Everyone is a healer

- Consider yourself
an artist?

- I am only insofar as everyone is an artist.

It is the famous sentence of Joseph Beuys. In a televised performance he wrote another famous sentence: Duchamp's silence is overrated . According to him, Duchamp had fallen short, it was not that anything could be art, but that anyone (is) an artist. It expressed a deeply democratizing desire for art and its practice in the face of the single object and its function in relation to taste and the market. In the democratizing spirit of Beuys's phrase was inscribed the conception that the human being is creative; that is, we are all creative.

And there are a thousand ways to be creative: drawing with leftover drinks on a paper tablecloth after a meal; adding herbs to a recipe; sorting books by color, title, lettering, or whatever on a shelf; adding stickers to the cover of the laptop; changing clothes; putting together different things ... Sorting, labeling, modifying and putting together different things are part of the basic tasks of the curator. A simple deduction from Beuys' phrase: everyone is a curator and being an artist is being a curator. In fact, for some time now everything has been curated, not just exhibitions: a shop window, a menu or clothes and physical appearance. No problem, it's just the palpable demonstration of curation as a creative activity and the futility of corporate defense or self-protection lobbies.

Artists are also increasingly taking on the role of curators, as one more episode in the dissolution of creative boundaries between curating and artistic production. Christian Jankowski was the first curator of a major event: the 11th Manifesto in 2016 in Zurich; a project that showed a deep coherence with his work as an artist, experimenting in castings with people and with the social conditions of the work applied this experience to the scheme of the event. For Jankowski it will be a work more consistent with the others he has done and it causes us to consider his work in a creative line that erases disciplines. Other places such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris carry out projects with artists as curators under the heading of "carte blanche". The latest is Anne Imhof, who had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for a series of performances in the modified space of the German Pavilion. He has done the same in Paris, a tour with large panels, no longer with performers , but with other works that interest him and that accompany his work. It is a personal choice, which has to do with taste and even whim. As if through the back door of the police station the unique genius had returned.