The Spike Roundtable: What Happened to the Curator?

In Spike’s Summer 2024 issue, “The State of the Arts,” we invited Daniel Baumann, art historian, critic, and former longtime director of the Kunsthalle Zurich to write on a vocation that, it turned out, he believes is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After the digital republication of his print article struck a chord online, the magazine brought together a roundtable at the Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin in November 2025, featuring Daniel himself; independent curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, who has worked with the Istanbul Biennial, Kunsthalle Wien, and DOCUMENTA (13), among others; and Luca Lo Pinto, former artistic director of MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. Moderated by writer and editor Pablo Larios, they discussed what went wrong in the trajectory of a vocation that, not so long ago, was the darling of global art.Sound and editing: Sören Hochberg.