Who Needs the Independent Curator?

Àngels Miralda's recent essay for Frieze asks a pointed question: who killed the independent curator? Her answer is structural. Biennials that once served as launchpads for independent voices now function as side projects for institutional directors already stretched thin by their day jobs. The result is predictable. Power concentrates. Access narrows. The curatorial field looks less like a discipline and more like an oligarchy.

She is right about the diagnosis. But the disease is older than she suggests, and the patient list is longer than biennials alone.

The independent curator has been losing ground for decades. Not because the role became less important, but because the infrastructure around it failed to keep pace with the economics. Museum budgets tightened. Project spaces closed. Grants shrank or disappeared. The curators who survived did so by accumulating institutional affiliations, advisory gigs, teaching positions, and writing commissions. The ones who thrived were the ones who already had access. Everyone else left the field.

Miralda focuses on biennials, and the critique lands. When an institutional director curates a biennial while still running their museum, the biennial doesn't get their full attention. Their staff picks up the slack. Assistants and co-curators work from PDF lists provided by the same funders who bankroll the event. Artists are selected for the relationships they represent, not the work they make. The curatorial act becomes a rubber stamp on a pre-approved roster.

But this is a symptom of a deeper problem. The art world has never built reliable economic infrastructure for independent curatorial practice. There are no standard fee structures. No transparent compensation benchmarks. No pipeline that converts curatorial labor into sustainable income. The result is a field where only those with inherited wealth, institutional backing, or extraordinary personal networks can afford to operate independently.

The artists lose too. Miralda notes that the elimination of the independent curator narrows opportunities for new artists to pass through institutional gates. This is exactly right. Independent curators have historically been the scouts of the art world. They find the artists that institutions have not yet noticed. They take risks on unfamiliar work. They build exhibitions around ideas rather than market positions. When that layer disappears, the artists who depend on it disappear with it.

The standard response is to call for better ethical guidelines, clearer contracts, and more regulated working conditions. These are reasonable demands and worth pursuing. But they treat the problem as one of labor policy. It is also a problem of market design.

What if independent curators had access to commercial infrastructure that recognized their expertise as an economic asset? What if the curatorial act of selection, contextualization, and presentation generated direct revenue for the curator? Not as a one-time exhibition fee, but as an ongoing stake in the success of the artists and works they champion?

This is not a hypothetical. The technology exists. The market demand exists. What has been missing is a platform built by people who understand curatorial practice well enough to design for it.

aha! was built on the premise that curators are not decorative. They are the engine of discovery in contemporary art. Every curator on the platform earns a royalty on every resale of every work they bring to market. Not as a favor. As a structural feature of how the system works.

Miralda calls on independent curators to 'move beyond competition and towards organization.' We agree. But organization alone is not enough. The field also needs infrastructure. The kind that turns curatorial authority into economic participation. The kind that makes independent practice viable without requiring a second job, a trust fund, or the right institutional connections.

The independent curator is not dead. But survival requires more than solidarity. It requires a new architecture.