16 Cultivating Care Ethics and the Minor Gesture in Curatorial Jacqueline Millner and Zsuzsanna (Zsuzsi) Soboslay 1 Introduction “It is easier to identify major shifts than to catalogue the nuanced rhythms of the minor . . . [It] invents its own value, a value as ephemeral as it is mobile”, writes Erin Manning (Manning 2016, 1–2). What might happen if those ever-present but often overlooked pulsations were more universally aforded due care? What if we were able to accord equal value, includ- ing aesthetic value, to the complex, coexistent, and generative forces that accompany and make possible what we register as ‘new’ and ‘major’ phe- nomena? This chapter considers these questions in relation to research and curatorial practices in contemporary arts and theory. With the falling away of the noise of so much major gesture during COVID-19, with the cancel- lation of grants, gigs, gatherings, and hence the point-scores such events accrue, we have perhaps been gifted a capacity to think diferently: in the minor key. The major, built-in received values, knows only one way to go, along received pathways. The minor adapts, adjusts, responds, and shifts. And we realise that, maybe, it is the grand gestures that have always been the more fragile. What we register and applaud as ‘the major gesture’ is in part a product of neoliberal exigencies that preclude the cultivation of alternative modes of exploring, curating, and academic research: before we even begin, we are already time-, money-, and space-bound, pressured to measure and evalu- ate, categorise and compare, specialise, and above all compete. These pur- portedly objective ‘metrics’ are routinely applied to determine what is of value and what meets the threshold for ‘success’, replicating the norm – the major – while overlooking the underlying minor gestures. Yet, the global crises we currently face demand that we upturn the norm, that we wrest back time, space, and exchange from their neoliberal colonisation. Instead of trusting the existing measures of value, we are called to wait for what latencies may emerge when we listen rather than speak, when we pause and hover rather than follow the imperative to ‘produce’. In this way, the ‘the minor gesture’ connects with the feminist ethics of care, tapping into “the recalcitrance of the temporality of care to productionist rhythms” (Puig de DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-19 Krasny, E., & Perry, L. (Eds.). (2023). Curating with care. Taylor & Francis Group. Created from latrobe on 2023-09-24 23:43:24. Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.