Morgan Quaintance

The American writer Truman Capote once said ‘...if you are going to have a genuine career in the arts it’s exactly like being a prizefighter or a concert pianist’. For the practitioners operating in each of these fields, the common element that binds them is the necessity to dedicate oneself to a sustained programme of continuous work. A person can’t simply wake up and decide they’re going to 
play Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano concerto; there are around 10,000 hours of scales to get through first.


This perpetual cycle of rehearsal and revaluation is akin to the processes involved in curatorial work. To me a curator is someone who is in constant training. That is why I refer to what I am engaged in as a curatorial practice. The condition that typifies my approach to this discipline is reflexivity. I am not a curator of this or that field. My specialist area of interest is contemporary art; my duty to the artists I work with is to be able to focus, in detail, on any given element within that field. Of course, this means a lifetime of reading, writing, reassessment, revaluation, criticism and as many experiences of failure as success. But, you know, when I think about it, that’s why I chose to become a curator.


Host organisation: Ikon Gallery, Birmingham