David Balzer – författare

*Winner of the ICA Book of the Year, 2015*Now that we 'curate' even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?'Curate' has become a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows in a way that can eclipse the contributions of individual artists. At the same time, curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and businesses are adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. Everyone, it seems, is now a curator.But what is a curator, exactly? And what does the explosive popularity of curating say about our culture's relationship with taste, labour and the avant-garde? In this vibrant book, David Balzer travels through art history to explore the cult of curation, where it began, how it came to dominate museums and galleries, and how it emerged at the turn of the millennium as a dominant mode of thinking and being.Recalling such landmark works of cultural criticism as Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word and John Berger's Ways of Seeing, Balzer asks whether curationism has finally reached its own limits, where its widespread success has paradoxically led to its own demise.

What does it mean to call something 'new'? Why is Western art and culture, even after postmodernism, still so obsessed with the concept? What are the consequences of relying on culture to bring about social change?In this provocative book, David Balzer argues that Western culture was never designed to produce truly new or original artefacts. Rather, we move from fixation to fixation, trend to trend—a cycle of creation and destruction with deep origins in Judeo-Christianity and the paganism that preceded it. The culture industry promises its own form of change while preserving existing systems of power exactly as they are.From the New Jerusalem to the New Left, from Vannevar Bush to Kate Bush, This is Not New asks difficult questions about the role of culture not in making change, but in delaying—even preventing—it.