Art as Diagnostic Instrument, No. 1:

Capitalizing Cultural Capital

In our ever evolving contemporary and post-modern times, the word “curate” has migrated from its origin — once the province of art museum and nonprofit cultural professionals tasked with the preservation of historical narratives and the construction of revised narratives. Now the word applies in a broad range of endeavors involving the intentional display of goods for sale, services, and experiences offered. The “curatorial practice” thereby operates outside of art museums and galleries, branching into retail, hospitality, and other domains of the experience economy. This essay looks at two recent museum exhibitions of Cartier jewelry — Cartier at the V&A South Kensington in 2025 and Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2022* — and argues that when a luxury brand adopts the visual and rhetorical language of museum exhibitions, it does more than elevate brand prestige; it collapses the distinction between public knowledge production and market-driven narrative, therefore transforming cultural authority itself into a convertible form of capital.

The word “curator” derives from the Latin cura, meaning care or responsibility. In its earliest usage, a curator was one entrusted with the oversight or guardianship of something. By the nineteenth century, it became primarily associated with museums, archives, and libraries. Although not exclusively art-specific, it was institution-specific, for it belonged to custodial institutions of knowledge. The rise of independent curators in contemporary art during the 1990s and the 2000s also saw an expanded usage of the word “curator” when the practice became more experimental, occupying spaces outside established institutions. Hans Ulrich Obrist treats this expansion with a kind of utopian enthusiasm — “the role of the curator is to create free space, not occupy existing space.” [1]  In other words, curating as a means of making connections, fostering encounters, creating temporary communities of meaning. But what happens when this connective, generative function no longer serves a knowledge-seeking community, but is instead captured by commercial interests?

The reassurance is that capitalism does not destroy the curatorial impulse, it operationalizes it. In doing so, the consumer is positioned as a discerning participant in meaning-making. Yet this discernment is engineered: the field of perception is structured in advance. What appears as free encounter is already aligned with interpretation. This alignment becomes clearer when we consider a curatorial dilemma Nicholas Serota first proposed in the late 1990s. In Experience or Interpretation, he argued for a curatorial practice that could hold both: the sensory immediacy of encountering an object and the intellectual labor of placing it within a framework of meaning.[2]  When translated into a commercial context — though not the way Serota would have intended — his dilemma has been answered by Cartier, one successful luxury brand that almost seamlessly appropriated it. Their example provides an especially revealing case because it does not merely position the jewelry pieces as decorative art, it has absorbed a museum’s institutional grammar: the exhibition, the catalogue, the retrospective, the visiting scholar, most crucial of all — the partnership with museums of unimpeachable standing.

what happens when this connective, generative function no longer serves a knowledge-seeking community, but is instead captured by commercial interests?

When Cartier stages an exhibition with the preeminent Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), it is a claim to cultural authority, one that operates through the same apparatus that once belonged exclusively to the art institution. The objects on display — archival commissions, one-of-a-kind high jewelry, historically singular pieces — are genuinely distinct from the retail inventory available at any Cartier boutique. But that distinction is precisely what makes the exhibition function: it is the exceptional object that lends the brand its cultural authority, an authority that then extends well beyond the vitrine. If Serota’s dilemma asks whether a museum should prioritize experience or interpretation, then the luxury brand has resolved this tension by collapsing it. The sumptuous vitrine displays and carefully calibrated lighting, together with the architectural design of the installation and the narrative woven through the exhibition catalogue, shape how the objects are read. In this environment, the commodity becomes cultural artifact, and the consumer is positioned as a discerning participant in its meaning. There is no gap between sensation and meaning because meaning has been engineered into the sensory encounter. This is not simply spectacle. It is epistemological design.

This flattening is not incidental but structural, and the value in question is not monetary alone; it is reputational, cultural, symbolic with the kind of value that allows a price tag to become invisible because the object has been re-categorized as something beyond price. The exhibition catalogue for V&A’s Cartier, for all its scholarly apparatus — substantial contributions by notable historians, the inclusion of notes, a bibliography, and an index — reads as an assertion of cultural authority rather than as a glossy coffee-table book. It ultimately legitimizes the brand through the authority of art historical inquiry. Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote how societies use myth to legitimate present-day structures by giving them the appearance of historical continuity. The myth doesn't just organize experience, it constructs a genealogy that makes the current arrangement look inevitable.[3]  It is not that the content presents insubstantial historical reference, but the structure through which it circulates has been pre-organized to produce a specific kind of unambiguous experience and value.

Installation view of  "Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity" at DMA of Art. Photo by Daniel Salemi. Courtesy of Cartier.

The Cartier exhibition curates not just a jewelry collection but also the cultural context in which those products are encountered — constructing historical narrative and blurring the very categories through which we distinguish art from commodity. The 2021–2024 exhibition Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity, which traveled from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris to the Dallas Museum of Art and then to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, illustrates this with clarity. The exhibition scenography was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a firm whose portfolio includes the High Line, Lincoln Center's renovation, The Shed, MoMA's expansion and V&A’s own East Storehouse — projects with institutions that define the infrastructure of contemporary public culture. DS+R created original animations that deconstructed the engineering of individual Cartier pieces, tracing their geometric patterns to their Islamic sources, and designed dramatic magnifications that allowed viewers to experience the jewelry at architectural scale. The result was an exhibition environment in which the interpretive apparatus was inseparable from the sensory encounter: you could not simply look at the objects without also absorbing the argument about their cultural genealogy.

The contradiction here is structural. A public museum exists to produce knowledge; a luxury brand exists to produce desire. When one stages the other in a format indistinguishable from its own programming, the brand acquires the institution's authority — and the visitor leaves not merely having seen jewelry but having been given reason to believe that owning Cartier is a form of cultural participation. As Roland Barthes showed in Mythologies, this is precisely how myth operates — it does not reconcile the contradiction so much as make the contradiction disappear, so that what was always a marketing strategy reads as cultural inevitability.[4]

The question is no longer whether luxury brands borrow from art because the implications extend well beyond any single brand. Cartier itself has gone further. Its Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, housed in a Jean Nouvel building, exhibits contemporary art with no direct connection to its commercial products — which is precisely what makes it effective as an instrument of cultural authority. It is not alone. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Fondazione Prada, the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce — these are not art patronage in any traditional sense. They are infrastructural investments in the production of cultural capital, institutions that blur the boundary between public and private, and between educational mission and the brand’s interests. To read a branded exhibition critically is not to dismiss it but to recognize that the structures through which culture produces meaning have been re-organized around the logic of the market.  As Guillet de Monthoux suggests, the question of contemporary cultural production is less about corruption and more about the subsumption of curatorial logic into capitalist systems.[5]  The broader concern is what this means for art curators who refuse commercial affiliations and for the art institute itself which has long served as a space of critical reflection.

The task of criticism is not to restore a lost purity but to recognize when the boundary has been blurred, and by whom. The aim is to understand not just what is being shown, but what is being produced, and at what cost.

This is where Chus Martínez's essay "The Complex Answer" becomes instructive. Martínez critiques what she calls "the modern thinking apparatus" — a mode of thought incapable of tolerating ambiguity, one that insists everything must be brought to light and made fully conscious before it can be engaged. It is precisely in this demand for total clarity, she argues, that she sees "the end of the possible."[6]  Although her argument was directed at curatorial practice within the arts, it serves equally to show what luxury branding eliminates. The branded exhibition resolves ambiguity. It takes the complex, contested space of art — where meaning is unstable, where objects resist singular interpretation — and flattens it into a coherent story of heritage, craftsmanship, and vision. The complexity that Martínez defends is precisely what the luxury curatorial model cannot afford.  If curatorial practice has become an apparatus of value production available to any entity with sufficient resources, the distinction between public knowledge production and commercial narrative grows correspondingly harder to maintain — not because it doesn't exist, but because it is no longer visible in the form of the exhibition itself. The task of criticism is not to restore a lost purity but to recognize when the boundary has been blurred, and by whom. The aim is to understand not just what is being shown, but what is being produced, and at what cost.

[1] Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 154.

[2] Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 55.

[3] Claude Lévi-Strauss, “When Myth Becomes History,” in Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 40.

[4] Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 240.

[5] Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Curating Capitalism: How Art Impacts Business, Management and Economy (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2024), 181, 196–97.

[6] Chus Martínez, “The Complex Answer,” in The Complex Answer: On Art as a Nonbinary Intelligence (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2023), 85.

For a broader economic framework on how contemporary capitalism generates value through narrative and heritage, see:
Boltanski, Luc, and Arnaud Esquerre. Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020.

Written by Chennie Huang

The art world constitutes its own economic and social ecosystem. "Art as Diagnostic Instrument" is a new essay series that examines how art renders societal structures legible — even as it participates in the erosion of the very values it once helped to generate.