The Fine Art Of Being A Curator.

Over the last decade, as the contemporary art world has grown to planetary size -- more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling Web sites, bigger museums, new biennials almost by the month -- it has sometimes seemed as if a new kind of cultural figure has been born as well: the international curator, constantly in flight to somewhere. The phenomenon is not wholly new. Roaming European curators like Harald Szeemann and Germano Celant set the terms in the 1960s. But the art world's transformation has transformed the curatorial field, and this week you needed go no further than a few places in Manhattan to sample its increasingly global sweep. One afternoon in a meeting room near Madison Square Park a young Australian curator who specializes in aboriginal art was sitting next to a Yale-trained painter-art-professor-curator from Tennessee, who sat across a table from fellow curators from London, Beijing, Mexico City, Madrid (by way of Brazil) and Berlin (though working in Albania). In previous months curators from 20 other countries, many of them far from contemporary art's beaten paths -- Sri Lanka, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria -- had been in the city for the same reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]