions, and disciplines. This development has affected the notion of curating—principally an activity of putting together—and widened its scope beyond showing or presenting to include enabling, making public, educating, analyzing, criticizing, theorizing, editing, and staging. Embedded in the globalization of the art field, on the one hand, and the conditions of labor in the twenty-first century, on the other, the curatorial has gained a specific sociopolitical relevance within contemporary society.

The publication aims to map the scope of perspectives from which this field of knowledge can be discussed. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.