British Art News: Newsletter of the British Art Network, January 2021

COMMENT On Some Conditions Facing an Early Career Curator I arrived early for the first meeting of British Art Network’s Early Career Curators Group (ECCG) in June 2019, so spent some time with Mike Nelson’s The Asset Strippers (2019) which had then filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with orphaned industrial machinery, grease and dust…..

The installation comprised a sprawl of heavy objects gleaned from asset stripping—the vampiric practice of profiteering from the sale of a failing company’s assets. Sometimes imprinted with imperial insignia, the provenance of these defunct machines was scored onto every surface. Nelson’s landmark commission brought the reality of neoliberalism into the gallery through the debris of British manufacturing, its first victims. A year after The Asset Strippers opened, COVID-19 would hasten the effects of this pernicious policy model on the culture and heritage sectors themselves, precipitating large-scale redundancies and raising the question of whether collections should too sell their assets.

The museum, the gallery and the academy are, as many of us recognise, now firmly in the grip of such forces. In an essay published before he permanently bowed out of curating, “The New Conservatism: Complicity and the Art World’s Performance of Progression” (e-flux conversations, 2017), Morgan Quaintance maps an unsettling series of recent instances in which public-private partnerships have seen public arts subsidy siphoned off by private interests. Curators Lina Džuverović and Irene Revell’s article “Lots of Shiny Junk at the Art Dump: The Sick and Unwilling Curator” (Parse 9, 2019), asks outright whether the curatorial career is a Ponzi scheme by another name. In 2016, Creative Scotland’s Visual Arts Sector Review revealed that the average total income of survey respondents was £17,526 p.a., with further indictments including a far larger than average wage gap across genders. From lived experience, contracts are overwhelmingly temporary, inextricably linked to funding which is rarely secured beyond a threeyear term. These things are never too far from mind: latent fears, baked into the subconscious of the precariat, allayed briefly by conversations, colleagues and the work—the magnetic objects and practices of art which it’s all in service to. For a while now, however, the work has felt to me a bit like the pilot light in a rundown boiler, persevering but perpetually at risk of being extinguished.

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