A quintessential aspect of aesthetic modernism in the nineteenth century is that it produced not only a body of artworks and a profusion of – isms , but also a body of institutions and a template of practices that, unlike the art itself, were accepted almost without protest by the European and American art public. 1 As early as the late nineteenth century, the field of exhibition-making also had isolated examples of figures similar to the independent curator of contemporary art—although, of...