On Discourse and the Curatorial

With the paradigm of salon exhibitions, developed some three centuries ago, bourgeois art patrons were moved to transform their experience of an exhibition into words. This incitement to discourse persists as a central component of curatorial practice today, within and beyond exhibitions as singular events. In On Discourse and the Curatorial Mick Wilson draws out the link between the imperative to generate discourse and the imperative to civilize that emerge in the genealogy of the salon, the exhibition complex, and the museum. The first volume in the forthcoming series On the Curatorial, which explores the decades-long debate on the genre of exhibition making and its limits.