The Curatorial Canon: Who Decides What’s ‘Important’ in Art History?

A Canon Set in Stone. Or So It Seems

Walk into any major art museum, from the Louvre to the Prado, the Met to the Uffizi, and the pattern is hard to miss: Western, male, white. Repeated, revered, and rarely challenged. The art historical canon, that set of artists, works, and movements deemed “important” enough to be studied, collected, and displayed, has long been accepted as natural, objective, even neutral.

But canons are never neutral. They are curated.

And that raises a deeper question: who decides what matters in art? Who gets left out? And what happens when the public starts to question the gatekeepers?

The Politics of Exclusion: What the Canon Silences

Historically, the canon has been built by a handful of powerful voices: art historians, critics, curators, collectors, and institutions. Their choices shaped textbooks, exhibitions, auctions, and ultimately public perception.

The result? A systematic erasure of women, artists of color, queer creators, Indigenous voices, and non-Western art traditions.

Some numbers speak volumes:

• In 2022, only 11% of works in major European museum collections were by women artists

• A 2021 study from Artnet & In Other Words showed that just 1.2% of acquisitions at 30 major U.S. museums between 2008–2020 were works by Black American artists.

• In France, despite numerous diversity pledges, over 80% of state-funded museum collections remain centered on Western European male artists from before the 20th century.

  
  

When Canon Meets Controversy: Exhibitions That Sparked Debate

The canon isn’t just about who is included. It’s also about what stories are told and which ones are avoided. In recent years, a number of high-profile exhibitions have reignited these debates:

• In 2019, the Whitney Biennial faced backlash over its inclusion of artists funded by tear gas manufacturers, leading to protests and several artists pulling out of the show.

• The “Les Origines du Monde” exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay (2021) was criticized for romanticizing colonial depictions of women while failing to address power dynamics in 19th-century painting.

• The Guggenheim was called out in 2020 for its near-total exclusion of Black artists from past exhibitions, prompting internal resignations and a public diversity audit.

  
  

These are not isolated controversies, they point to a growing fatigue with institutions that claim to be universal, yet continue to reproduce old hierarchies under the guise of excellence.

How Canons Are Shifting... Slowly

Across museums and academia, change is happening but not without friction.

The once-unquestionable status of the Western canon is now under public and professional scrutiny. Yet the responses from institutions often feel more like adaptations than transformations.

Yes, several museums are revisiting their permanent collections. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) made headlines in 2019 when it reinstalled its galleries with a more thematic, non-linear approach, interspersing lesser-known voices alongside canonical works. But while the narrative flow changed, the dominant names — Picasso, Rothko, Matisse — remained largely untouched.

“We don't need another retrospective of Picasso. We need institutions that reflect the world we actually live in,” said artist and curator Sophia Al-Maria in a recent panel at the Serpentine.

In other cases, change is symbolic but shallow. Temporary exhibitions celebrate “forgotten women artists” or “non-Western modernities” while permanent collections and acquisition budgets remain anchored in the same historical logic. Aesthetic diversity, but not structural disruption.

As critic Aruna D’Souza noted: “Many institutions are happy to diversify the face of the canon, but they refuse to question the skeleton underneath.”

One reason for this inertia is financial. The canon isn’t just cultural it’s capital. The reputations of canonical artists are tied to multi-billion-dollar markets, donor expectations, and academic legitimacy. Questioning the canon means risking devaluation, not only of artworks, but of institutions themselves.

So the canon evolves but cautiously. Not like a revolution. More like a corporate rebranding.

Audience Behavior Is Changing, Too

If the institutions resist change, the public no longer does. The art-viewing public is younger, more global, more politicized and far less reverent. The 21st-century viewer no longer enters a museum expecting to receive truth; they come to negotiate meaning, to question authority, and to see themselves reflected, or not.

Surveys show it clearly:

• A 2023 ArtReview study found that over 65% of Gen Z visitors want museums to “take a stand” on political and social issues, rather than pretend neutrality.

• In France, 48% of young adults say they feel alienated by museums they perceive as “elitist and outdated” (IFOP, 2022).

• On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, grassroots art educators gain massive followings by deconstructing myths, offering “anti-canon” perspectives, or calling out institutional bias.

  
  

But this shift is not just digital or generational, it’s epistemological. Viewers increasingly refuse the old hierarchies of taste and value. They question why certain artists are “masters”, why certain styles are praised, and why art history is still mostly taught through a Eurocentric lens.

The public is no longer asking “Is this beautiful?” but rather: “Who decided this mattered?” “Whose story is being told and whose is missing?” “What power dynamics are embedded in the walls of this museum?”

This pressure is not trivial. It redefines the role of the institution: from temple to forum, from authority to host.

But it also generates discomfort. Curators face backlash whether they change too fast, or not fast enough. Institutions are caught between the expectations of traditional donors and the demands of new publics.

This tension is productive but it requires courage.

Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking the Foundations

The question is no longer just: Who gets included in the canon? It’s: Why does the canon still exist in this form at all and what hidden values does it continue to protect?

In many cases, inclusion still operates within the same hierarchical logic. A woman, a queer artist, or an Indigenous creator is finally granted a retrospective but their work is judged according to criteria born from the very systems that once excluded them. A seat at the table, perhaps but the menu remains the same.

“Inclusion without interrogation is assimilation,” writes curator and theorist Legacy Russell. In other words, being let in means little if the architecture of the institution, its narratives, values, collections, governance, remains unchanged.

To truly rethink the foundations of the canon, we need more than invitations. We need disruption.

That means:

• Challenging the notion of “mastery” itself often tied to Eurocentric ideals of genius, originality, and permanence.

• Interrogating the educational systems that produce curators, critics, and art historians, and the canons they replicate unconsciously.

• Questioning the fetishization of the object, a model of art rooted in colonial extraction and capitalist collection.

  
  

It also means opening up to alternative models of value: ephemeral art, community-based practices, oral traditions, and works that prioritize process over product.

And it means making peace with incompleteness.

The canon is not just too narrow. It’s too obsessed with closure, with linearity, with permanence. A decolonial, feminist, or queer approach to art history accepts contradiction, disruption, and multiple timelines.

Because the point is not just to rewrite the story.

It’s to admit that no single story can ever hold it all.

Rethinking the Canon. From Authority to Dialogue

The canon is not a fixed list carved into marble. It is a story, one written, edited, and curated over centuries by those in positions of cultural power. A story that claims to be universal, yet has long spoken from a singular, dominant point of view. One that has privileged certain voices while muting others, often in the name of excellence, tradition, or taste.

As museums, classrooms, and digital spaces begin to interrogate the foundations of this narrative, a new space opens, one that doesn’t simply rearrange names on the list, but questions the very need for a list at all. In that space, art is no longer a monument to revere, but a site of dialogue, of tension, of plurality.

The real shift is not about deciding who deserves to be in the canon. It’s about asking: Who has been deciding all along? What values shaped those decisions? And why do we keep reproducing them?

Rethinking the canon is not an attack on art history, it’s an invitation to expand its boundaries, to embrace contradictions, and to recognize that what we consider "great" has always been shaped by ideology, economy, and exclusion.

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to stop searching for a new canon, and start listening, deeply, to the multiplicity of stories that were always there, waiting to be heard.

Because in the end, the true power of art lies not in its ability to endure, but in its capacity to disrupt, connect, and transform.