5. against speed curating; for generosity

In the mid–1980s, somewhere in movie suburbia, a sexy vampire flexes like an umbrella on a doorstep while two teenagers defend their home with scalded cheeks. In without an invitation, I spy from my submissive couch through the ghostly blue glare of the TV set the lives of teenage boys and girls possessed by fantasies of sex next door while overprotective parents make bad watch outs. The shadows, long and awkward, scissor one another under jittery street lamps and midget clusters as the world comes to an end under the vigil of electricity. I don’t know why this coming-of-age, -of-night, -of-end, of-beginning scene is the setting for my critical feelings binding *speed curating* with a clenched fist, but there you go: a vampire, a home, an invitation, day falling into night, reality into fantasy, childhood into adulthood, and back again. Certainly this constructed daydream is drenched in the loss of anticipating experiences yet to be experienced, and futures of desire that adolescence can only dream or imagine through screens. Youth is always waiting for the future, willing it forward, waiting for things to happen, as teenage me did in church, in school, in the disco, on the corner of the pretty village I grew up in as a boy. I bullied a future into being before I was ready to experience it. The future never comes quick enough as a kid, and when it does... you want more future. Speed curating arrived at my doorstep a few years back. Like the doorstep vampire it arrived out of the blue, eclipsing my attention, as it pitched a quickie over something more generous. You can hear the artist reciting to himself the self-harming excuse, “No harm in trying." Speed curating proffers a fast track way past the bullshit into bigger bullshit (note: my experience of speed curating is second-hand artists’ regret—I am sure some artists have had a good time, some curators the worst time). What artist could deny an invitation to discuss their work with those at the doorstep of power: curators. What I first appreciated as a playful contrivance, or ironical expropriation, or even critical commentary on the mainstream and its fondling of speed over substance, speed curating, nothing less than an abomination, has become an annual tradition with more and more curators signing up, something that makes power relations between artist and curator more visible and more real. “No harm” you might say (again), let’s show the art scene for what it really is, vampires and mirrors. But what if I say, “Look in the mirror.” Unlike the morally free and mirror-free vampire, artists indeed have a reflection, a self, a soul—in the empathetic sense. If anything, artists are soulful mirrors. What do you see? What I see is a gangway of artists waiting to be invited en masse into a social Get Together, something that would never happen naturally because the art scene is split between those that are visible and those that are not, those at the centre and those that are not, those who are not here and those that are. It’s all good; democratic. It’s like this: when the vampire crosses the doorstep they suck your blood, the blush of childhood transfused into a greedy gush—a glamorous death for the short-lived. The immortal vampire, not under the pinch of death, is morally free; the mortal artist with the possibility of bi-proxy immortality via the legacy of the artwork is free? if not morally. We invited the soulless and mirrored mainstream in at the advent of the internet. We came out of our subcultural closets, tore down our bad-mannered posters and straightened our Darwinian slouches—evolved from the beautiful shouldering of narcissism that is the artist’s pain and pleasure—overnight, to meet the mainstream with open arms, a world that we had retreated from at the advent of becoming artists. Now we commandeer such mainstream stock phrases as “Sorry for cross posting”. We beg for acceptance. We worry about the unsolicited, the impolite. GDPR. Bollox. “Sorry for cross posting” is an apology with a silent ‘but’ at the end of a beginning. If you lob on another t you get ‘butt’. “Sorry for cross posting” is the implication of an arse without the shitstorm; or with the shitstorm depending how far an artist will implicate their tongue in the arse of an apology that is neither sincere nor lives up to what an artist should never do—apologise. Sorry! What happened was: once upon a time an artist or few went to a professional workshop for artists (laughs), then another, and another, before every artist went and shared the good professional advice delivered by curators and other career apologists until we were left with artists making apologies en route to discrediting themselves by continuing on with their whispering but(t)s. This is just the tip of the shit pile. Over the past two years I have mentioned ‘speed curating’ in passing as a critical example of how the contemporary artist has come to see themself as a passive pawn in terms of the art administration that holds sway over the dissemination and display of their work. Speed curating is a depressing outcome of the hyper-professionalisation of the artist and our art scene; being professional meaning, you get in line and wait for the ding-dong of the bell. Dong. Dong. Dong. Previous mentions of speed curating in my writing were propagandist in delivery and tone, sneering (it’s an indefensible and easy target), never explicating why speed curating is wrong and should not be supported or facilitated by artist or curator or institution. I write this now on the night I receive an update on the forthcoming VAI Get Together where, we are told, 40 curators (named and profiled) lay in waiting for the unnamed or unprofiled in the arid, salty, cracked desperation of the opportunity dessert at the next event in June. We can make lemonade from this lemon but the effort would make us look old and wrinkled, saving ourselves from something like conviction. The moral imperatives of generosity and kindness are lost to the self-serving lies of confirmation bias when money and careers are at stake. Kindness is a big word, generosity even bigger. Artists sometimes use the word ‘generosity’ in relation to time and attention given to them by other artists during their education or just the day to day of being an artist. Generosity is rare. When given or received it is spoken almost like a surprise, as if time and energy given over to someone else is a rare thing in this commodifying and on-the-clock culture. Generosity has nothing to do with money; generosity is good, one-sided, an act of kindness, of sacrifice that, most of the time, is hidden from view. Generosity is about levelling the playing field, making everyone else into invisible men and women, even yourself, so that the receiver hears and trusts themselves in your empty presence, void of agenda or instrument. Generosity is all or nothing; it puts the giver on hold, and the receiver at risk as they bleed out. With our blushing cheeks drained by the vampire of experience, maybe growing up is the real problem for the artist whose childhood blush made they retreat under the covers of art where being out of place was a virtue not a shaming. Blush on.