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What is your job?
[Laughs.] I have often wondered! As a producer, I'm not just saying, Oh, let's get a good bass drum sound. I'm saying, OK, look, this thing you're doing now is hinting at a certain universe of things that I believe are connected. A frame maker is another way of describing my role: "OK, let's put a descriptive frame around this, look at everything that we've included inside our frame, and see how those things relate to one another. And what if we extend the frame to include all these other possibilities?" Of course, at the time you do it, it looks like you're including more marginal things in it. For example, when I first started making records, it was unusual for someone to come into the studio without a prewritten piece of music, to sit there, as I did, and make it up with whatever was there. Now it's how nearly everybody works. People hardly ever go into the studio with completely prewritten material now. Those kinds of innovations always look marginal at the time, but in fact often become central later on.
Would the frame-identifying role be relevant to all types of artists?
Yes. An artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to
this sequence of things. If you read art history up until 25 or 30 years ago, you'd find there was this supposition of succession: from Verrocchio, through Giotto, Primaticcio, Titian, and so on, as if a crown passes down through the generations. But in the 20th century, instead of that straight kingly line, there's suddenly a broad field of things that get called art, including vernacular things, things from other cultures, things using new technologies like photo and film. It's difficult to make any simple linear connection through them.
Now, the response of early modern art history was to say, Oh, OK. All we do is broaden the line to include more of the things we now find ourselves regarding as art. So there's still a line, but it's much broader. But what postmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn't
one line, there's just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently. Thus there is no longer such a thing as "art history" but there are multiple "art stories." Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities. You've drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together.
Do you worry about everybody being a curator and nobody creating anything?
To create meanings -- or perhaps "new readings," which is what curators try to do --
is to create. Period. Making something new does not necessarily involve bringing something physical into existence -- it can be something mental such as a metaphor or a theory. More and more curatorship becomes inseparable from the so-called art part. Since there's no longer a golden line through the fine arts, you are acting curatorially all the time by just making a choice to be in one particular place in the field rather than another.
In the traditional classical view, art objects are containers of some kind of aesthetic value. This value was put into them by the artist, who got it from God or from the Muse or from the universal unconscious, and then it radiated back out to those who beheld it. It was thus that missionaries played gramophone records of Bach to Africans in the expectation that it would civilize them, as though they would somehow be enriched by the flood of goodness washing over them. We now see the arrogance of this assumption, but I think few people understand what is really wrong about it, aside from its political incorrectness. What wrong about it is that cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. This is a controversial and volatile statement. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them. Duchamp's urinal was an exercise in this. Things become artworks not because they contain value, but because we're prepared to see them as artworks, to allow ourselves to have art experiences from them, before them, to frame them in contexts that confer value on them.
-- Brian Eno, interviewed in Wired
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