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general, that conception of the word “curator” is woefully outdated in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
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