Event And Spectacle

Exhibitions have become an indispensable significant role in today’s sociocultural consumption for the public.While curatorial acts in contemporary Chinese art exhibitions are important yet mysterious,curators as practitioners continue to promote the domestic exhibition ecology.In this thesis,I take curatorial practice as the exact object for examination.In terms of presenting the present and contemporary condition of human civilization,I first briefly elaborate on the origin and development of Western curatorship.Focusing on the awakening of free thought in Chinese contemporary art,following the timeline of the emergence,exploration and development,this thesis seeks to illustrate the evolution of curatorial practice in China.I will put an emphasis on summarizing the essential values of the exhibition production,namely,the interpretive value,the identity value,the exhibition value and the capital value.In such a content,important exhibition events will be taken as key cases to analyze the inner logic of value generation,demonstrating the complementary relations among different value systems.At the same time,faced with the exhibition values presented in different periods,this thesis also examines the responses of domestic curators in their practice in the constantly changing context.These curatorial moments fully present the essential core of curatorial action.In the 30 years of curatorial practice of Chinese contemporary art,exhibition,from the event nature to an industrial and consumer product,falls into a mere landscape.It is of necessity to find a clear path for the evolution of exhibition value in the process of rapid development,in order to figure ways to cope with the current curatorial crisis.At the same time,based on the current situation of curatorial landscapization,this thesis puts forward the objective problems of exhibition production and the situation of curatorial practice,and proposes different curatorial approaches to establish the basic criteria for criticizing exhibitions.Finally,I hope to supplement and explain the important ideological content of curating as an emerging discipline that keeps pushing social thought forward and activating the teaching responsibilities.