Image CC; pixabay.com
What role does public opinion play in the professional of curatorial practice? In the past the answer was simple: very little. A curator honed their knowledge on a niche-topic and then presented that within the hallowed halls of the museum with the slim desire to educate an audience.
However, today the curatorial role is increasingly focused on audience engagement and collaboration. Curators need to be aware of what the public likes because the public can so easily share that opinion.
Creative campus program manager Erinn Roos-Brown describes a curator’s role as more like a television producer than an academic scholar: ‘They need to capture the attention of the audience through entertainment and engagement.’
This has lead to chatter in recent years about the “death of the curator”. But the role of the curator is hardly dead, it has rather evolved and, one might argue, it is more important than ever.
Academic Michela Sarzotti writes: ‘The Internet is no longer only a preview of reality, but also and above all an amplification of it.’
It is easy to click ‘like’ but how does it relate to really appreciating art work? What influence does that social media ‘like’ have on real-time curating?
‘Like’ as influencer
Social media has been around for some time now – long enough to read its impact on curatorial practice. The consensus is that traditional curatorial practice hasn’t change; it has just expanded.
Robert Bell, former Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, National Gallery of Australia believes that really liking – as opposed to clicking a Facebook button – is something you learn.
Unlike the realm of social media that is driven by a popular swell, a curator must trust their likes.
‘It doesn’t mean you have to own these objects, but you can like them and it reinforces the pleasure of engagement,’ he said.
It would seem that the traditional museum autocracy has had to accommodate the new model of democracy fostered by social media. John Maeda, a digital guru at MIT, points out: ‘We’re living with the people’s choice 24/7’. He believes the right path is to ‘leverage the power of the people’.
Glenn Barkley, co-founder of The Curators’ Department and former Senior Curator Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, endorsed the “Instagram moment” in an exhibition – and encouraged curators to ensure they plan for that to engage viewers.
But he was clear that a curator’s responsibility was to the artist first. ‘I think you should curator for the artist first, then artists generally and then the general public,’ he said.
The cleft sword of ‘interesting’
Liking is democratising curating but comments can dissolve the craft. The use of the ubiquitous term “interesting” nullifies the intelligence of curatorial practice.
Glenn Adamson, former Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, feels that being outcast to the banality of being called “interesting” is far worse than the social media “like”.
‘I think of it as the plague of “interestingness”, the way we lean on it like a crutch. It is like putting a Post-It note in a book – the Post-It doesn’t say anything; it just flags it as interesting,’ he said. ‘It is just like Facebook in a sense, where everything is tagged and liked and people are not really committing to anything.’
Former Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Julie Ewington was even more critical: ‘It is a cover word someone says when they are not prepared to commit themselves. Are we professionally reduced to that?’
Ewington taps into a bigger question that is endemic in contemporary society, one of the ever-so-safe, politically-correct, nanny state that likes to pull people into line while, at the same time, championing their own opinion.
Barkley responded: ‘I am a bit worried about “interesting” now; I am more into “amazing”. We’ve had the Facebook generation; now it’s the Instagram generation. Curating now I go along with that. Having that Instagram moment in a show works – it is an amazing market.’
‘But yes, interesting is a cheap way of talking about things,’ he added.
Bell believes that just saying a work or exhibition is interesting is not enough. Intelligent engagement requires, ‘It’s interesting because…’ It is only then that we start to achieve real communication across audiences.
‘Today we expect things to earn their place – in an exhibition, a publication or online. I’d argue that everything is interesting – you need to have a hook to make it good,’ said Bell.
Image CC; pixabay.com
Personal over professional
Among curators there is a difference of opinion over whether actually liking a work – in the full sense of the term – is a helpful criterion.
Ewington believes that casting against type is really important as a curator. ‘You have to step up to the work and give yourself to it – you just can’t retreat and say you don’t like it.’
In contrast Barkley is a big advocate of liking and says, if anything, we undervalue it. ‘Liking is the most important thing you can have as a curator. The shows that are successful, you can tell the curator has invested some of themselves in them. I don’t think there is enough emphasis put on liking actually,’ he said.
It is a curious polarity. What is unequivocal, is that it is in the DNA of a curator to make judgments.
‘As a curator you walk around with a kind of dossier – a check list – the whole time, always evaluating what is important and what is not, what is worth looking at and what is not, what is good and what is not,’ said Bell.
But the popular “like” is almost an afterthought for these curators. It seemingly clicks in after their professional decision to collector or exhibit an artwork, and is more a conversation about presentation and engagement with an audience. Then “liking” moves into overtime.
Bell added: ‘Every work bought for a collection in my career had to be backed up by a several thousand-word essay that says “yes we should acquire it”, so you start off from a position of trying to convince people who are not engaged.’
How different is that to the social media like or share?
Today people expect to be engaged, and museums have had to adapt to this consumer-orientate world to compete with other activities. The horizon of curatorial expertise has been widened from curating object to the gamut of curating information. In many ways the curator has moved into the role of moderator, or interloper within the “like culture”.
Bell said: ‘As a curator one of the first things you have to do is to convince the people who have just employed to trust you. In the case of the NGA I had to deliver a 10-year plan in my first few weeks and walk into the Council of the NGA and say here is what I think you should do and it will cost X million dollars. I ask you to trust my judgment on that. Some of that will involve liking things and sometimes it includes disliking.’
Trust, judgment, like, share – they are hugely subjective responses. Museums hire curators for those very traits; and as audiences we listen, but also add our own.
Perhaps Barkley best summed up the like-versus-curator debate.
‘The things I am really interested in, and the reason why I like things, is because I want them somehow. It is desire based. Being able to touch them and hold that object in my mind – that gets to the core of my existence,’ he concluded.
His point reiterates that the role of the curator and the museum will always have this place, because liking is only one level of engagement and that, as human beings, we are hard-wired to want more.
The panel was presented at the AusGlass Conference, presented at the National Gallery of Australia.
