Writing and criticism are central to curating and engaging people with the work. This section explores the relationship between these two areas from the role of criticism in exhibiting work and the importance of writing for interpretation, marketing and helping an audience engage with work.

Importance of writing & criticism

Writing is a fundamental element of curating and is essential for everything from making proposals, applying for funding to presenting the work to the public. Writing is the key way of articulating the arguments and contexts for the work and exhibition. A critical argument is important when presenting your project and looking for support but it’s not the same as a critical assessment.

Critics and curators often collaborate and work closely together to develop and contextualise projects. It is common for curators to invite critics to talk about work and respond to the work and provide a different perspective or interpretation. The different perspectives introduced by critics can help strengthen and expand your project. Criticism and writing about work adds to its profile and helps situate an artist's work in a broader context. Creating a space to ask and discuss critical questions of work is essential to any screening or exhibition.

How curating and criticism relate

The rise of independent curators working outside of a collection or institution brings into question the role and the relationship of the work of a curator and critic. Independent curators’ active roles and critical underpinning has been seen to take the place of written criticism that some see as declining area merging increasingly with PR.

Independent curators require a more developed critical stance as they are approaching institutions from the outside. Curators should have something of the critic about their practice in order to explore and select work from many sources and present it along with an argument. There is too much work to not make an argument for what you have decided to show. A critical argument will give weight to your project not only to audiences but also for potential venues, funders and the press.

Influence of language

Words play a very strong part in defining what work can mean or how people can approach it. Text accompaning an exhibition is an important and vital tool in communicating your excitement about work or ideas to an audience. But it is also important to allow work to breathe and for people to be able to experience the unique qualities of the work itself rather than prescribing a singular reading. As German film curator Stefanie Schulte Strathaus at the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin states, 'films do not work as proof of a argument' as this risks depriving 'them of their cinematic quality.' She continues:

'The part of the emotional perception in cinema, where rhythm, colour and sound create the interplay of distance and closeness, is necessary to help film to its full potential of expression. This may well mean that a film that at first sight appears as a perfect match to a specific topic may actually not work at all in the framework of a program because it does not allow for frictions or for transitions: it simply does not communicate with other works.' (1)

The power of words to impose meanings on or stifle artists’ work reveals the influence they have and the care that should be taken when writing about work. Text is an essential way to convey context and arguments for work and guide people’s experience. It is often the first way people will be made aware of an exhibition along with an image or design. As such always think about how the text could be understood without any knowledge of the rest of the project or artists involved.

Language influences curators, and critics, decisions all the time – for example the descriptions of work in an exhibition catalogue or press release. Be careful with becoming too reliant on writing about work and make sure to look at work to see how it could operate in the context you are interested in. At the end of the day it is the work, not the accompaning text, that is being presented.

The context within which work is being shown and where it is written about dictates the way people write about it. For example marketing copy, a press release and a catalogue essay all address different types of readers. But in the end writing should be lucid and readable; it should address the work and its context and conveys' the reasons, as well as the excitement, behind presenting the work.