The Death of the Curator
Posted in Individualism, Presentism, Technology on 16. Apr, 2009
The Guardian and the Saatchi Gallery (who else?) are putting on Your Gallery @ The Guardian exhibition. In short, a panel of judges have shortlisted 30 artists (from the 10,000 who submitted on saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/) and now the general public will reduce that 30 to 10 who will be put on display (by voting at arts.guardian.co.uk/yourgallery/ or texting it in).
Crowdsourcing the curatorial decisions of an exhibition. The process of museums has been brought to the lowest common denominator, pitched somewhere between reality TV and youtube’s most-viewed list. My point is about individualism in museums is entirely proved.
Let’s make the comparison between museums and the “old” news media of print and television. Let’s face it, they are both firmly “media” in the industry of information. You can argue the differences somewhere else. For the sake of my argument, museums are an “old” media. Possibly one of the oldest. What makes it the exception is that new/social media hasn’t completely ruined it or caused a massive rush to adopt it. You’ll find the Guardian on almost every social network or new technological advance. I think there’s about 10 UK museum institutions on twitter.
They are two methods for media to take, both opposite ends of the individualised spectrum. At one end, individuals-to-individuals. Old media does this with celebrity and personality as intermediates that we consume. We choose Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann to shout back at us our own political bias. We listen intently to to those objects of our fandom as they tell us stuff. New media the Internet Blogs are starting to cotton onto this, as I read more and more of “blogger-as-curator” or “celebrity blogger” (terms I don’t think would exist without the Cory Doctorows of the world) and “original content” becoming the an Internet Brahma bull and that Stephen Fry is King of Twitter or something.
This is only half-occurring in museums (probably in the same way I can only half-argued museums as old media). Celebrity is certainly becoming a more central feature but that’s certainly been the case with art since the year dot. It’s when David Beckham curates an exhibition of his favourite British archaeological treasures you know the paradigm has truly shifted. Museums may have its occasional superstar director, but ultimately the curator is hidden behind the institutional banner.
Individuals-to-individuals firmly puts the power into the hands of the consumer, with everyone else trying hard to make enough noise to become famous enough for you to listen.
The other end is individuals-as-social. The Internet is all over this and old media often have to rely on the new to provide access to this construct to which they had no answer. They best is the glut of phone-ins associated with reality TV, as the social-individual-media-consumer votes to keep or kick some dancer/singer/c-list celebrity. The new gave the people a voice in media of conversation. Granted, the majority of the social media voice may not adding much and with so much noise we often return to the Doctorows and Stephen Frys to show us stuff. What individual-as-social creates naturally though is the ability to create lists. Youtube has a Most Watched. Delicious and Digg have top items. Twitter loves to tell us who has the most followers.
One of the casualties of media is journalism, and this is where the comparison offers a warning. Proper journalism, as in a job with actual skills to do right, is bumped behind individualism. You can be any kind of celebrity and be a popular blogger or columnist and reach that individualistic market. That hill is very steep to be a “celebrity journalist”. We only need one O’Reilly/Olbermann. We don’t need either to see what the most popular music video is or what’s the world most favourite picture of a cat. The Crowd and tell us that for us automatically.
Museum curators and print journalists have a lot in common, in that it is their skills that turn an amount of information into something worth giving a damn about. There are plenty of other places to find out about the DefCon of journalism, especially the ever increasing problem of how to get paid. At this current moment in time, the museum curator is “safe”, got nothing to worry about. “It will all blow over”. The fact that there is a gallery in London who are going to offer thousands of people, many without art history degrees, the ability to choose what goes on the wall. The first step new media did to try to kill old media was to make the skills unimportant under the banner of “democratising”. “Everybody can get involved!” also means “It doesn’t matter what you know!”. Suddenly, your art history or archaeology degree isn’t looking so important, your museum post-grad may not be enough and your years of experience don’t mean much in the world of facemuseumtube when your job can be done by a thousand unpaid contributors. Curators may be safe now, but they would do well to look over their shoulders to their destitute journalist buddies.
Someone get David on the phone.
It doesn’t have to be the end for curators! We need their expertise. Curators are incredibly creative and can, and should, develop new ways to share/critique/collect/present. New media is not lamentable; it’s an opportunity to reach new audiences, to find new artists, to explore how far you can reach your ideas.
You could have said the same thing about journalists.
I don’t know, Pete. I’m not convinced. For one, there’s a panel (of curators?) choosing that group of artists, so there is some form of curatorial decision-making in the Guardian’s exhibition.
A couple of years ago, Shelburne Museum tried a celebrity-curated show with “Got E-bay?” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB5lbSQtVSA for a tour) It was interesting in a kind of rubber-necking way, but I didn’t feel that it was all that compelling. An interesting experiment, yes, but not one that changed the way the museum works.
To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, “The reports of the death of the curator have been greatly exaggerated.”
Especially in the case of this bogus “crowdsourcing” (flashy term — essentially meaningless) PR stunt.
Let me get this straight, a pool of 10,000 submissions has been whittled down to 30 by a panel of judges with art background/critical expertise — that’s called “curating” in my book.
Then of the remaining 30 pieces, 10 are chosen by the public? That’s a popularity contest run by a newspaper. It’s akin to asking people to suggest a name for the new baby hippo at the zoo.
If this is the new competition to curators, my money’s on the curators.
So come on, New Curator, suggest some achievable ways of ensuring the survival of the future museum curator ;-)
You raise some interesting points but I cannot really see where you have matched, for example, what the Guardian and Saatchi have done at one event with what, for example, a small or specialist museum could do in their locales? At times your understanding of what ‘media’ is, and what it does, seems confused.
With my curator’s hat on, it is the information (content), the quality of that information and the multiple ways it can be conveyed to different crowds (publics) that requires attention, i.e. an inside out approach, not an ‘oh look what the Guardian has done this week, let’s give it a go’ (tho I realise you are not saying this, precisely).
No one but the museum has as much quality knowledge about their collections and the people and places associated with them as they do. Unlike many (most?) journalists, the museum’s best work and service to society is not derivative. No amount of reality-tv joe-public-can-be-a-curator-too will replace this particular aspect of what museums do, and are expected to do, in the same way that the best journalists will find their feet online, in print, in a podcast or through whichever other medium becomes available to us in time. It’s the ‘copyists’ who will need to look over their shoulders, just like the scribes of the later Middle Ages in the face of the printing press. The writers still carried on writing. In fact, they wrote more, and better.
Woah. Let’s deal with all this bit by bit shall we. Starting with you, Nancie.
The panel in this was a bunch of art experts, yes. But, if Lily Allen can be on a panel of judges for a book prize, the group of judges could be (in the future) anyone.
Now you, Paul.
“The Death of the Curator” title is indeed borrowed from “Death of the Author” by Barthes, an essay describing how people provide far more input into the interpretation of symbols in text than the writer can possibly intend, thus relegating the author to a backseat. Okay, I know I’m being glib in my interpretation of Barthes, but I only have so much space.
“Death”, in this case and Barthes’s original sense, is a description of the fundamental change. Death of the old ways, life of the new. Curating isn’t gone. Just allow me my overdramatics.
Crowdsourcing is my input. Yeah, this case may not be “true” crowdsourcing, but this blog has been about “future trends in museums”. So, the question which I thought was obvious by now is that this could be an outbreak of future, not that this is the perfect outright model. Imagine if this is a huge success. Why curate anything at all if people are perfectly happy with a museum’s Top Ten Most Important stuff? Yes, it’s a PR tie-in. But television phone-ins were once tie-ins for competitions, now entire shows are based around phoning in your opinion.
Lastly, Tehmina.
Ensuring the survival? Easy, look at everything print media did wrong, and don’t do it. Which I could probably sum up by aggressively pursuing new influxes of people and graduates, creating an active job market that can adapt very quickly. The idea of one curator holding a job for 40 years will only cause problems. Also, be adaptive to all and every new crazy idea that comes along. This crowdsourcing curating may not take off, but we’d all look silly if it did and we weren’t prepared. Either that, or be curator-experts of David Beckham choices.
And my understanding of what “media” is fine, thankyouverymuch.
And with my “curator hat” on, quality of information doesn’t mean anything any more. If “quality” is what people wanted, why is it the standards of journalism have dropped so much and people are now starting to get their news from twitter? It’s individualism that counts, our own personal standards that for most people ain’t high. This is why the biggest selling newspapers in the UK are tabloids and the highest selling magazine is Heat.
What requires attention isn’t quality of content, its the foward-looking ability to notice that someone could do something really low-brow with no usual curatorial practice and blow us all out of the water. Saatchi is very capable and rich enough to put on exhibitions that could appaul us all and make millions. Then someone else will try it. Then there could be a glut of these just like there was/still is a glut of Big Brother-style programmes when Endemol first started it. People didn’t care that news programming was bumped. Just like I (without curator hat) ultimately don’t care if someone knows everything about a collection. Instantaneous gratification demand by individuals nowadays will not bother/care about the entire book written about one object.
Quality doesn’t matter. What sells matters. What is consumed matters so speed matters. A museum could sack all is curatorial staff tomorrow and turn the museum into a ultra-spectacle to feed people’s obsession with material culture and it would probably be the world most popular museum. Museums don’t get popular by curators. Museums get popular through marketing. I could have one room with only the Mona Lisa in it with no words and I would have the world’s most popular museum.
In that explanation, I take very seriously when someone begins to play with unusual models of curating an exhibition. In this individualised world (some may say a supermodern/hypermodern world) the rules can change very quickly.
I’m with Paul on this one–this is marketing, not curation. No curators were harmed in the making of this exhibit…
What’s more, people in the museum and arts field have been screaming about the death of the curator for decades–ever since post-modernism and multiculturalism hit the scene as ideologies and someone conceived of the idea of the “community curated” exhibit. Art historians and curators were all shaking in their boots–with a combination of rage and fear–how could the community possibly know enough about museum collections to curate exhibits?
But here we are a couple of decades later and curators still hold their jobs (registrars/collections managers/keepers are far more in danger of losing their jobs, at least here in the States) and “community curation” happens less and less and when it does, no one fears or makes a fuss.
However, all that said, I would like to say that while I’m not all that afraid of the role of the curator dying off because of stunts like this Saatchi deal, I am afraid of the likely demise of scores of museums and arts organizations (again, at least in the US) due to the economy and what Allison Fine refers to as a business model problem. http://afine2.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/greatest-loss-of-2009-social-capital/ Allison also makes the connection between arts organizations and newspapers as both are sources of and arbitrators of social capital–and both are currently endangered by today’s economy and social media.
But where your arguments and hers differ is that she sees more hope for the newspapers–there is a definite marketplace for news, all the newspapers have to do is change their method of delivery and their business model.
For arts organizations, it’s more challenging. For one thing, what we do usually happens in a defined (and confined), set space–be it the gallery or the theater. Museums are trying to find ways to break out of the bricks-and-mortar way of thinking by doing things like making use of Flickr for sharing collections and hosting online events and, yes, competitions, but when all is said and done, museums have tangible things and real estate to contend with whereas newspapers have ideas.
The other challenge for arts orgs that Allison points out is that often times we have fixed costs–collections care costs so much and that is a rising cost if anything, unless the museum engages in a little deaccessioning.
So, to make my long-winded point short, I think that curators may very well be an endangered species, but not because of marketing ploys or crowd-sourcing. Rather I think the danger lies in the fact that museums are closing, casting off their collections and cutting staff as part of budget cuts during a failed economy.
I do wonder about the blurring between marketing and curation more and more.
Decades ago, they didn’t have youtube.
I may regret use of the word “death” now in my attempt of literary humour. Never again. Dying or changing or mutating are interchangeable here. The keyword is “change”, one made by social shifts.
Yeah, all the newspaper have to do is change there business model, and try to work how to make money from something people take for free.
Newspaper had tangible things called print rooms and newsrooms where people did some work. And the struggle now is how to pay for them.
Agree on the deaccessioning.
Lots of equivocation, Pete!
I could advertise that I’m going to shoot a horse on the steps of City Hall at noon tomorrow and draw a huge crowd. So what? We already know that spectacle and crass commercialism “sell.” That doesn’t mean that they are models, or future trends, for anything other than spectacle and commercialism.
“Museums don’t get popular by curators. Museums get popular through marketing.” Really? Then what happened with the Millennium Dome?
Or, why are the Louvre or the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum amongst the world’s most “popular” museums? Neither has anywhere near the world’s biggest museum marketing campaigns.
I guess we’ll all have to wait to judge the full import of this Guardian/Saatchi experiment.
Millennium Dome was bad marketing.
The Louvre has the Mona Lisa. I wonder how much it counts for the museum numbers. It’s the most famous painting in the world, made famous by marketing. Okay, that very cynical and a very loose use of marketing, but you get the idea.
I’m going to leave this comment thread now to do it own thing. Everybody join in.
http://blog.artabase.net/?p=464
“The first step new media did to try to kill old media was to make the skills unimportant under the banner of “democratising”. “Everybody can get involved!” also means “It doesn’t matter what you know!”.”
Eh, I take issue with this statement. I would say, “Everybody can get involved!” means “What you know matters even more.” With the exception of actual celebrities, celebrity on Twitter stems from the utility of what you tweet. Internet users, people in general, value and respect insight. If you’ve got knowledge – about a product, event, or work of art – that the “everybody” doesn’t have, I would say your knowledge matters very much.
I’m sorry to have offended your sentiment.
The original post takes a very idealistic position in discussing the curator role. In reality, putting an exhibit together traditionally involves a solid amount of back-rubbing and back-stabbing, both skills do not necessarily taught in art classes. In other words, the current curator already does the crowd-sourcing, just from a different – and very small – crowd. After recent visit to MOMA, I am eager to see an exhibit curated by a different crowd.
It sure is idealistic to want to get paid.