When I interviewed 28-year-old curator Shinya Watanabe a month ago, he surprised me when he said his dream was to curate Documenta, the massive exhibition of international contemporary art held once every five years in Kassel, Germany. He might as well have said all he wanted was to be the most famous curator in the world.

In the last two decades, Japan's visual artists have become as prominent as its scientists, and its designers as respected as its businessmen. But local curatorial talents have never stood out on the world stage.

This is hurting the nation's standing in the art world, as over the last couple of decades, large-scale exhibitions such as Documenta have rivaled established museums as the arbiters of taste. So important have these shows become that an adulatory new term has been coined to describe the globe-trotting curators who organize them: "super curators."