nostalgie de bou

America's major art museums have built exhibition spaces that are like minimalist cathedrals, with vast, white-walled, column-free galleries and extravagantly tall ceilings. These volumes were intended for large-scale sculptures and video installations or to be broken up into exhibition-specific architecture. They were conceived for artists like Richard Serra, Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist, Sara Sze, and Carsten Holler. But as mentioned, few younger American artists now work at this scale. And yet, when curators consider artists for institutional projects, they ask themselves whether the artists will be able to meet the challenge of exhibiting in their spaces. Emerging American artists are caught in a vicious circle of risk aversion, in which institutional curators and bigger galleries wait to see if the artists will develop practices and projects that will fit into their large spaces while at the same time denying them access to the very spaces in which these kinds of practices could develop—spaces where artists can experiment with working at scale. This denial occurs out of public view, as part of the curatorial process, when curators decide that the artists they are considering for projects aren't ready to take on larger spaces and opportunities— because the curators have never seen them work in large-scale spaces.