Intersections: Practices Of Curating, Education And Theory

Practices of Curating, Education and Theory comes out at a time when interconnected and various global crises have reached a boiling-point. The continuous insurrections in the Arab world blossomed in the spring, ripened in the summer, and have'matured’ in the fall. The crash of financial markets in August 2011 was officially ‘inaugurated’ by Obama as he entered the US presidential race and was followed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Social turmoil in the UK has left shops destroyed, teenagers arrested, and their families evicted from social housing. Here and elsewhere, the collapse of the social welfare state, alongside the unfulfilled capitalist promise of a consumer paradise, has bred double-headed monsters, both in the figure of the government protecting corporate interests in the face of endemic social problems and in the figure of violent rioters. The latter, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek ar­gues, are no longer the old agents of oppositional ideological politics, but are the offspring of post-ideological economic governmentality, who primarily destroy private property in order to reclaim their right to be consumers within the same system that has left them desti­tute. Zizek refers to Zygmunt Bauman’s characterization of the riots. He states that,'more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realize itself in the ‘proper’ way—by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology.’