Museum History Journal
ISSN: 1936-9816 (Print) 1936-9824 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ymhj20
Cultures of Curating: The Limits of Authority
Sarah Longair
To cite this article: Sarah Longair (2015) Cultures of Curating: The Limits of Authority, Museum
History Journal, 8:1, 1-7, DOI: 10.1179/1936981614Z.00000000043
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museum history journal, Vol. 8 No. 1, January, 2015, 1–7
INTRODUCTION
Cultures of Curating: The Limits of
Authority
SARAH LONGAIR
The British Museum, UK
The collection of papers presented in this special issue of Museum History Journal
originated in the Museums and Galleries History Group (MGHG) conference,
‘Cultures of Curating: Curatorial Practices and the Production of Meaning, 1650–
2000’, held at the University of Lincoln in July 2012.1 Throughout two days,
panels and papers interrogated the history of curatorial practice from a variety of
angles, disciplines, and methodological approaches. A theme which arose
frequently, in discussions of individual curators, exhibitions, or institutions, and
which now binds together the papers presented here, was the question of curatorial
authority: how a curator might exert authority over an institution, collections,
objects, knowledge, and public understanding — and furthermore how such
authority is tested, challenged, and limited. The keynote speaker at the conference
was Dr Samuel J. J. Alberti whose 2011 essay examined the question of curatorial
authority and highlighted many concepts pertinent to this discussion.2 The
authority of the curator, and by extension of the museum, is derived from various
sources and expressed in different arenas. This short introduction discusses the
ways in which curatorial authority is established, shaped, and inherited, and also is
limited and subject to challenge. It considers the sources of curatorial authority,
the curator’s interaction with internal and external communities, and finally the
social and political contexts within which they work. Certainly the last 40 years
have seen transformations in the perception of museums and the shift from
‘museum as a temple’ to ‘a newer one of museum as forum’.3 As Claire Warrior
aptly states, museums today are ‘sites of negotiated authority’.4 This selection of
essays from a variety of geographical and temporal contexts demonstrates the
longer history of contestations over authority in museums and the variety of
responses by curators.
Intellectual authority — the command over knowledge — might appear to be a
fundamental component of curatorship. The civic function of the museum as a site
of control, discipline, and authority has been discussed in depth within the
literature in the last 30 years.5 Such authority is transmitted through various
channels — the physical environment of the museum, the ordering and
arrangement of the collection, and the public exposition of knowledge through
ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1936981614Z.00000000043
2 SARAH LONGAIR
lectures, displays and exhibitions. Indeed, much of museums’ purpose (in the past,
and in a variation of this form today as discussed here) rests upon their perception
in the eyes of the public as institutions where experts in the field organize, validate,
and convey knowledge. An element of such authority is the sense of trust in the
museum and its curatorial expertise. As Susan A. Crane notes: ‘Museums are not
supposed to lie to us; this act seems like a breach of faith. Assuming that our own
memories are fallible, we rely on museums as well as on historians to get the past
‘‘right’’ for us.’6
It is clear, however, that the concept of museums as sites of authority only tells
one part of the story. Such questioning of museums’ authority could be external —
as evinced by the immense shifts in curatorial practice in the last two decades of
the twentieth century and since, where museums and galleries worldwide
recognize and actively seek diverse interpretations of their collections. The work
of Ivan Karp and others has discussed such challenges and responses in depth.7
Nonetheless, Sharon MacDonald reminds us that, in spite of these attempts to
represent multiple perspectives in exhibition displays, ‘people are attracted by the
authority of museums and audiences could lose interest if that authority is called
into question’.8 The tension between these diverse public demands remains a
constant in exhibition practice. Nicola Ashmore’s essay (p. 59) explores
interventions by source communities within art commissions in the 1990s,
recognizing the problematic nature of such projects and the ways in which display
and labelling subtly alter the conferring of knowledge.
When analysing the wide number of variables which determine a curator’s
authority, we must recognize that the definition of the role varies widely:
between institutions, within the field, and even between the incumbent and her/
his managing authority. While the word itself derives from the Latin curare ‘to
care [for]’, which taken literally focuses our attention on the custodianship and
preservation of collections, curatorial responsibilities include a broad range of
activities. The multiplicity of tasks expected of a curator could be vast,
particularly in the many smaller museums in which a curator might be the single
member of staff, perhaps even unpaid. As well as caring for, preserving,
safeguarding, and documenting the collection, a curator might be expected to
undertake independent research and publish the results, conceive and mount
exhibitions, manage budgets, give lectures and tours of galleries, make new
acquisitions, and attract donations. Depending on the size of the institution,
some carried out technical work, including taxidermy and specimen preserva-
tion. With such a wide variety of potential tasks, a curator skilled in one area
might lack expertise or experience in another. Training in museums has, in spite
of the emergence of training programmes in the mid-twentieth century, largely
been done ‘on the job’. National professional associations, such as the UK
Museums Association, founded 1889, for decades existed as a forum for
exchanging ideas and practice rather than providing formal training and
qualifications. Even to this day, while curatorial practice is without a doubt a
recognized profession, there are still no requisite formal qualifications. In spite
of the expansion of Museum Studies postgraduate programmes in universities in
the UK and abroad, such qualifications are not mandatory for museum
CULTURES OF CURATING 3
employment. Learning from peers or intra-institutional training programmes
remains the norm.
An intimate knowledge and understanding of the institution’s collection is a
fundamental component of curatorial authority. Object identification and
documentation provided the building blocks on which to construct a curator’s
claims to expertise. Many of the curators mentioned in the examples in this
volume held their posts for many decades — such length of service around a
particular collection enabled them to amass a wealth of knowledge, some of
which inevitably was lost after their departure. A curator could also provide, or
limit, access to these objects and associated knowledge. This was then asserted
publicly in different spheres — within their discipline and also to a wider
audience — through publications, lectures, and exhibitions. They might also
need to draw on the expertise of others in order to assert authoritative
knowledge over new or extensive collections. The theme of authenticity, and the
definition thereof, is a closely related theme, discussed in particular within Alan
Crookham’s essay (p. 28), but also by Michelle Huang (p. 41) and Jozef Glassée
(p. 102). Across the fields related to museum objects, but especially in art
history, archaeology, and ethnography, a central component of a curator’s
authority was their ability, through experience and expertise, to identify
authentic works or artefacts and to recognize forgeries, fakes, adaptations,
and alterations. The question of attribution is a constant within the field of art
history — whether or not works were undertaken by the hand of a particular
artist, or their school, or a combination of both. Huang’s essay discusses the
development of Laurence Binyon’s expertise in Chinese art, the challenges to his
expertise, and how acquisitions reflected his burgeoning knowledge and status in
the field. We should also recognize that while one curator’s expertise around a
collection might appear paramount, the value and significance accorded to
objects by curators, collectors, and visitors were not fixed but manipulated and
contested over time.9
While a curator might have an academic specialism in a particular field or
more general scientific training (for example, many in the nineteenth century
were medical doctors), museum collections often encompassed a wide array of
objects and specimen types.10 Such was the distinction between the wider
scholarly world and the museum: the collection defined the subjects and thus
often demanded a curator to amass an eclectic miscellany of knowledge from
different disciplines. Caroline Cornish’s fascinating case study (p. 8) probes more
deeply into the relationship between academia and museums. She demonstrates
how the discipline of economic botany — the application of botanical
knowledge for economic benefit — was in large part established within
museums, in particular by the Museum of Economic Botany at Kew. The
discipline had direct practical application at a time when scientific under-
standing, economic need, and imperial priorities coalesced. It flourished in some
museums that could combine research and exhibition, and many local museums
had ‘economic botany’ collections. However, this phenomenon was short lived
and was quickly eclipsed by other branches of botanical science. Even Kew’s
Museum of Economic Botany was re-organized; Cornish’s discussion of the
4 SARAH LONGAIR
museum’s Tasmanian timber specimens indicate just how problematic this was
as the collection’s role was changed.
The majority of examples in the literature about challenges to curatorial
authority investigate examples of external bodies or individuals contesting the role
of the museum. It is important, however, to recognize that tensions, resistance, and
challenge also exist within institutions themselves, in spite of a unified public face.
The internal organization of the institution imposes limitations and restrictions on
curatorial authority for a variety of intellectual, practical, or financial reasons. The
persistent intervention of the institution’s controlling board could undermine
the work of the curator.11 In this respect, the work of MacDonald and others,
which delves deep ‘behind the scenes’ in museums, has made clear the level of
contestation and debate inherent in curatorial decision-making prior to the public
display of an exhibition.12 In these instances, compromises are made which
question the notion of dominant curatorial authority. Such studies bring the
academic study of museums much more in line with the experiences of those who
work in them. Similar instances of curatorial frustration and testing of authority
have occurred throughout the history of museums, revealed by close analysis of
museum archives, exposing the constancy of the contingent nature of such
authority.
The model of the ‘relational museum’ draws our attention to the relationships
between objects and people within an institution.13 Of particular relevance here
is the focus on the complex web of local and global connections that exist in
museums. The curator sits at the intersection of multiple networks: institu-
tional, disciplinary, scholarly, and professional, all of which can vary in
geographical reach from the municipal to the international. By considering
these internal and external spheres within which the curator moved, we can
begin to discern the different ways in which the status of the curator was
established. These relationships are bound up with another key element of
curatorial practice, effective communication: internally with colleagues and
management boards, and externally with donors and the public.14 One might
argue that the most effective curators perfect the different modes of
communication and deployment of appropriate knowledge with these different
constituencies.
The relationship of the curator with the public is touched upon in many of the
articles within this journal. Ashmore (p. 59) regards contemporary curating in
terms of ‘meaning-making’ and investigates the relationships between curators,
artists, and communities in the 1990s against the backdrop of New Labour
policy. This was a recognizable shift, as she notes, away from artistic
commissions which critiqued the institution’s authority. The case studies expose
the tensions between the different levels of authority accorded to the participating
communities and the visibility of their involvement. An intriguing counterpoint to
this practice — where artists worked together with communities and curators to
interpret collections — is the example given in Huang’s essay, where Chinese
artists came to the British Museum in the 1920s and 1930s to learn about the
history of Chinese painting, knowledge which they found lacking elsewhere. This
CULTURES OF CURATING 5
consultation was testament to Binyon’s emergence as a world authority on the
subject.
While the contemporary term ‘fundraising’ might jar with reference to historic
practice in museums, curators have throughout the existence of museums been
actively engaged in seeking funds and objects to enable the institution to survive
and flourish. Although museums are often housed in large buildings giving the
essence of permanence and dominance, their survival has rested upon financial,
political, and social support. Most evident within the essays presented here is the
relationship between the curator and potential donors. When seeking to expand
and enhance the collection, the curator needed an insight into the social setting of
the community in which the museum was situated and how best to shore up local
support. As seen in the case discussed by Glassée (p. 102), De Mont carefully
cultivated good relationships and friends with local elite collectors, encouraging
them to regard their donations to museums as part of the longer tradition of gift-
giving in the town. Like Binyon, De Mont made clear that he respected the
expertise of these individual collectors as they were important sources of
knowledge, as well as funds.
Beyond the local social backdrop, the curator acted within a particular political
setting. In these essays, we see how curators in Ashmore’s essay reacted to the
intersection of cultural and social policy promoted by New Labour in the 1990s
and their response to this coalescence of cultural projects with the Government’s
diversity agenda. Melania Savino (p. 88) brings to our attention the way in which
the Turkish curator and archaeologist Aziz Ogan carefully negotiated the new
Republican interpretation of Turkey’s history in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. She highlights how the scholarship on the history of Turkey’s
archaeology has been dominated by ‘big’ European scholars, neglecting the critical
role of local curators and scholars which must be understood within this political
context. The Republican government emphasized the Hittite era, as a means of
creating a new national identity, disconnecting it from the Ottoman and Classical
past. However, Savino describes how Ogan’s authority within the museum world
and experience enabled him to display the ‘heterogeneity of the Turkish past to a
wider public’ (p. 88). In contrast, Widén’s case study of the National Portrait
Gallery in Sweden (p. 73) shows how the curator Baron Adolf Ludvig Stjerneld
created a distinct and politicized viewpoint on recent history, incorporating the
stories of ‘meritorious citizens’ alongside political and royal figures. As an
aristocratic and well-connected figure he had the apposite contacts to enhance the
portrait collection and establish his authority over the collection. The dramatic
narrative of the guidebooks that he wrote blurred the lines between history and
fiction, in an attempt to instil in the viewer an evocative historical experience of
the palace and the collection.
The use of the guidebooks as a means of examining the exertion of the
curator’s authority leads to a final point about the use of sources in these cases.
The authors here have drawn upon a variety of public and private correspon-
dence, museum archives, objects, newspapers and meeting reports, as well as
images and descriptions of the displays. A critical element in the study of
curatorial authority is the need to test their public pronouncements — which
6 SARAH LONGAIR
themselves were designed to legitimize and establish their authoritative voice —
against the hidden tensions and limitations exerted ‘behind the scenes’.
Furthermore, as with any historical study, it is the moments of crux or crisis
where we often have the most detailed information: the controversial exhibition,
the challenge regarding a work’s attribution, the sale of an object, or the
resignation of a curator. Evidence of historic curatorial practice often remains
elusive. Depending on the institution and its administrative structure, decisions
and discussions might go unrecorded. Historians of museums must use all
available evidence to reconstruct the realities of curating, bringing together
fragments from registers, photographs, and correspondence, both private and
personal. Fastidious curators who recorded extensively their every action speak
loudly in the archive, while many assistants are silent. Or in other cases, we might
rely upon the records of assistants of curators who engaged in verbal discussion
more regularly than they committed their views to paper. When a debate,
decision-making process, or singular event is recorded, we must mine such
occasions both for their particularity and for their insights into the ordinary state
of affairs.
The first four articles in this issue discuss examples in British museums and
galleries from the early nineteenth century to the 1990s, but all tell much wider
stories, notably, of how knowledge about global collections was acquired,
conveyed, and its subsequent impact upon curators’ authority and status. The final
three articles are geographically diverse with original and lesser-known case
studies from Sweden, Turkey, and Belgium. They offer revealing insights into the
role of curators and museums in constructing local, regional, and national
identities.
Cultures of curating continue to evolve. Contemporary curating is a vibrant and
thriving field within the museum sector and beyond. Indeed, several commentators
have noticed in recent years that ‘everyone is a curator’.15 The term has become a
fashionable by-word in social media for editing and creating pages and identities
online. Here, the democratic vision of taste in the twenty-first century confers
authority upon these individual ‘curators’. Within the museum sector, more
extensive and varied engagements with the community continue to demonstrate
how curators learn from their audiences and use their skills as communicators and
wider contextual understanding to bring objects and their stories to life. Openness
within curatorial practice underlies the philosophy and practice of new museum
developments, such as ecomuseums, which are community-based heritage projects.
Exhibiting will always be a contested terrain16 and museums now have a
heightened self-awareness of how to act responsibly with the power and authority
still expected of them by the public. Taking the wider historical and geographical
perspective enriches our understanding not only of our collections but also of the
continuities in curatorial practice. Furthermore, individual curators in the past
have shaped the collections we work with nowadays. By deepening our
understanding of how and why curators generated and recorded knowledge about
and the meaning of collections — and the social, political, and economic
circumstances which affected this knowledge negotiation — the better we can
work productively with collections and the legacies of curators of the past.
CULTURES OF CURATING 7
Notes
1
My thanks to Kate Hill, Ilja Nieuwland, Nicholas Institution Press, 1992); Ivan Karp, Corinne A.
Donaldson, Peter Davis, and Jeffrey Abt for their Kratz, and Lynn Szwaja (eds), Museum Frictions
assistance in reviewing the articles in this journal, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
8
and to Peter Davis and Kate Hill for their Karp and Lavine, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8.
9
insightful comments on the introduction. S. J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Objects and the Museum’,
2
S. J. M. M. Alberti, ‘The Status of Museums’, in Isis, 96(4) (2005), p. 561.
10
Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. Alberti, ‘The Status of Museums’, p. 56.
11
by D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J Withers S. Longair, ‘The Experience of a ‘‘Lady Curator’’:
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Negotiating Curatorial Challenges in the Zanzi-
2011), pp. 51–72. bar Museum’, in Curating Empire: Museums and
3
Duncan Cameron writing in 1971, quoted in S. the British Imperial Experience, ed. by J. McAleer
D. Lavine and Ivan Karp, ‘Introduction: and S. Longair (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
Museums and Multiculturalism’, in Exhibiting sity Press, 2013), pp. 122–44.
12
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum S. MacDonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science
Display, ed. by I. Karp and S. D. Lavine Museum (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2002).
13
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution This project explored the longer history of
Press, 1991), p. 3. networks associated with objects, from the
4
C. Warrior, ‘What is a Curator?’, in University producer onwards. C. Gosden and F. Larson,
of Cambridge Art and Science of Curation 2013- Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at
2 014 pr oject, , http://www.cam .ac.uk/ the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884 – 1945 (Oxford:
museums-and-collections/working-together/art- Oxford University Press, 2007).
14
science-of-curation/what-is-a-curator-claire- Katy Barrett describes contemporary curating as
warrior. [accessed 1 September 2014]. being: ‘as much about people as about objects,
5
E. Hooper-Greenhill, ‘The Museum in the the ‘‘art’’ of communication, if you like, as much
Disciplinary Society’, in Museum Studies in as the ‘‘science’’ of collections’. K. Barrett, ‘The
Material Culture, ed. by S. M. Pearce Art and Science of Being a Young Museum
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), Professional’, University of Cambridge Art and
pp. 61–72; E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Science of Curation 2013-2014 project, ,http://
the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, www.cam.ac.uk/museums-and-collections/
1992); T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum collaborative-projects/art-science-of-curation/
(London: Routledge, 1995). the-art-and-science-of-being-a-young-museum-
6
S. A. Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History professional. [accessed 1 September 2014].
15
in the Museum’, History and Theory, 36(4) Several blogs and conference sessions have add-
(1997), p. 51. ressed this issue. For a summary see D. Blight,
7
I. Karp and S. D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting ‘What Happened to the Expert Curator?’, ,http://
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-
Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/aug/23/
Institution Press, 1991); I. Karp, C. Mullen art-curator-in-digital-age. [accessed 1 September
Kreamer, and S. D. Lavine (eds), Museums and 2014].
16
Communities (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Karp and Lavine, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
Notes on Guest Editor
Correspondence to: Dr Sarah Longair, Department of Learning, Volunteers and
Audiences, The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, UK.
Email:
[email protected]
