I'm an artist! (Slap!) I'm a curator! (Slap!) I'm an artist and a curator!

As usual I'm playing catch-up and coming to this conversation a bit late, but Art Fag City, who incidentally was nice enough to give a shout out to the opening of my show in the Bronx, even though it included a dig at my unoriginal use of the title (aw, snap!), brought my attention to From the Floor's diatribe about current "masturbatory" curatorial practice. Good points are raised and I completely agree that curators should never emphasize their own thematic agenda over the importance of the artists. Absolutely, every exhibition is about the artists. Where he and I differ is on the point about raising curatorial practice to the status of artmaking-his example of the Wrong Gallery's contribution to the Biennial being the latest example of curatorial self-aggrandizement is off the mark. There is something more subtle then curator hubris going on there-it's a collective work of installation art taking the form of an exhibition. Outside the realm of the "traditional" curated exhibition there is nothing BUT room for curators to reimagine their practice as an artistic endeavor. A great example is Michael Conner's 2005 Raiders of the Lost ArtBase, an archeological dig through layers of antique Internet art in blog form. Conner's nostalgic, insightful and humorous musings were ongoing, and redefined an online exhibition from a static page of links and a text block to something organic and worth checking out more then once. This is a new definition of the curator's job, one that doesn't lessen the importance of the artists to the process. Is this curator as artist? I don't think Michael would ever think of it that way, but I also don't think the concept automatically indicates disrespect for artmaking either.