Curating Capitalism: How Art Impacts Business, Management, and Economy

by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

How art impacts management, drawing from stories told by internationally known contemporary curators, artists, critics, and philosophers.


Curating has evolved into much more than creating interesting exhibitions, promoting artists, and selling artwork. Art worlds have fused with business worlds and transformed capitalism from the inside out. To "curate capitalism" implies new ways of management that go far beyond the simple commercialization of art and artist. Today, art and the artist inspire business. While some of Curating Capitalism can be traced back to the German Artist Joseph Beuys’ declaration that Art=Capital and American Andy Warhol’s vision of a capitalistic "Business Art," it takes the insights of independent curators to upscale and intellectually articulate these ideas.

Genres: Fashion, Art, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

Expected publication January 2, 2079

Reviews

[Statz]

didn’t finish - i’m perhaps not smart enough for this book haha

[Sahand Yazdanyar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual Rating 3.5/10

"Stop trying to make fetch happen!" - Regina George
"Stop trying to make 'curating capitalism' happen!" - Me

Look, I'm all for developing new academic language/phrases to encapsulate a specific phenomena or novel concept within a certain field of study, but I would hope that at the end of the book I'd come away with some semblance of understanding of what the phrase means. I've gathered that it's some way of sort of using Art in a business/capitalist sense to pursue a liberatory(?) end for the artist??? I genuinely have no idea because the author kind of rambles about different concept with a through line that is only an idea that never really gets fleshed out in my opinion.

Additional bones to pick:

- The writing style goes from extremely obtuse to very insider baseball to quite informal/familiar...I wouldn't be mad at this if it made sense or lent itself to anything meaningful other than making me even more confused
- The author mentions Eurocentricity but then is...just extremely Eurocentric?
- Part 2 to the above, lots of "not capitalism, not communism, but a secret third thing" that is all too common with European economists/Europeans who write on topics related to economics
- I just don't buy the argument...like, okay, we can say that "Art no longer equals politics but instead *sly grin* Art = Capital" but that's still just capital "A" Art. The other art still very much remains political and is apparent when you look beyond the big names. Yes, they're doing Basquiat collabs with Uniqlo and Kehinde Wiley is designing AmEx cards, but that is irrelevant to art itself. Art has always been able to find itself both in the highest places with unlimited resources (think artists with patrons during the Renaissance or artists with trust funds during our current era) as well as at the very bottom where materials are sourced from what could be found or "acquired." This book wasn't a complete waste -- on the note of Wiley and AmEx, the author does talk about middle-class exposure to art, and I guess that's what this is about maybe? How Art is a business and everyone is trying to get in on it. I don't know...now I'm rambling.

Last thought, personal gripe, anyone who is confused (AND WRITING IN 2024 NO LESS) about the ability of Raf Simons (paraphrasing "is he a part of high fashion or not? is he just an interior designer? his pick to run a luxury fashion house makes no sense") should not be speaking on luxury fashion.