This issue of ONCURATING.org brings together a range of interviews and essays, inspired by the symposium, “Why Artists Curate,” held by the Kunstbüro der Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in cooperation with Columbus Art Foundation in July 2011. The feedback from this conference prompted a discussion on authorship in contemporary art, from artists, curators and artist-curators.

Walter Benjamin’s well known essay, The Author as Producer, outlines that artists became producers when they shifted their labour from an independent creator relent on conventional artistic apparatus, to an operative, in which the skills and accomplishments of the artists are transformed by the advanced technical content of new reproductive technologies’ place in art. This represents the very re-functioning of the relations of artistic production in the interest of the new definition of the artist. Therefore the artist is not bound by a closed relationship with material, or their own encounters with the world in the conventions of artistic tradition…