NEW YORK—In a recent essay about the task of organizing an exhibition, star curator Robert Storr, who directed this year’s Venice Biennale, made a point of distinguishing between people he called “exhibition makers,” who are responsible for putting together temporary shows, and curators, whose “primary concern” is the “care and preservation of art.”

Storr’s distinction is about much more than splitting hairs over job descriptions: Its significance lies in pointing out how we habitually stretch the traditional notion of the curator to encompass many different practices. And it comes, not surprisingly, at a time of identity crisis for the profession.

Since the 1990s, the number of major international biennials has grown from just a few to over 100, and the ever-proliferating art fairs have begun to feature curated booths and concurrent exhibitions. With so many venues competing for public attention, the sexy, up-to-the-minute show—as opposed to the less glamorous, behind-the-scenes work of collecting—has become the center of many contemporary curatorial practices. It is a trend that has benefited independent curators making timely, idea-driven group shows by providing more outlets for their work. But it has also impacted traditional curators at collecting institutions, who must strike a balance between staying current and cultivating the museum’s holdings.

Artists Over Art
As founding director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College—one of the first academic programs geared specifically to curators—and current director of its graduate program, Norton Batkin has an obvious professional interest in keeping close tabs on the changing practice of curating. “Opportunities for contemporary curators have changed radically over time in part because of curatorial studies programs,” he said. “There are people coming out now who think differently about galleries, independent spaces, and other [non-institutional] situations.”

Those venues have created many new opportunities for curators to come in and create exhibitions, which, according to Batkin, has become a more attractive activity to CCS students than developing collections. While some students remain committed to studying a particular historical moment or body of work, the vast majority prefer working with younger artists and developing exhibitions with them. “They’re mostly talking about a younger generation of artists; they’re not talking about people who are heavily represented in collections,” Batkin says.

The Rise of Independents
If the supply of exhibition makers is on the rise, so is the demand. With increasing frequency, galleries, nontraditional venues, and even museums are turning to exhibition specialists, often given the blanket title independent curators, hoping they can bring a specific angle, expertise, or philosophy to the institution’s exhibition program. The assumption is that the independent curator’s specialty—the provocative or timely thematic group show—tends to generate more buzz than scholarly considerations of a single artist.

Indeed, the independent curator lives and dies by the novelty of her ideas. Without the weight of an institution behind them, according to Katy Siegel, a professor of art history at Hunter College in New York who has also organized a number of successful independent exhibitions, “You really have to prepare a very tight idea of the project, because what people are most interested in is your perspective.”

Her touring exhibition “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975,” which debuted at the National Academy Museum in New York last spring, was a particularly successful example. The show brought together a group of painters—some well-known, others not—to tell the story of painting in an era when many considered the medium to be “dead.” At once cautious and provocative, it earned critical praise as a long-overdue reconsideration of the period, and also won an international roster of venues eager to play host.