Vaporwave curating is haunting the art world. You know it when you see it: poetic titles and fuzzy curatorial frameworks that unfurl languorously, like a dust mote dancing in a sunbeam. Sensuous language of community and care creates a kind of honeyed, sunset-lamp effect, encouraging the viewer to feel good about feeling bad about the state of the world. It’s polycrisis curation that eschews the local in favour of a grab-bag approach that nebulously gestures towards the deprivations of somewhere else. ‘Exhibition about political crisis is so subtle, viewers must guess which crisis,’ as one @freeze_magazine meme goes.
At Frieze, I wrote about biennales and the rise of vaporwave curating. It is available to read online here.