The Spike Roundtable: What Happened to the Curator?

In Spike Art Magazine’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 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 for this episode are by Sören Hochberg. Our theme music is from Seth Price’s 2001 track “Die Leguane.”