Risky Business

First a word about language. People who think about these things tell us that all things meaningful have two properties – they are arbitrary and conventional. The word ‘cat’ doesn’t have to signify a cute little furry animal, but we (who use English) agree it does.

So if you take a word like risk and make it the center of a conversation among curators - as was the premise of today’s symposium Curating and Risk at Moore College – you risk finding little consensus on what it means.

This phenomenon tends to annoy some people, but empty signifiers can be valuable. From time to time, we need a big, empty word into which a lot of different thoughts can be poured.

Much of the day was spent trying to fill the word 'risk' with different possible significations. But first, it had be thoroughly emptied. The first conversation, between Ruby Lerner, Lana Lin, Lan Thoa Lam, and Richard Torchia took care of that. The conversation began by addressing the changing nature of risk. Lerner acknowledged that a fear of her organization, Creative Capital, was of taking inadequate risk. Lin and Lam, a collaborative team, took the question of time a little differently, talking about how a long-term project was risky in an art world where novelty is over great importance. Torchia, always thoughtful, acknowledged that everything is a risk…thus completing the emptying of the term. (Clearly some things are riskier than others…) But Torchia usefully turned the question of whether an exhibit or project was too risky around by suggesting that we imagine the world or Philadelphia without this particular show and ask what the effect of that would be. Such a question could be useful in determining the value of an enterprise, and determining whether it’s worth the risk.

Next, Aaron Levy, David Dempewolf and Radhika Subramaniam came up to talk about DIY spaces and their inherent risks with moderator Janet Kaplan. Among the many things that got said, two stood out. One was the repeated use of the word ‘community’ in a conversation about DIY spaces. But its use didn’t always seem fitting, especially when ‘community’ appeared to describe a group of people who get together to talk about books or look at each other’s art. A real community includes people who share your interests beyond your immediate circle of friends. The bank on the corner in my Chinatown neighborhood is part of my community even though I don’t know a soul who works there, because it serves and supports others in the neighborhood. Occasional (even frequent) beers do not a community make. The second point was related to this: the question of risk was most often connected to what is at stake. But for a moment in this conversation, the stakes extended beyond the charmed circle of artists and curators to a larger world when Subramaniam acknowledged that a controversial program might cause “someone in accounting” to lose his job. For one brief, frightening moment, risk was real. Then we broke for lunch.

After lunch, a third conversation between Homer Jackson, Nato Thompson, and Sheryl Conkelton (again moderated by Kaplan) looked at intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical risks. Here, the conversational format of the day’s proceedings most clearly backfired, as Jackson and Thompson are both charming presenters with great anecdotes to recount. Conkelton is a reflective, deliberate thinker who tried to steer the conversation into questions about logistical risks, and was put in the unenviable position of occasionally reminding the room that institutions (easily caricatured as big and bad) are comprise of individuals who make decisions that may be petty, selfish, or cowardly, but who are seldom evil.

At the end of the day, it was stunning how little discussion of reward was part of the topic of risk although the possibility of failure (even humiliation) was glancingly recognized. But one of the principle motivators for taking a risk (in economic terms) is the possibility of a reward. Occasional outbursts about liberal neo-capitalism may signal that my crassly market-based thinking would be wrongheaded in such a context, but I came away thinking (much as I felt when I arrived) that the risks of mounting exhibits are, on the whole, small. That’s not to say they aren’t real. In fact, their consequences can be great for people who aren’t directly involved (think of how many people in the arts – and arguably, in the audience for the arts – paid for the ‘risky’ machinations of cultural warriors on both ends of the political spectrum). But in an art world where risk appears to be its own reward, we may not have time to think about all that.