About curators – and control

• By Jenny Parker
• January 22, 2008

Working with museums of all types on creating participatory visitor experiences, you can count on one issue to keep coming up: Curatorial Control. For many, the long-standing belief that a museum should be the single, authoritative voice on its collections is not up for debate. It is what visitors expect and it is the mission of a museum to provide it.

Hilde Hein summarizes the debate nicely in her book Public Art by contrasting the philosophies of two vastly different museum directors:

Alfred Barr, the first director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, had a vision of its collection as a single, complex, but coherent and longitudinal (i.e., art historically conceived) work of art that articulates modernism with impeccable, single-minded artistry. Julian Spalding, former director of the Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, holds that museums should not tell one history but rather facilitate many concurrent stories. In his book The Poetic Museum, he proposes that the museum be something like a self-generated poetry anthology, permissively equipped with stimulating artifactual props… [He] encourages visitor/curator collaboration in the reimagining of exhibits. (2006, 110)

Anyone reading these posts knows that while we agree there is a time and place for the more traditional experience, we tend toward the more participatory approach. Our 2007 paper, Remixing Exhibits, offers some compelling thoughts for the unconverted:

On the more practical level, it is worth pointing out that this is not an either/or matter. Visitor-contributed programs respond to exhibits and collections. They don’t replace them.

And as far as participation goes, the best participation is voluntary. So visitors expecting the traditional curator-to-visitor experience can still have it. (Those opting to participate might just find a more enriching experience.)

But on a more philosophical level, let’s probe what really happens when we open up the museum experience to visitor participation. Museum professionals construct meaning out of vast bodies of knowledge and collections in order to present a compelling story to visitors. Shouldn’t museums then pass along these same valuable storytelling skills to visitors, skills that are so vital to understanding the world today?

On a final note, digitally organizing information – blogging, tagging, sharing – isn’t just a passing trend. Ignore that fact and you could end up in the dark. Museums benefit by getting on board.

Filed under: trends, what's cookin'