New Book by AICA-USA Member Brett Levine

July 12, 2021

AICA-USA member Brett Levine's new book Curatorial Intervention: History and Current Practices explores the myriad ways in and through which curators mediate the artist-audience exchange. In particular, Levine explores how curatorial transparency, agency, and power can recontextualize and reposition artworks prior to their being experienced by audiences—often with viewers none the wiser.

Focusing on contemporary curatorial practice, this work critically examines the ways in which curators impact artists’ intentionality, and how this alters audiences’ experiences of reception. Through discussions with leading artists, curators, and arts administrators, Levine posits a new paradigm for defining and contextualizing curating, while exploring how the former dialectic intention/reception is today superseded by the triad intention/intervention/reception. After situating the more traditional artist-audience relationship, he explores how extant theories of the art experience fail to either provide for considerations of curatorial practice or contextualize its operations.

Levine writes,

"The overarching question is not if curators have agency within the artist–audience exchange but rather if their mediations in advance of experience should be visible to the absent audience member. These mediations, as Boris Groys explains, problematize the artist–audience exchange to such a degree that audiences, as viewers, are compelled to evaluate which experiential frame they wish to operate within—a mediated curatorial frame or an unmediated creative frame. In many ways, curatorial intervention emphasizes if and, if so, how a spectator or the spectator (think, the ideal spectator) experiences a work of art, rather than how every individual subjectively encounters works—and questions how the specific experience is mediated. This query forms the foundation of intervention theory." (p. 1-2)