Hi
On 22 Jun 2006, at 11:07 pm, Murphy wrote:
> Now we have this news from the Brooklyn Museum of Art that they are
> planning to do away with curatorial departments in favor of two
> curatorial "teams", one for collections and one for exhibitions:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/arts/design/22muse.html
I think this is interesting, and i've always been curious about subject
specialties in terms of curatorial department divisions in institutions
of all sizes. this new 'trend' (?) towards departments of exhibitions
or programming vs. collections is becoming more prevalent, and i
suspect is one reason why so many 'new media curators' have found
themselves downsized, alongside performance art curators, film and
video curators, even education curators ("every one of our curators
wants to curate new media" a museum director once told me). But it does
shift the power balance, where those responsible for collections might
be able to acquire works and thus shape the history of art through what
is collected or not, but have no remit in terms of exhibition space in
the building and actually getting things shown and thus into public
memory. then again, often a strong reason for a museum acquiring a work
(or convincing the board to buy it) is because they have plans to
include it in a forthcoming exhibition.
Museums that have no collections at all, such as the kunsthalles and
ICAs, it seems to me are even more pushed towards a
global/international style of curating when they don't have curators
who hold portfolios (i.e. have deep knowledge) of specific media -
what's there to advocate for except the new project and its context,
the artists' work on its own terms? Does anyone have any experience of
this or can suggest how institutional structures have gone on to
influence curatorial decision making as regards the inclusion of new
media in the museum?
Sarah
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