Abstract

I propose to open a discussion on a realist philosophy of curation. To do so, I plot premises that will move towards such a philosophy. While I am neither introducing a new ontology nor contributing to metaphysics, I deal with metaphysical and ontological issues as these engage in the philosophy of curation and the philosophy of museums. In particular, I start with a museological or curatorial realism towards a discussion on meeting curation with the broadness of reality. There are three core premises. First, while reality is ontologically mind-independent, it is anti-realist for reality to be curation-dependent. Second, curation has to be folded (contrary to Deleuze’s use of dynamic folding qua ‘an origami cosmos’) to address the anti-realist connotations of curation. To do this, I methodologically introduce the fold and state two-fold, three-fold, fourfold, and fifth-fold semantics of curation. While curatorial realism can be argued in a fourfold curation, the third premise is that the realist aspect lies in the fifth-folding of curation to match the extensivity of reality. This paper will attempt to introduce the philosophy of museums and the philosophy of curation with a bent on the realism/anti-realism debate. It will expose the inherit anti-realism of curation, and survey the need for objects in metaphysics and within contemporary forms of realism.