Seth Siegelaub
’In a contemporary art world increasingly becoming just another obedient sector of the capitalist ‘entertainment’ industry, it is encouraging to see that a critical spirit is still analyzing the past, present and possible future role of curators and art exhibitions, whether as experimental laboratory, as social analysis, as temporary site, as studio, as political resistance or as pedagogic tool. From the curator as museum employee to the curator as collaborator, as facilitator, as militant activist or as ‘artist-in-chief’, a collection of texts which will certainly mark out the range of problems needing to be answered’.
Matthew Higgs
’This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature about exhibition making. Moving away from autobiographical, first person narratives, Curating Subjects instead invites its broad range of contributors to comment upon the curatorial endeavours of others. Conflating and colliding the past and the present with possible futures this book unfolds as an idiosyncratic conversation that is at once informative, entertaining, and often revealing’.
Brian O’Docherty
’In this splendid book Paul O’Neill has passionately applied himself to the issue of how art is presented, which amounts to what we might call ‘the curatorial intervention’. For between the artist and the public falls the shadow - the curator, who applies to art his or her conceptual schema, a role now being intensely re-defined. This book energetically contributes to that re-definition’.
AA Bronson
’Curating Subjects well represents O’Neill’s collaborative, inclusive and wide-ranging way of working and thinking. The result is a book that opens windows and doors in all directions and forces us to look across vistas we knew existed, but had chosen to ignore. Curatorial practice has morphed, diversified and multiplied in ways none of us could have foreseen: here we see the multiple avenues and even rivers of possibility open out before us, and, in addition, it is a good read’.
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