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vuk-thanks for the comment re artists on a curators list !! it prompted me to articulate my thoughts on this discussion on curators ethics and how the situation arises for scientists, and ethical rules of conduct for scientists who organises venues where the work of scientists is presented why is in that in the art world that there is a separate professional category of "curator", but not in the science world because there are no science curators,scientists get involved in many kinds of 'service' activities that help make visible the work of their scientific colleagues= in my work as an astronomer I have worked as a book editor for a collection of essays, on organising committees for scientific conferences in astronomy and astronautics etc as discussed by many here = there are 'general rules of conduct' and then practicalities= indeed in general a scientist would not present their own work in a venue that they are the organiser , or a journal where they are the editor in chief= and normally in all peer reviewing or selection processes one is asked to 'declare all conflicts of interest"= for instance often one refuses to peer review work by scientists at ones own institution but an example of my own violations of these general rules would include; a) our research group was developing a new emerging sub discipline ( extreme ultraviolet astronomy), we organised the first conferences and books on the subject- and included the work of our own research group in the books, and often invited ourselves as keynote speakers this is a dilemma that many artists in the emerging areas of art/science/technology - in the early days of digital arts there were no curators paying attention- so the artists organised the venues, and naturally included their own work- this seems to be fine the same for art and biology, or nano art ( with the exhibition curated by artist vesna for instance), on the hand if a curator at a Museum of Modern Art organised a painting exhibition that included their own paintings= this would be a stretch ( except in the recent rash of museum of modern arts asking artists to curate from their collections) b) I was chairman for a conference session in astronautics and didnt have enough papers to fill the session, so presented a paper from our own group to fill out the session. The abstracts were peer reviewed by the other session co chair but it would have been difficult for my colleague to turn down this paper !! On the other hand this was the only session in the conference which covered our work , so i couldnt submit the paper to another session where I didnt have a conflict of interest, so should i penalise our group because i had helped organise the conference ? I still feel I violated something. as i said at the beginning , in science we have neither official 'science critics' nor "science curators' as separate professions from science- ( its a good question as to why this is necessary in the art world but not in the science world)= we have science historians, but they are not practicing scientists in general, and philosophers of science=but they dont organise venues for scientists to present their current research mind you some would argue that we are in serious need of in depth science criticism to help reintegrate science into society !!! roger ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Vuk Ĉosiĉ <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:24 PM Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] artist curator ethics To: [log in to unmask] Interesting how many artists you can meet at a curators mailing listi -- Roger Malina is in France at this time IN USA phone 1 510 853 2007 When in France I can be reached at: 011 33 (0) 6 15 79 59 26 or (0) 6 80 45 94 47