Curator Porn: Documenta (13) and the Press Kit from Hell

For such a large, high-profile art event such as DOCUMENTA (13), it comes as a surprise that their media kit has been printed on a Panasonic CDR and is labelled with the marks of a felt-tip pen. I picked up the Documenta press kit at ITB, an international travel fair every March in Berlin. Documenta shakes down this June 2012 in Kassel, Germany.

The CDR features three images by the artist Giuseppe Penone.

There are nine jpegs featuring the work of Jimmie Durham.

But the DOCUMENTA (13) camera-friendly curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has 19 images featuring various glamour shots of her in a forest, lounging on a lounge chair, wearing business blazers, working hard, hardly working, throning it and more.

I’ve received a lot of criticism for my web tv show being too much about me, and that’s fine because I’m working outside of traditional interview style you don’t typically find in online journalism. But enough about me. Clearly, we know what - or who - this Documenta is really about: The curator. This bitch loves the camera. To celebrate the glamour shots of Carolyn Christov-Barargiev, I have pasted my favourite pics below. And if you can’t get enough of the curator, or would like autographed copies of these snapshots, we strongly suggest you attend DOCUMENTA (13) and bring a felt-tip pen of your own. This is curator porn at its best.

But seriously: For someone so highly powered in the art world, you’d think her fashion sense would be a little more refined?

Note to artists: Please do your own PR. If not, this might happen - you might have the chance to be in a big art show and be completely squashed by someone else’s political savvy and outrageous vanity. This Documenta (13) press kit is a bad example of what happens when you hand over the responsibility of promoting your work to an office who obviously doesn’t have any idea what they’re doing. This is a humiliating first impression that Documenta has given to journalists in the form of a Panasonic CDR.

-Nadja Sayej