BERLIN—I met a guy who likes to date curators. “Why do you guys like Commes des Garçons?” he blurted out as he walked out of the toilet. He reached for the water bottle on the bedside table and replenished himself with its entire contents, with compliments to the hotel. Prodding me as if it were a millennium problem of the night, he said he did not understand why people like me like the brand. He is a journalist and was very sure of his assumption. He did not let me respond.

I don’t understand why contemporary art curators don’t write anymore. I wish this were a critique. I say this, wanting it to become a lamentation that the art of writing has totally escaped our grasp. Between our fingers, a compass that points direction, discreetly and doubly judgmental. On the palm of our hands, we wish for an itch to mean money, a superstition I have not shaken off since I heard it. Sometimes I let it compete with the gift of motivation to write. What if writing is like an itch, a sensation on the surface of the skin that jolts the body and its nerves into a motivated urgency to locate it? When traced and found, the itch, the mind short-circuits, like a rabid dog scratching a topography of tingling non-aches. What will itch the curator into writing?

My colleagues seem to have been avoiding writing recently. I must confess that it was only when I visited a glorious bookstore in Nairobi that I read fiction again. I transitioned to listening to audio in early 2016, desperate to consume stories as sleep-inducing sound. I prefer short stories, under 40 minutes, read by older female authors. Once, I discovered a well-produced app dedicated to essay reading. It has since been bought out by a publishing conglomerate. I remember the readings were almost so immaculate that I slept through an investigative text on sexual abuse in an art high school in the United States. The reading made me “view” the essay in multiple dimensions, the commentary invested in the humanity of errors and lapses, in the promise of repair with minimal sociology around the legal context of abuse. Had I read it like an opinion piece, the author’s voice would have passed through me as a spokesperson for the survivors. The reader of the words was neither a voice-over nor a dub. The reader is a speech actor, akin to a curator who conducts a walkthrough in an exhibition or whose voice is delivered in one’s ear through exhibition wall texts and catalogs.

When curators speak, they talk over their writing. Whether this is true or false merits a reassessment of the task of curating today. When I was living in Manila in the 2010s, one of my initiations into the art world was a workshop on art criticism and visual literacy, a curious pairing of functions. It was hosted by the country’s only art history degree-granting university a year after an art exhibition made national headlines for offending religious sensibilities. 

I was one of many young and enthusiastic participants in what felt like a conference-training session that took over one week. Everyone was interested in writing. We communed around the content of art that we had all viewed together in the university museums we visited in the previous days. We were all interested, as the word’s etymology reveals: We were in between the content and exhibition of art, in the midst of being aware and informed, in the thick of context and consequence. 

In a graphic demonstration, our interest had to be squeezed out. That squeezing is our writing, articulations in English or Filipino that still bear the burden of contextualization. Such a task has been taken up by the curator through speech, as the spokesperson of the total art experience. Most of my fellow workshop participants either pursued careers outside art or never wrote again. I became a curator.

Writing curatorially is a theory too tentative to be outlined. Nevertheless, it can be formulated through two techniques of copying: transcription and plagiarism. Rather than remedies in the impasse of “squeezing,” they can be considered as pricks around the text, the idea. There is a curator who needs acupuncture to write. There is another who writes as a scribe at the disposal of art. They mark two increasingly divergent curatorial lives. The former operates in the wellness economy of art as content, while the latter has since disappeared, as the task of the public intellectual has been seized by speech communication. As both have been absorbed into sociological and political narration, curatorial texts often appear as motherless children of aesthetic imagination.

Contemporary (art) curators seek paternity in plagiarism, the once anarchic technology in the intellectual copyright struggle that now finds obsolescence in artificial intelligence. While it remains the most rampant form of curatorial writing, it is not an alternative to transcription in the sense that when it fails, plagiarism operates in lieu of it. Plagiarism, as the avant-garde artist Shūji Terayama used it, expands the space that the text occupies, from haiku to tanka. It works when the writing of history becomes impossible. Transcription, on the other hand, prioritizes the audibility of thought, as if what becomes inaudible were already intelligible. 

Can art curators be taught how to re-intone these forms of writing?

Returning to literacy and criticism, the labor of curatorial writing manifests in how Terayama read plagiarism as the procedure of being interested: “The first symptom of the disease is showing interest in what other people are doing.” A life-giving pathos encourages self-plagiarism to become serial, a stubbornness that believes that by appropriation and repetition life will eventually reveal itself. This “biting” is not criminal, as Jay-Z would demonstrate in hip hop. Borrowing is paying respect to lineage; referencing is a form of literacy. The chaos of lyricism intervenes in curators’ ability to write, lingering on the desks of art history, social media, entertainment, and the literary business. Following Jay-Z in “What More Can I Say”: I’m not a biter, I’m a writer for myself and others/I say a B.I.G. verse, I’m only bigging up my brother/Bigging up my borough, I’m big enough to do it/I’m that thorough, plus I know my own flow is foolish/So them rings and things you sing about, bring ’em out/It’s hard to yell when the barrel’s in your mouth/I’m in, new sneakers, dual-seaters, few divas/What more can I tell you? Let me spell it for you.

When a now-repudiated and disgraced P. Diddy collaborated with Faith Evans and Atlanta-based R&B group 112 on the track “I’ll Be Missing You,” in which they integrated the lyrics of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” in their song, they permitted themselves to leave the literary framework of music production. Sting may have secured the royalties of the song and the authorial right, but Diddy, Evans and 112 transcribed a new text based on cut-and-paste, medley, and chorus. After the total discursification of art, writing loses its intellectual and poetic license to describe the force of art in the public domain. When curators abandon writing, whose texts gain power? How can a “good” plagiarist emerge powerful when curators paraphrase artist statements and outsource the task to speech moderation? 

For writing to remain an obligation of articulation, texts about art must be written outside the medium of response, beyond the logic of reply and retaliation. When the guy who likes to date curators wrote “don’t tell anyone about this” the next day, I pasted the same sentence I had sent to other men who asked me to bring the event to the illicit. I told everyone about it, and I embellished the scene. Texts to be curatorial in ethos and form can be re-cited in the pressure of silence. How can art and its exhibitions be publicly enjoyed when curators write after they plagiarize? I rewrote and plagiarized night. CS

Renan Laru-an is a curator and theorist in contemporary arts, from Sultan Kudarat and living in Berlin.

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