The paradox of success: institutional capture in the SeMA’s citizen curator program, South Korea

The participatory turn in museums is often entangled with institutional legitimacy requirements. This study analyses the SeMA (Seoul Museum of Art) Citizen Curator program (2015–2022) using the theoretical lens of institutional capture [Stigler, George J. 1971. “The Theory of Economic Regulation.” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2 (1): 3–21., 3]. Through a mixed-methods longitudinal analysis of 80 exhibitions, the research identifies a structural disparity between inclusive rhetoric and exclusionary practice. Findings reveal three mechanisms of capture: a human-centred capture where 85.7% of participants (n = 48/56) were emerging art-world elites; a spatio-temporal sequestration limiting projects to peripheral ‘heterotopias’ [Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27, 24] for an average of 11.7 days; and a ‘refeudalization’ [Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 232] of the public sphere where success required professionalized standards. The program functioned as a tool for participatory branding and legitimacy extraction, shielding the museum’s core ‘professional jurisdiction’ [Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 59] from genuine civic agency. Museum democratization requires shifting from isolated projects towards reciprocal governance and a substantive redistribution of interpretative authority.