CURATOR committing a linguistic Faux pas According to Merriam-Webster, you can’t call yourself a “curator” just because you recently organized an art exhibition. In fact, the dictionary is more apt to permit you this title if you feed zebras than if you mount paintings and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. The definition reads: “One who has the care and superintendence of something; especially: one in charge of a museum, zoo, or other place of exhibit.” Here, it’s the concern and attention to objects (or animals), not their particular arrangement, that matters.
It’s a nice thought at first—that curatorship equals care, and that specialized museum staffers are tending to artifacts that offer a narrative about human history and making. And it’s true that this is how many institutional curators think about their jobs, and how they operate. But in general, that conception of the word “curator” is woefully outdated in light of how we actually use the word today. Some of the most thoughtful contemporary exhibition organizers work outside the institutional context, offering new ideas about art through displaying objects that aren’t actually theirs for the caretaking. And they’re also challenging received notions about the very purpose of museums. *Yet progress always has its detractors*. “Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art,” Roger Kimball wrote in a recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal, complaining that today’s museums are about “entertainment…snobbery and money…and politics, politics, politics.” He overlooks the fact that art museums have always been political spaces, and that the curators who work there are always individuals with their own agendas—be it to promote art by vaunted white men, or not. Merriam-Webster’s entry now seems quaint, nostalgic, and reliant on possession: It fetishizes art objects at the expense of considering the humans that make them and the community that engages with them. As it stands, the word doesn’t account for anyone at a Kunst Hallé, or a non-collecting institution, which must relinquish works that have been loaned. The same goes for anyone who works with public art. The term, and our acceptance of who counts as a curator, is necessarily expanding. And while that’s a good thing, for the most part, popular culture is simultaneously extending the moniker to people who definitely don’t deserve it. The longstanding broadening (or bastardization, depending on whom you ask) of the word “curator” reaches far beyond the art world. An app that allows users to make what are essentially on-screen mood boards calls itself “Curator.” The idea of “curating experiences” turns marketers into elite gurus. These days, even your home decor can be “curated,” which suggests that anyone with decent taste in end tables has an expertise that’s on par with art history Ph.D.’s. “On the commercial side,” artist Seth Cameron told me, “[curator] seem like a word that sounds nicer than ‘trend caster.’” Right now, profit-seeking entities—both businesses and cash-hungry schools—often try to act as gatekeepers, asserting who can and can’t use the moniker. It seems as though everyone wants to be a curator, and universities are more than happy to offer programs that offer (pricy) stamps of approval. He believes that the universities realized they could charge for a series of courses that would ultimately allow students to call themselves curators “without having to learn a second language or complete a full dissertation.” John Patrick Leary goes so far as imply in his forthcoming book, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, that this definitional debasement of the word “curator” is about economics: “Like entrepreneurship and innovation, curating as a business practice presents profit-seeking activities as the pursuit of truth and beauty.” In his mind, if you’re misusing the word “curator” to describe your work in a commercial industry, you’re not just *committing a linguistic faux pas—*you’re perpetuating a rapacious system. Without overextending the term in unfortunate ways, I think that we can also enlarge our ideas about thoughtful exhibition-making. Institutions shouldn’t demand that advanced degrees be a prerequisite for curating. In an ideal world, universities would receive more funding, and anyone could afford to attend art history graduate programs and courses. Student bodies would be more diverse. Until that happens, institutions would do well to frequently look for fresh curatorial outlooks, whether or not they come with advanced degrees. In short, as organisations, have become, one task in leading intelligently in the tech pro surroundings, curator base had widened at large. Unless had a lot of experiences and read widely, such acts cannot be performed so easily as some one could think. One who gets into unbalanced situation seeking the guidance to set right things, shall not encompass that one into a curator since either that one was incapable of so, came into or could not resist the emotions of idiotism so easily out of ego. Knowledge includes the ART but analysis is pro-term activity which cannot sustained always, in human responses. “Anyone can be an artist; anyone can be a curator. A curator is really a facilitator,” Roya Sachs, curator of the Lever House Art Collection and art director of Spring Place, recently told me. “A curator is someone who connects people and ideas and creativity and finds a way to create a universal language between them.” K Rajaram IRS 15724 16724 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to thatha_patty+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZopsncoDsZqwqqCq9qOKpP3mjTh5SxqkA1Uk-zzA65JZKw%40mail.gmail.com.