In November 2025, prompted by an essay of the same name in Spike #80 – “The State of the Arts, curators Daniel Baumann, Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, and Luca Lo Pinto, along with writer, editor, and moderator Pablo Larios, convened at the Julia Stoschek Foundation to discuss what went wrong in the trajectory of a vocation that, not so long ago, was the darling of global art.

Listen to their conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts; and get your copy of our Summer 2024 issue on art’s new forms of resilience and risk-taking from our online shop or in select book and magazine shops worldwide.

What Happened to the Curator? is the second in a series of four Spike roundtables on the critical conjunctures in contemporary art, proudly hosted by the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin.

Thursday, 27 November 2025
Julia Stoschek Foundation
Leipziger Str. 60, 10117 Berlin

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DANIEL BAUMANN is an art historian, curator, and critic. From 2015 to 2024, he was the director of Kunsthalle Zurich. He lives in Basel.

ÖVÜL Ö. DURMUŞOĞLU is a curator, writer, and educator working on civilizations critique, infrastructural questions, and togetherness as a question of aesthetics and practice. She lives in Berlin.

LUCA LO PINTO is an Italian curator and editor. He was the artistic director of MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome from 2020 till 2025. From 2014 till 2019 he worked as curator of Kunsthalle Wien. He lives in Rome.

PABLO LARIOS is a writer, editor, and International Editor at Artforum. Born in Honduras and raised in the US, he lives in Berlin.