The Spike Roundtable: What Happened to the Curator?

This is Spike's roundtable at the Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin.

The curator is long gone as an important figure.

I'm just serving the people, serving the exhibition, the artists.

That's my job.

I really don't think we're in power anymore.

Unfortunately, it's also true that often it's the market today that is writing the history.

In the art world, we kind of all assume that there are certain things you can't say.

I'm not talking about political correctness, I'm talking about the sense that a lot of people don't actually believe that a lot of what's shown in museums is actually very good.

There has to be consensus.

A consensus is a kind of a facade when everything else is burning.

There's almost like an obligation to keep this facade and not to talk about anything that is going on and under and above and below.

A little bit like kind of performing the situation.

In Spike's summer 2024 issue, The State of the Arts, we invited Daniel Baumann, art historian, critic and former long-time director of the Kunsthalle Zurich, to write on a vocation that, it turned out, he believes is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

After the digital republication of his print article struck a chord online, the magazine brought together a roundtable in November 2025, featuring Daniel himself, independent curator Övül Ö, Durmuşoğlu, who has worked with the Istanbul Biennial, Kunsthallevin and Documenta 13, among others, and Luca Lopinto, former artistic director of MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.

Moderated by writer and editor Pablo Larios, they discussed what went wrong in the trajectory of a vocation that, not so long ago, was the darling of global art.