Is Your Back Up To Being A Curator?

12 hours of taxis, group meetings, meet and greets, studio tours in Korea will leave you carrying 20+ pounds of paperwork.

Really, though this post is about one of the many, major differences between art in Korea and the US.  Every show, no matter how small, usually has a small catalog or brochure here, and every artist has a well-made and prepared portfolio on hand.  There’s a combination of aggressively cheap and enthused graphic design labour here and cheap, reasonable quality printing that leaves the art world brimming with printed materials, curatorial essays and literature about artists.  A huge and almost unfathomable record of what’s happening moment to moment in contemporary art is present, and it’s both overwhelming and staggeringly impressive.  Add to that the constant, formal exchanging of name cards or business cards and you’re awash in a hypertext information space that speaks to the raw power of networking and community that exists here.

The prevalence of all this printed matter serves as a real illustration of the health of the arts economy here, in a sense that goes way beyond the simple sale of objects.  Here, there is not only constant work for the producers of art, but a steady flow of labour on the part of designers, curators and critics to participate in a multifaceted dialogue about artwork that just doesn’t exist in the US, unless one is lucky enough (and I mean lucky) to ascend the “art success ladder” to a certain point of relevance.  The arts economy here has a use, a paid use, I might add, for non-artists in support of artists at every level of the economy.s.  There’s not just vibrancy at the top and desperation at the bottom, there’s life all the way up the vine.

In the US, many, many more artists and institutions are taking it upon themselves to use print-on-demand services, their bootlegged copies of Adobe Indesign and their unpaid hours (or a friend’s unpaid hours) to produce small printed catalogs.  Now when I do studio visits with artists in the US, they’re not unlikely to have similar materials to their Asian counterparts.  Given the clear poor health of the American art economy, is this a step towards better health?  I think so.  Is it a sign that the Asian art world is coming into its own and beginning to have global influence in terms of artistic and professional practice?