The birth of the curator has led to the death of the artist. Or, at least, that’s the impression one gets from a gloss of the current literature on exhibition practices. Concerns percolate that the expanded portfolio of the curator now encroaches on the artist’s autonomy. Yet it’s important to survey the situation from the opposite direction as well: changes in curatorial practice have long been preceded by those in artistic practice. Since at least the early 1960s, the very category of artist has come under considerable pressure. The famous texts on authorship by Barthes and Foucault were only the theorization of a multi-pronged attack well underway. One such campaign was mounted by George Maciunas, the focal point of two exhibitions in New York this autumn: “Mr. Fluxus” at the Stendhal Gallery and “Out of the Box” at the Emily Harvey Foundation. Maciunas’s example is especially relevant, since he devoted himself so extensively to collective organization, production management, and bureaucratic wrangling—that is, the very spheres of activity where today the agency of artist and curator grow indistinct. As Julia Robinson has observed, Maciunas is routinely characterized as the impresario of Fluxus, which is more of a dodge than an accurate description. …