I recently attended a panel discussion on the question of the curator, prompted by Daniel Bauman’s 2024 article “What Happened to the Curator”. In it, Bauman, former director of the Kunsthalle Zürich, reflects on his own curatorial trajectory, tethering personal experience to a larger – global – momentum we’ve all sensed but are only now able to articulate. The conversation between – Bauman, independent curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, former artistic director of MACRO, Rome Luca Lo Pinto, and critic Pablo Larios – was genuinely engaging. Nothing was resolved, of course, but several big questions were at least aired.
What stayed with me most was the question of scale.
Bauman, now in his late fifties, noted that when he began, the art world was small: a place for the weirdos and their ideas, made up of perhaps 50 galleries in Europe, a hundred institutions, and a handful of critics who acted as the original gatekeepers.
Which is generally fascinating as I belong to the cohort of curators who emerged from the 2010s, when curatorial studies were becoming established but not yet clearly defined. The art world was already interconnected across the Global North, with growing inroads into the South and institutions becoming more systematic in their representation.
From there, he suggested, the art world didn’t grow so much as explode – and now seems to explode–implode on a daily basis. It is a highly confusing landscape: while we witness closures of galleries or extreme budget cuts (Berlin earlier this year being one example), we also see record auction results and a more diverse, open art ecology than ever.
By consolidating this year’s events and the developments described in the article and panel, the shifts begin to make sense. After the critics – who once determined relevance, quality, and taste – came the curator-as-star: the big careers, big voices, and big ideas. Our current OGs, however, are commercial entities: mega-galleries, mega-collectors, private institutions, where the “context of the time” feels vaguer than ever, often displaced by personal or monetary visions of what art is and should be. These actors have always been part of the ecosystem, but their power has changed. Scale, at this point, feels unscalable. And in the eye of the storm, seemingly holding it all together, sits the common curator.
Bauman writes:
“It is demanded of curators that they appeal to absolutely everyone: the general public, the avant-garde, the insider bubbles; that we think with the art market - galleries, collectors - who are regarded as (overrated) opinion leaders but still crucial for funding.”
So I found myself thinking: if the art world is truly this massive, opaque, and unwieldy, is it even sensible to speak of it as a single thing? And yet – here we are, still trying to do exactly that. We want to understand its effects on a larger system. It’s obvious we cannot capture this ecosystem’s complexity in a single conversation or a single page. But perhaps that’s the problem: the art world has scaled itself into unmanageability. We chase bigger, more, faster. Even though we know it isn’t sustainable, we haven’t quite hit the limit – or we refuse to admit that we already have.
And here comes the almost delusional thing. Because meanwhile, we are slowly recognising that the art world is no longer small, no longer talking solely to itself. It is a global power that must examine both its internal dynamics and its impact on wider systems. The question is: how do we cut through the convoluted perception that makes us dizzy and paralysed? Perhaps by breaking things into smaller themes – not quite bite-sized, but more manageable.
A long-winded path to get here, but since we’re unpacking the beast, let’s look behind the scenes—into the system the public rarely considers, largely because they don’t know it exists. What happens before and after a major exhibition or art fair? The logistics, the travel. And yes, private jets. Cargo shipments. Air freight. The whole dance. And then there’s climate change. Plot twist, I know.
Last month, COP30 in Belém wrapped with the usual result: ambitious rhetoric, disappointing commitments, and no binding measures to meaningfully curb global warming.
So what if we approached this from another angle? What if we start with the granular (yet, still a massive rock)? Everything is connected – fine. But connection doesn’t have to mean bigness. It can mean intimacy: small conversations, ideas exchanged quietly, private reflections that later lead to action. Not the big, glossy concepts we keep losing ourselves in.
Instead, we create parallel “big things”, neatly separated – like going on a silent retreat because we’re overworked, without allowing one mode of living to transform the other. So perhaps, rather than riding the rollercoaster of totality, we take one specific example. Climate change – however tired we are hearing of it.
The art world’s oversized scale produces a specific effect: everyone wants to be everywhere. At every blockbuster opening, every major institution, every art fair – Art Basel (Basel, Miami Beach, Hong Kong, Paris, and now Qatar) or Frieze (London, New York, Los Angeles, and soon Abu Dhabi). And those are just the biggest. Add biennales, film festivals, fashion weeks – the calendar fills itself continuously.
Trying to address this is the Gallery Climate Coalition, which recently released a stocktake report tracking its members’ efforts to lower emissions. As co-founder Louisa Buck writes: “The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time. Art has always shaped how society thinks and feels. To use that influence responsibly in the face of the environmental emergency, we must first transform how our own industry operates. We have the tools, we have the evidence – what’s needed now is a collective will to turn commitment into tangible change.”
Maybe that’s where scale becomes interesting again – not as spectacle, but as responsibility. Maybe the real work begins not with the whole art world, but with the tiny hinge points that determine how it moves. I know I baited you to this. But now you know.