Do you remember the last time you stood in front of an artwork and felt something — really felt something — and didn’t know why?
Maybe it was a scene in a gallery that stopped you mid-step. Maybe you read a single curatorial text that completely changed the way you looked at the exhibition. Maybe someone told you the story behind a work, and suddenly everything you’d previously seen as “interesting” became unforgettable.
That moment — when something “clicks” — isn’t an accident. That’s a story doing its job.
I’ve been working in culture for over fourteen years, and if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned this: between an artwork and the person looking at it, there is always a story. Sometimes that story is carefully shaped — through a curatorial text, an artist’s statement, the way works are installed in a space. Sometimes it’s left to chance, and the viewer is left to their own devices, without any tools for understanding. The difference between one scenario and the other can be the difference between an exhibition that lives in people’s memories for months and one that nobody will be able to say anything about except “it was fine, I guess.”
This isn’t a text about marketing. This is a text about something much older and much more powerful than any sales strategy.
Stories as the foundation of everything we are
In his book Nexus (2024), Yuval Noah Harari argues that stories are what made Homo sapiens the most powerful species on the planet — not because we’re the smartest, but because we’re the only ones who can cooperate in unlimited numbers thanks to shared narratives.¹ While chimpanzees organize in communities of typically 20–60 members, with numbers only rarely reaching 150–200 (because they rely exclusively on personal bonds), humans can form networks of a billion or more — as long as they share the same story.²
Consider this: a global trade network connects around eight billion people. These people will never meet, don’t speak the same language, don’t live on the same continent. And yet, they cooperate every single day — because they share a story about the value of currencies, the reliability of institutions, the meaning of contracts. When you think about it, money is actually one of the most persuasive narratives in history: a piece of paper or a number on a screen that has value only because we all agree it does.
Now think about how the art world works — and you’ll see where I’m going with this.
The brain seeks stories — whether we want it to or not
In his book Story Proof (2007), Kendall Haven synthesizes the results of numerous cognitive studies and concludes that the human mind uses stories as the primary roadmap for understanding, remembering, and planning — not just other people’s experiences but our own lives as well.³ We live in stories because we think in stories.
This means that when someone stands in front of an artwork — whether it’s a curator thinking about an exhibition concept, a collector evaluating an acquisition, a gallery director choosing a programme, or a visitor who walked in out of sheer curiosity — their brain automatically seeks a narrative. It seeks a story. It seeks something to latch onto, something it can store in memory and later retell to someone else.
If we don’t provide that story — whether we’re curators, gallerists, artists, or cultural workers — the viewer’s brain will create one on its own. And that’s where the problem begins, because that spontaneously created story may have nothing to do with what the work was meant to communicate.
Narrative that shapes reality
In Nexus, Harari introduces the concept of a “brand” as a specific type of story — a story attached to a product, person, or institution that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the objective qualities of what it describes.⁴ And no, I’m not just talking about commercial brands. I’m talking about every artist whose body of work is presented to the public, every gallery building its identity, every museum that chooses what to exhibit (and by extension — what not to).
When a curator writes an exhibition foreword, they’re building a narrative. When a gallery decides how to position its programme, it’s telling a story. When a museum chooses which works from its collection to display in a permanent exhibition, it’s deciding which part of a cultural story will be told — and which will be left untold.
And these stories create reality. Harari describes the concept of “intersubjective reality” — things like laws, nations, currencies, and ideologies that exist only because enough people believe in the same story.⁵ The value of an artwork isn’t inscribed in canvas or marble. It emerges in the space between people who discuss, write about, and think about it. In 2010, 10,000 bitcoins were worth two pizzas; by November 2021, the same amount was worth $690 million.⁶ The only thing that changed were the stories we told ourselves about bitcoin. The pizzas stayed the same.
(This is why a curator who knows how to write a good exhibition foreword isn’t “just writing a text” — they’re co-shaping perception, and with it, the value of artistic work.)
When the story goes wrong
The power of story is a double-edged sword.
Harari devotes a significant portion of Nexus to analyzing how stories throughout history have served not only to reveal truth but also to maintain social order — and these two functions are often in conflict.⁷ A simple, emotionally charged fiction can be far more convincing than a complex, uncomfortable truth. National myths, ideologies, even scientific paradigms — all of these are stories that shape the way we understand the world, and each of them inevitably simplifies or distorts some part of the truth for the sake of coherence.
In the art world, this manifests in at least two ways.
First: an artwork whose message isn’t clearly articulated can be completely misinterpreted. A work that interrogates national identity can be co-opted for propaganda. A deeply personal work can be reduced to a formalist analysis that misses the point entirely. Without a clear narrative accompanying the work — whether through curatorial interpretation, an artist’s statement, or contextualization in the exhibition space — interpretation is left to everyone else.
Second: a well-told story can give an artwork a power that far exceeds what the visual object alone could achieve. Think of Duchamp’s urinal. Without the story — without the context of Dadaism, without the provocation aimed at the institutional art world, without the question “what is art, anyway?” — it’s just a bathroom fixture. With the story, it’s one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century. And that story was told by the curator, the critic, Duchamp himself, and every subsequent generation of art historians who built upon it.
Stories are medicine
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian analyst and cantadora (keeper of old stories), writes in the introduction to her book Women Who Run with the Wolves (1992) that stories are medicine — that they hold such power they require nothing of us except that we listen.⁸ Estés comes from a tradition in which knowledge is passed down orally, through myths, fairy tales, and narratives that contain “instructions” for navigating the complexities of life.
This has fascinated me for years because I believe it’s applicable to what I do every day. When I work with artists, curators, or institutions — whether through individual coaching, critical conversations, writing texts, or preparing exhibitions — my job isn’t to dictate to someone what their work means. My job is to help find and articulate the story that’s already there, woven into the process, into the decisions that were made, into the materials that were chosen, into the themes that keep someone up at night.
Because the story of an artwork isn’t something you paste on from the outside. It’s already inside. It just needs to be unearthed, shaped, and told in a way that resonates with those who listen.
What does this mean in practice?
For artists
Your work tells a story — the only question is whether you’re listening to it. When you’re preparing for an exhibition, a grant application, or a conversation with a gallery, don’t think about “describing your work.” Think about the story. Why this work? Why now? What changed in the process? What was that moment when you knew the piece was working? What kept you up at night while you were creating it?
These aren’t marketing questions. These are questions that reveal the core of artistic inquiry — and once you know the answer to them, communication becomes easier because it becomes honest.
For galleries and museums
Every exhibition is a narrative. Every foreword, every accompanying text, the way works are installed in a space — all of it tells a story. The question isn’t whether a narrative needs to exist (it always does, whether we want it to or not), but who shapes it and with what intention.
A good curatorial text doesn’t explain the work — it contextualizes it. It gives the viewer a framework within which to build their own experience. A bad text or no text at all leaves the viewer without tools for understanding, and thus without the possibility of forming a meaningful connection with the work. And a gallery or museum that systematically neglects the narrative dimension of its exhibitions risks something worse than bad wall text — it risks its programme becoming interchangeable.
For collectors
The story a work carries with it — provenance, the context of its creation, its place in an artist’s oeuvre — isn’t an “add-on” but an integral part of the work’s value. A collection without a story is a pile of objects. A collection with a story is cultural heritage.
Narrative is not decoration
This is perhaps the most important message of this text: narrative isn’t something we wrap “around” an artwork to package it more attractively. Narrative is the way the human brain understands the world. Haven concludes that research has “without opposition” confirmed that stories are an exceptionally effective medium for transmitting factual, conceptual, emotional, and tacit information.⁹
And art, at its core, is communication. A work whose message reaches no one — however formally impeccable — is missing its fundamental function. Not because art must be “understandable to everyone” in some banal sense, but because art exists among people. Between creator and viewer. In that space between — a space that is built from stories.
Harari would say: artworks are nodes in information networks, and stories are the chains that connect them to people.¹⁰ Without a story, a work remains isolated. With a story, it can travel the world — carried by gossip, anecdotes, curatorial texts, articles, social media — and leave a mark far wider and deeper than the physical object that set it in motion.
And that, ultimately, is my job. Helping those stories come to light.
Yours,
Dora Derado Giljanović
This text is part of a series of posts on culture, art, and presentation on the DLightful Services blog. If you need help building a narrative — whether for artistic practice, curatorial texts, or programme presentation — get in touch.
¹ Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (New York: Random House, 2024), chapter 2.
² Harari, Nexus, chapter 2.
³ Kendall F. Haven, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007), vii.
⁴ Harari, Nexus, chapter 2.
⁵ Harari, Nexus, chapter 2.
⁶ Harari, Nexus, chapter 2.
⁷ Harari, Nexus, chapters 2–3.
⁸ Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), 14.
⁹ Haven, Story Proof, 122.
¹⁰ Harari, Nexus, chapter 2.
Bibliography
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Repr. Ballantine Books, 1997.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. First edition. Random House, 2024.
Haven, Kendall F. Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. Libraries Unlimited, 2007.