A friend asked me about my opinion on who I thought was a good curator and I told her I don't know any good curators. She looked at me incrediously and while I was trying to explain what I meant, I realised that the job of a curator has very little to do with artistic qualities. Which is of course not how we think of curators today.
The kind of curator she was thinking of makes some kind of artistic decisions and tends to present these to a public through exhibitions and the like. In this sense there have been curatiorial efforts that I admire, but these tend to be by artists, like Robert Gober's presentation of the Menil collection, Simon Starling's show for the 50th anniversary of the Camden Arts Centre, or gerlach en koop working with the collection of the Bonnefanten Museum in their show : . What these exhibitions have in common is that they had a clearly defined existing collection as their subject. It was a quote-unquote straightforward question of which objects to choose and of how, and why, to combine and display them. Each of them made interesting and unusual choices in these matters and that makes those shows memorable for me.
But this is not really what a curator does. A curator generally doesn't make decisions about a static collection of objects. Instead, a curator works with artists or other institutions and collectors, where various matters have to be balanced, discussed and negotiated. This kind of work makes up the bulk of a curator's duties and is managerial and logistical in nature. Only loosely is it connected to any kind of artistic decision. This makes it so that the artistic vision of such a curator is essentially limited to a question of taste or of who they are able to contact. There are some curators whose taste in artists overlap with mine, but that doesn't necessarily mean I will relate to the exhibitions they create, because it is extremely rare that all decisions in an exhibition are based on the personal preferences of a single person.
Any curator working at an institution is going to have to balance various interests of various stakeholders, be it artists, lenders, various kinds of audiences, governments, financial backers, and so on. Their job is not to make 'a good exhibition', their job is to weigh and manage the importance of many different demands. Demands that are quite often in conflict with each other.
There is theoretically a bit more freedom for a curator at a private gallery, but even there the artist, not the curator, usually has final say about the artistic aspects of their exhibition. A privately funded gallery also can't forget about the taste of the public if it has to make sales in order to survive.
Anything can only be judged on their own quality, so if there is such a thing as a good curator, it would need to be a wholly independent person, with enough affluence to build a collection from which they can freely choose and arrange that collection as they please.
Perhaps more importantly, a good curator would need the vision and the foresight to build that collection in a way that it allows for many different cross-links between objects, so that this collection can offer more than the simple sum of its parts.
I for one can't think of any person, or collection, that fits this description and therefore there are no good curators.
