好英语网全世界到处飞的国际策展人
Over the last decade, as the contemporary art world has grown to planetary size — more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling Web sites, bigger museums, new biennials almost by the month — it has sometimes seemed as if a new kind of cultural figure has been born as well: the international curator, constantly in flight to somewhere.
过去十年，当代艺术在全球范围内高速增长，几乎每个月都有新的画廊、博览会、艺术品销售网站、美术馆、双年展出现。在这个过程中，一种新的文化形像似乎正在酝酿并发展壮大，那就是：全世界到处飞的国际策展人。
The phenomenon is not wholly new. Roaming European curators like Harald Szeemann and Germano Celant set the terms in the 1960s. But the art world’s transformation has transformed the curatorial field, and this week you needed go no further than a few places in Manhattan to sample its increasingly global sweep. One afternoon in a meeting room near Madison Square Park a young Australian curator who specializes in aboriginal art was sitting next to a Yale-trained painter-art-professor-curator from Tennessee, who sat across a table from fellow curators from London, Beijing, Mexico City, Madrid (by way of Brazil) and Berlin (though working in Albania). In previous months curators from 20 other countries, many of them far from contemporary art’s beaten paths — Sri Lanka, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria — had been in the city for the same reason.
这并不是什么全新的现象。早在上世纪六十年代，哈洛德·塞曼(Harald Szeemann)、杰曼诺·切兰特(Germano Celant)等往来于欧洲各国的策展人就已经为这一新人群提供了某种原型。但艺术界的变化也改变了策展行业。这个星期，你只需要移步到曼哈顿几个地方，就能切身体会到这一日趋全球化的发展大潮。一天下午，麦迪逊广场公园附近的一间会议室里，一名专攻原住民艺术的澳大利亚年轻策展人正坐在来自田纳西州、耶鲁出身的画家/艺术学教授/策展人旁边，桌子对面则是来自伦敦、北京、墨西哥城、马德里（借道巴西）、柏林（但本人在阿尔巴尼亚工作）的策展同行们。过去几个月，还有来自其他20多个国家的策展人为了同样的目的聚集纽约，其中很多人所在的国家都是远离当代艺术大本营的边缘地带，比如斯里兰卡、拉脱维亚、尼日利亚、保加利亚等。
Each of the curators had paid $1,900 — and in some cases more, for airfare and lodging — to come to New York for a 10-day training and networking program recently established by Independent Curators International, which has been known through most of its three decades for helping turn curators’ ideas into traveling exhibitions that are rented by established museums.
这些策展人每人花了1900美元（有的因为交通和住宿的缘故，费用更高），来纽约参加由独立策展人国际联盟(Independent Curators International，简称ICI)组织的为期十天的培训和社交项目。ICI自成立以来的三十年里，主要工作是把策展人的理念变成巡回展览，在各大知名美术馆展出。
But over the last three years this nonprofit organization, based in modest offices overlooking lower Broadway, has reinvented itself, and its profile has begun to rise along with the profile of the profession.
但在过去的三年中，这家小型非盈利机构实现了某种自我重塑。他们的办公地点俯瞰着下百老汇，环境极其简朴。随着策展行业受到的关注越来越高，该机构的口碑也开始越来越好。
While not exactly lucrative — the most recent snapshot by the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the estimated mean salary of a curator, broadly defined, in the United States at $53,540 — the profession has grown rapidly in cachet. The word itself has seeped into the language, a little too deeply. (“Curate your Facebook profile like you curate your life,” a social media blog counseled recently.) And while the term “independent curator” is misleading — curators are usually attached to institutions or programs, if only temporarily — the example of itinerant curators who have become art-world celebrities in recent years, like Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Neville Wakefield, has had an effect.
劳工统计局最近一次统计显示，在美国国内，广义而言的策展人年平均工资约为53540美元。虽然收入不算丰厚，这个行业的社会声望却在迅速增长。“策划”这个词本身已经深深渗入人们的日常生活语言（某社交媒体博客最近提出建议：“策划你的Facebook帐号，就像策划你的生活”）。尽管“独立策展人”这种说法容易造成误解——策展人通常都附属于艺术机构或项目，哪怕只是临时。近年来，奥奎·恩维佐(Okwui Enwezor)、汉斯-乌尔里希·奥布里斯特(Hans-Ulrich Obrist)、内维尔·维克菲尔德(Neville Wakefield)等足迹遍布全球各地的策展人俨然已成为艺术界的超级明星，而且他们也的确产生了重要影响。
“This whole phenomenon is really a post-millennium thing,” said Kate Fowle, a longtime British curator who took over as the executive director of Independent Curators in 2009 after working for a year as the curator of a new art center in Beijing. “It’s a profession growing at a very, very fast rate.”
“整个现象真的是2000年以后才出现的，”英国策展人凯特·福尔(Kate Fowle)说。2009年，她接任独立策展人联盟执行总监一职，之前一年在北京某新艺术中心担任策展人。“这个行业正在以非常、非常快的速度增长。”
Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Ms. Fowle said that an indication of the field’s size worldwide was that in the two and a half years since her organization started a training program in 2010, 672 applicants from more than 62 countries — “many more than we ever expected,” she said — have vied for what has turned out to be about 150 spots in the program, chosen by a jury. Two sessions are held each year in New York, each with room for only about 14 participants. And the popularity of the program quickly led Independent Curators to begin collaborations with other groups to start parallel training sessions elsewhere: in Philadelphia, Mumbai, Beijing and southeast Brazil, at the privately financed contemporary art complex known as Inhotim.
虽然很难统计出准确数字，但据福尔称，ICI设立培训项目以来的两年半内，来自62个国家的672人提交了申请，经过评委选拔，最终有大约150人参加了培训。“大大超出了我们的预期，”她说。纽约每年举行两轮培训，每次只能接受14人。培训大受欢迎，很快促使ICI跟其他团体合作在其他地区启动了同样的项目：费城、孟买、北京以及巴西东南部由私人赞助的艺术区Inhotim。
In New York this week the latest participants, ranging in age from early 20s to early 50s, spent time with some of the most prominent professionals of the city’s museums and nonprofit spaces: Nancy Spector, the chief curator at the Guggenheim; Scott Rothkopf, from the Whitney; Laura Hoptman from the Museum of Modern Art; Matthew Higgs from White Columns. The subjects and discussions — from the aesthetic subtleties of plinths and sandpaper tape to ideas about organizing exhibitions against one’s own taste — were as expansive and amorphous as the job description.
本周纽约的培训项目中，年龄从20出头到50出头的参加者，跟本市美术馆以及非盈利艺术空间的重要职业人士欢聚一堂，其中包括古根海姆美术馆首席策展人南希·斯佩克特(Nancy Spector)、惠特尼美术馆的斯科特·罗斯科普夫(Scott Rothkopf)、现代艺术博物馆的劳拉·霍普曼(Laura Hoptman)、白圆柱画廊的马修·希格斯(Matthew Higgs)。主题和讨论——从基座和砂纸美学上的微妙特质，到策划跟自己趣味完全相反的展览——涉及范围之广泛多变，和这份职业的工作描述一样。
Ms. Spector spoke about the difficulties of “grappling with the authority” of the Guggenheim’s architecture (“I sometimes think that I can’t install in a square room anymore”), but also, more extensively, about the dangers of the “helicopter model of international curating,” which too often leads to superficial understanding of cultures and their art — and to bad shows, she said.
斯佩克特女士谈及古根海姆美术馆建筑的“权威性使策展人在控制展览场地上”遇到了很多困难（“我有时候觉得自己已经失去在方形展场里布展的能力了”），但同时也更详细地说起“全世界到处飞的国际策展”模式潜在的危险，该模式常常导致策展人对当地文化和艺术的理解流于肤浅——最终做出很差的展览，她说。
Mr. Rothkopf, who was headed to another curators’ conference in Boston the next day, extolled the virtues — those he joked might seem almost “neocon” in an accelerating art world — of working closely with museum collections and with artists over long periods of time to create exhibitions “that shape an argument.”
罗斯科普夫第二天还要去波士顿主持另一场策展人会议。那些被他拿来开玩笑的人和事，听起来简直就像蓬勃发展的艺术界里的“新保守主义”。他赞成长期跟美术馆的收藏以及艺术家紧密合作，在这个过程中策划出“能够提出问题”的展览。
“I want to have some voice as a curator,” he said, “not just as a kind of movie producer.”
“我希望作为一名策展人发出自己的声音，”他说：“而不仅仅只是像个电影制片人一样工作。”
An unofficial theme of the gathering was a desire among many curators to find ways to to define themselves against the juggernaut of the commercial art world while still being able to pay the bills.
本次培训的一个非正式主题是许多策展人都渴望找到方法，既能抵挡商业艺术界的支配性力量，又能保证资金来源。
“It’s very hard for people doing this in China to find the right kind of place, that doesn’t feel like just a part of the market,” said Su Wei, an independent critic and curator from Beijing. Meaghan Kent, who worked for Chelsea galleries for many years and recently started a nonprofit program, site95, that organizes shows in temporary urban spaces, said that many curators she knows are as creative about their livelihoods as they are in their work with art and artists.
“在中国，这种运作方式很难存活，到处都像是市场的一部分，”来自北京的独立批评家/策展人苏伟说。梅甘·肯特(Meaghan Kent)在切尔西的画廊工作多年，最近创建了自己的非盈利项目site95，主要在一些临时的都市空间策划展览。她也表示，许多认识的策展人在处理生计问题上跟处理有关艺术和艺术家的工作一样富有创意。
“There are a lot of people out there who are artist-curator-bartender-whatevers, and they just put it all together to make it work,” she said. “They want to be able to have the freedom to make things up as they go.”
“很多人既当艺术家，又是策展人，同时还做着酒吧服务员或其他什么工作，他们都是想尽一切办法也要把事情办成的人，”她说：“他们希望能够自由地让事物自然生成。”
Emilia Galatis, a curator from Perth, Australia, who spent part of last year in the desert meeting aboriginal artists, said that visiting New York and talking to curators from around the world underscored for her how far off the radar of contemporary art aboriginal art remains, and how narrow the focus of the curatorial field can be despite its size.
艾米莉娅·加拉茨(Emilia Galatis)是一名来自澳大利亚珀斯的策展人，过去一年都在沙漠地区造访当地的原住民艺术家。她说来纽约跟全世界各地的策展人交流后，更加觉得当代艺术和原住民艺术彼此仍然相距遥远，策展领域尽管规模庞大，但其关注范围却意外地狭窄。
“It’s really hard even to talk precisely about global curating when the world is still so diverse,” she said.
“在各地差异仍然非常明显的今天，要谈全球策展真的很难，”她说。
But Mr. Su said that the more he traveled as a curator, the less diverse the art world was coming to seem. “I was at another curators conference just before I came here, in Guangzhou, and all the things we were discussing there weren’t much different from what we’re discussing here today.”
但苏伟先生说作为一名策展人，他出门见得越多，越觉得艺术界内部的差异很小。他说：“我来这儿之前在广州参加了另外一个策展人会议，感觉当时讨论的内容和今天我们讨论的内容并没有太大不同。”