“It’s the ultimate democracy of creativity. You just have to walk down the street to be part of it,” says Scott Burnham, the 39-year-old creator and curator of Urban Play, an interactive outdoor art project featuring Rebar and a host of other international art agitators that opened last month in Amsterdam. “It’s not commissioned, no gallery has asked them to do this. The artists get involved in this creative system by working completely outside of it.”

Burnham, who’s also heading up the 2009 Montreal Biennale next May, could have been talking about himself. He’s not tied to any one gallery or museum, and over the past 12 years he’s flitted from London to Barcelona to Montreal and elsewhere, giving university lectures, consulting on design projects and hovering around the fringes of the art establishment. He’s a kind of anti-curator – he prefers to call himself a creative director – who has arrived on the scene as the walls of the traditional gallery are coming down. Art is just as likely to be consumed and created on the streets and over the Internet as it is to be hung on the walls of Tate Modern. “Institutions have slowed in their ability to keep pace with the production of art, and independent curators like Burnham have taken up the slack,” says Richard Rhodes, the editor of Canadian Art.

“They’re steam valves for artists’ creativity. Burnham creates opportunities to tell stories that aren’t being told in mainstream galleries.”

Burnham is a kind of anti-curator who's arrived on the scene as the walls of the traditional gallery are coming down.

Dressed in jeans, a loose button-up shirt and a jacket that looks like it might have come from the Gap, Burnham, with his long, ruddy face, looks more like an eager young high school teacher than the man behind two of the most innovative art events around. When we meet, he’s putting the final touches on Urban Play, taking place on one continent, while he works on the program for the Montreal Biennale on another. There is hardly time for him to reflect on the trajectory of his career.

After studying journalism, he worked as a graphic designer and then moved to London to set up a satellite office for a Boston publishing company. While there, he studied curating and design and then lectured at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. “This was late in the YBA [Young British Artists] thing, that whole Damien Hirst era,” he explains. “As I learned about curating, I got frustrated. I realized that these cultural systems are incredibly slow. If there’s just the curator and the artists, it’s a closed shop. I find that boring.”

For Urban Play, Burnham partnered with Droog Design in the Netherlands to commission 19 artists – including street artist Mark Jenkins and design icons Stefan Sagmeister and Thomas Heatherwick – to create everything from video art to sculptures to graffiti for an outdoor show. (You can see the results until November by walking the IJ riverfront route through Amsterdam.) “What fascinates me is the desire to be creatively involved with the city. Most urban design discourages intervention. Urban Play encourages it,” he explains. Mark Jenkins put it this way: “Scott is looking at how this new thinking can ripple out not only to public space, but also how it’s influencing designers and planners to reconsider the city. It can be a force multiplier.”