Curating is about choices
An interview with a curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is an internationally renowned art curator and writer. At the end of the 1990s, he published his first book, Relational Aesthetics, which remains his most popular work to this day.
“I’ve been working since then on what I call an extended relational aesthetics, which not only concerns interhuman relationships but also involves the non-human: our relationships to the atmosphere, to bacteria, to animals, to vegetables — to… in one word, to the living world. And this came as something obvious, actually, from the early 2000s,” he says in our conversation, which took place in Riga, where Nicolas Bourriaud had arrived to be part of the Panel of Judges for the Latvian art award Purvītis Prize 2025.
From 31 October at MAXXI in Rome, the exhibition 1+1. The Relational Years, dedicated to almost 30 years of the Relational Aesthetics movement and curated by Bourriaud himself, will be held. Announcing the project, MAXXI writes: “In the 1990s, a new generation of artists revolutionised the discourse of art by opening it up to human relationships, exploring the collective sphere, and using social practices, conviviality, interaction, groups, and communities as both materials and tools of research. The concept of Relational Aesthetics, theorised by Bourriaud in 1998, is now recognised as one of the major artistic movements of the new millennium, with its artists acclaimed worldwide: Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, to name just a few.”
Bourriaud has curated a large number of exhibitions and art biennials. He was one of the 13 co-curators of the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale (1993), artistic director of the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), curator of the Istanbul Biennale (2009), etc.
He was co-founder and co-director of the Palais de Tokyo (1999–2006). Until 2021, he was the Director of the Montpellier Contemporain (MO.CO), an institution he created in 2017.
Besides Relational Aesthetics, his published works include Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (Sternberg Press, 2001); Radicant: For an Aesthetic of Globalisation (Sternberg Press, 2009, Denoël); and The Exform (Verso Books, 2016). And Inclusions : aesthetics of the capitalocene (Sternberg Press; 2021)
I guess your most popular book is Relational Aesthetics, which was first published in 1998. What has changed within art scene changed since then? Quite a long time has passed — almost 30 years.
I was 30 years old when I wrote this book, actually. In the 1990s, nobody really was involved in the Anthropocene. Even the word didn’t exist yet—it was coined in 2001. The growing consciousness of ecology, climate change, the extinction of species, etc., deeply impacted my way of thinking from the early 2000s. Some of the artists I wrote about in Relational Aesthetics also evolved in this direction. Like Pierre Huyghe, for example, whose work really corresponded at the time to Relational Aesthetics, and still does in a way — we both evolved in the same direction.
Since The Great acceleration, the Taipei biennale that I curated in 2014, I have been working on what I call an “extended relational aesthetics”, which goes beyond interhuman relationships and involves the non-human: our relationships to the atmosphere, to bacteria, to animals, to plants… in one word, to the living world. And this came as something obvious for me, but it wasn’t yet represented in the scene at the time. So it evolved in this way, redefining the space around us as a theater of relationships—not only between us human beings, but with all the neighboring forms of life. We are actually within a network of living organisms, and we have to take care of it.
Our bodies, even, are a zoo—actually, we are sheltering billions of bacteria. We cannot see the world the same way as before, I think, since we acknowledged this situation and our state of consciousness has evolved. So that’s how Relational Aesthetics also evolved—from the interhuman sphere to a way of thinking that acknowledges this extended field of the living.
Since The Great acceleration, the Taipei biennale that I curated in 2014, I have been working on what I call an “extended relational aesthetics”, which goes beyond interhuman relationships and involves the non-human: our relationships to the atmosphere, to bacteria, to animals, to plants… in one word, to the living world.
It’s interesting that you mentioned “Anthropocene” as a new word. And in the context of what you said, I was thinking that there’s one quite old word which became very important: animism. And, also, shamanism, in a way—because this is what you see in today’s art scene, and not only in the art scene but in our culture. We want to expand our notion of reality, of consciousness.
You’re right. What is the common point between the shaman and the artist? Well, there are two ones. The figure of the shaman exists because there’s no art, properly speaking, in his/her community. In certain human societies, shamanism includes the concept of art. But in societies where this concept exists, you don’t need shamans, as artists are assuming their role, which consists in giving a shape to the unknown, to the non-explainable. It is a social position, a specific mental place.
And what is this position? Shamans and artists are both diplomats. They enter into contact with the invisible, with energies we cannot see, with forms of life we’re not connected to. But it’s the same principle, I would say.
Shamans and artists are both diplomats. They enter into contact with the invisible, with energies we cannot see, with forms of life we’re not connected to.
So it’s not a surprise if the figure of the shaman is coming back so strongly. Actually, it never really disappeared. What’s changed is that we’re coming back to a pre-Columbian way of thinking—a thinking before the colonization. We are connecting again with knowledges that were erased by Europeans all over the world.
It’s especially interesting in the Baltic regions, where I am now – because this part of Europe was the last one to be Christianized, and it’s on the front line of the ancient clash between paganism and Christianity. And there is so much knowledge that has been erased, so many wisdoms eradicated, so many ways of doing and thinking that were standardized.
That, I think, is what the current world is trying to help us find again – seeing what we can do with those forces, and with the ancestor of the artist, who is the magician. That’s the point, and this phenomenon comes from the re-evaluation of pre-modern ways of thinking.
Since Philippe Descola—who published his book Beyond Nature and Culture in 2005 – we know that animism is just one of the four ontologies shared by all human beings all over the planet. This analogical way of thinking, that was adopted only in the 16th or 17th century in Europe, implies a radical separation between human and non-human beings.
Many artists are coming back to this ontology nowadays. But think about conceptual art, for example. Look at Robert Morris’s 1962 piece Box with the Sound of Its Own Making—it’s an object that talks about itself. Isn’t that animism?
In popular culture, look at the Pixar film Toy Story—a toy describing itself as merchandise. That’s also what conceptual art does—saying “this work of art is constituted of…” Many artworks, in the wake of conceptual art, describe their own making, as if they’re speaking for themselves. There are traces of animism everywhere in the Western world.
Once you said that you always see art as an alternative editing table for reality. But what is the notion of the real today? How has it changed? Because on one side, with our actions and digital reality, we have gone as far as possible from it, and on the other, we desperately want to return to it, because we want something solid, like this table, to stand on.
Reality is a very difficult concept to define and to work with. One could say, like Jacques Lacan, that reality is what hurts. If you are not hurt, facing a limit, a border, you aren’t touching reality. So, I’m afraid that we are pretty much inside reality at the moment, with wars spreading and the wave of stupidity contaminating the planet. That hurts, actually. And that’s real. And people are more and more consciously touching reality – in a bad way, I would say. Lacan opposed the real to the symbolic and the imaginary. Today, there’s no balance between those three components, and that’s the problem. We’re getting more and more into the real, while the imaginary and the symbolic are being erased or attenuated. So, we are living in a reality that’s not balanced anymore by these three components.
And that might be the reason why there is a lot of figurative painting nowadays: they are a way to get to the Real, in a very direct way. Simply showing an object or a face in an artwork is a passage to the Real. But now, the relationship we have with the Real is determined by the 3 billion images that are produced every day on social networks, for example. This is not real. This is just another reality, which is filtered, photoshopped, and selfie-oriented. And this is not reality, that’s the imaginary without the weight of reality.
I’m afraid that we are pretty much inside reality at the moment, with wars spreading and the wave of stupidity contaminating the planet.
And what is the role of the curator in this ecosystem today?
Well, curators are somewhat like the workers at national parks in America, actually. They are trying to evaluate, describe, maintain and organize life. It’s about selection. It’s about making things readable, and I think that’s really important. They are like seismographers, they try to capture and understand the direction and the intensities of the wavelength we are surrounded by. It’s keeping your headset on and trying to make sense of what you hear. In the end, I think curating is about choices, and choices are always ideological. Always. For me, when you show one artwork next to another, you start producing a very specific meaning, and nothing is innocent. So, it’s really important to keep in mind that this is also a political activity. Political, because art is the polis in which we all evolve. And we have to intervene in this city, this artistic polis that surrounds us, which means taking positions, standing for principles, distinguishing intensities on one side and what is not intense on the other: the fake and the real, the original and the banal.
Curators are somewhat like the workers at national parks in America, actually. They are trying to evaluate, describe, maintain and organize life.
In 2022, you founded the Radicant curators collective. Does this initiative continue to exist?
It’s a little slower, but we still have one project to do in Japan next year, and two or three other shows, proposed and curated by different curators, which are on standby. But, you know, sometimes institutions are a bit reluctant to take exhibitions from outside. I was expecting a bit more understanding to shelter proposals from young curators, from all over the world.
In one of your past interviews, you quoted the great anthropologist Tim Ingold, mentioning his description of anthropology as a “philosophy with the people in”. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with him, and I asked him about art, and he, in a way, developed this theme further and also spoke about art as kind of anthropology which works for the future, in the best way.
I’ve been really interested in anthropology in the last few years, actually. I just noticed that, since the beginning, my way of thinking was anthropological: Relational Aesthetics was already a kind of anthropological study, describing a social mutation and the way it impacted art. But in the last years, especially for my last book, Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene, I went deeper into some anthropological patterns, particularly into the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who I think is still an important figure, because he actually anticipated many issues which are debated now. Almost every anthropologist is a disciple of Lévi-Strauss, in a way or another. Lévi-Strauss asserted that cultural productions could only be understood within a global formal production: for example, the signs produced by bees or wild animals. And today, it’s particularly interesting because we are facing the “great extinction” of animal species. We are also losing a part of our culture, in a way. And I think it’s important to understand that, as human beings, we are caught in a network of voices that we don’t necessarily want to hear. This extinction is actually affecting us first and foremost, and it echoes the extinction of vernacular human cultures. One has to be aware of it. It’s far from being the case.
If we are looking at artwork, the viewer needs to be present. It’s really important to interact with an art piece. But I think in the last years, or in the last decades, our notion about presence has also changed, because we have somehow erased our bodily sensory systems — we do not use all our senses anymore.
Yeah, we’re just limiting ourselves as human beings, and accept to be dominated by the Automaton, the machinic system, being governed by algorithms and robots. That’s why art is so important nowadays. Because when we visit an exhibition, we need to use all our senses. And we are in a position that is much more open, more attentive, than if we were in the streets. That’s why museums and art centres are so vital for societies who don’t have a place for magic — because they put us into a totally different physical and mental configuration.
We’re just limiting ourselves as human beings, and accept to be dominated by the Automaton, the machinic system, being governed by algorithms and robots. That’s why art is so important nowadays. Because when we visit an exhibition, we need to use all our senses.
It was philosopher Georges Bataille who compared the museum to lungs, and it’s very important what kind of air we are breathing. What is the responsibility and the role of the museum, of the art institution today?
I was rereading recently a book that we published in 2001 before the opening of Palais de Tokyo, called What Do You Expect from an Institution of the 21st Century? We interviewed 50 people from all fields, architects, philosophers, artists. As I was rereading it, I think there are still many things that still need to be developed, and there were ideas which were very original and interesting. Today, there are many types of museums. Since the early 2000s, the notion of the museum has diversified. Different kinds of places are competing or complementing each other, in any city. If I take Paris, for example, the Pinault Foundation or Louis Vuitton Foundation do not have the same role as the Centre Pompidou or Jeu de Paume. So it’s difficult to wrap them all in one category. You have to examine them case by case. What is the most important, maybe, is the opposition between an art that plays the market game and this other kind of art, which does not necessarily end up with an object to be sold— this object being what Philippe Parreno calls the “happy end” of the creative process. But sometimes, there is no happy, and art can only be apprehended under the form of a gas. The main opposition for me today is market / non-market, because in the last 10 years this has been amplified. And this is quite dangerous, as the art world is splitting in two parts: a system where price tag is the only value, and another one which is focused on “content”. But both parts are devitalizing each other. Till the 2000s, the price of a work was more or less in line with its aesthetic value and its importance within the history of art. And today it’s totally disconnected. So, what are the criteria for the market? It becomes a Ponzi pyramid. A total moron, like this guy who sold his NFT for millions, can suddenly overprice Rembrandt. What is the value based on? I don’t understand, to be honest. It’s totally arbitrary, like Trump bitcoins. Values are not related anymore to any real economy. So that’s a big, big danger, I think. The question of criteria might be more and more important in the next years. And the problem is there’s not so much space anymore to discuss aesthetic values and to organize the necessary intellectual struggle between different visions of the world in order to establish criteria. That’s the main problem.
So, what are the criteria for the market? It becomes a Ponzi pyramid. A total moron, like this guy who sold his NFT for millions, can suddenly overprice Rembrandt. What is the value based on? I don’t understand, to be honest.
And maybe this is a kind of subconscious reason why we see the returning of craft in art nowadays.
Because savoir-faire, manual skills, provide us a kind of natural criteria: “Oh, that’s well done, at least. There’s a lot of work behind it.” So, as we are completely lost today in terms of criteria, we go back to the most traditional one, which is: how many hours did you spend doing this? Which is not, according to me, fully satisfying. Matisse could actually execute a painting in two minutes, but every day he was repeating 1,000 times the same gesture as an exercise. In the same way, even if some works take 10 minutes to be done, they are actually fed by a whole life of thinking behind them. So, it is a fake criteria. I would prefer the idea that people think that the depth of thought is the criteria, no? Singularity can also be a criteria. Originality. It’s the intense singularity of a vision of the world that might be my main criteria.
Matisse could actually execute a painting in two minutes, but every day he was repeating 1,000 times the same gesture as an exercise. In the same way, even if some works take 10 minutes to be done, they are actually fed by a whole life of thinking behind them.
Of course, but working with the hand is very connected to regions in our brain, to evolution, to thinking… Hands are not just trained. Maybe the arts that are very, very concerned about craft — textiles, ceramics — in some way point us in these directions: that we need to start handwriting a bit to train our brain.
I seldom take pictures with my cellphone, I write things in my notebook, because otherwise my memory will get lost, actually. By the way, there’s a very interesting idea in the Talmud that the text has no value as long as it’s not commented on. I love this idea. And it’s the same with the image. An artwork has a value as long as it’s possible for it to be at the center of discussion. If you don’t respond to images, they cease to exist. They are one of the billions of images that you will never see, the ones which pass through social networks every day. What is their purpose? Just souvenirs? Art is not a souvenir of reality — it’s what generates reality. You have to respond to it. It is like tennis, actually: if you serve, there is another player who has to respond, and the quality of the response is what makes the game interesting. You send the ball, and then nobody answers — or just says “well received.” That is the poorest answer that we can get. And this doesn’t make images exist. For images to exist, they have to be answered, responded to.
But there’s a well-known gap between contemporary art and its audience. Surveys show that contemporary art is one of the most misunderstood fields of culture. We’re talking about the power of art, but how do we convince young people about it?
At the same time, never before have so many people visited museums all around the world as today. That’s the paradox, because people, I think, instinctively feel that it’s important for them, even if they don’t know exactly what to expect from it. They go to see exhibitions because that’s the last place where we actually can discuss in front of images. If you go to a movie theatre, you cannot talk. If you go to the theatre, you cannot talk. If you read, you’re just alone. If you watch TV, you’re alone. If you watch your computer screen, you’re alone. Where can you actually discuss images with friends? It’s the museum, actually. That’s the last place where you can do it, strangely enough, and I think it plays a part in this interest that people have for museums, too. It’s a place where you can discuss life with images. It’s like organic intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence, and our relationship to art is organic because it doesn’t impose anything on you except something you have to extract from the artwork by yourself. Actually, it’s not predigested.
They go to see exhibitions because that’s the last place where we actually can discuss in front of images.
In a way, it reminds me of what Sam Keller said, that the museum is a forum.
Yes, an agora.
Which is the rarest thing in today’s art? Something that we miss, if any.
I think art allows humankind to project itself upon the world. Really, that’s exactly what it has done since prehistoric times. We became smarter than other species through acquiring the capacity to project ourselves. And art is the mental equivalent of this projection that we achieved through inventing spears, for example, or other projectiles. Art is a projectile, a mental projectile — and if we lose it, we’re not going to get it anywhere else. The Lascaux or Altamira caves from the Palaeolithic show this projection, this poetic projection into the world. And if we only have a rational type of projection through science and economics, the world will be less and less interesting. First, it’s going to be a kind of dry space, left to needs, greed, and very low-quality passions. And that’s the main thing — that’s what art brings to our lives, if we take it as a space of interactions, qualitative interactions with the world.
Art is a projectile, a mental projectile — and if we lose it, we’re not going to get it anywhere else.
