Acts of Support: Contradictions of Curating and Care

The crisis of care and sustainability has become a key preoccupation in the art world. Artists and curators attempt to make visible the unseen and under-valued labour and relationships on which their activities rely. Activists agitate for policies to improve labour conditions in the art world’s notoriously unregulated sector. To compensate for the lack of care they routinely experience, cultural workers establish structures of support and mutual aid. In this lecture Helena Reckitt reviews some of these artistic, institutional, curatorial and activist developments. Drawing on debates around the feminization of labour and the rhetoric of labours of love, she highlights the conditions that exacerbate the crisis of care: from the withdrawal of state funds for cultural projects, to the precarity of life under late capitalism where emotional labour is treated as an infinitely exploitable resource. Pointing to the need for curatorial and institutional initiatives to address the political conditions under which they operate, Reckitt asks how care in the art field can be reconsidered, revalued, and more fairly distributed. [the article’s title references Nancy Fraser’s 2016 essay ‘Contradictions of Capitalism and Care’