New Curator, a great website which looks at the future of museums through changes and trends in architecture, individualism, internationalism, expansionism, politics, presentism and technology, has an interesting take on Saatchi-Gallery’s populist, user-curated exhibition. The blog’s author, Pete NewCurator, comments
Crowdsourcing the curatorial decisions of an exhibition. The process of museums has been brought to the lowest common denominator, pitched somewhere between reality TV and youtube’s most-viewed list.
Having not read such a meaningfully critical comment on the internet for a while, I shot the author a few questions to learn more about this industry-insider blog.
New Curator was conceived late last year and birthed its first online posts January 2009. It’s written by Pete NewCurator who, despite their online pseudonym has an ‘immense’ (their word, but it does show) amount of expertise in the field. Knowing how frequently internet flamers hide behind a veil of anonymity, I asked them to justify that too.
What was your motivation for starting New Curator?
Partially by my existing interest in the future and museums. The blog takes the form more of a research notebook than “proper” articles. I spend a lot of time looking for things which may be the beginnings of trends or small oddities that may not exactly be noticeable yet. Yeah, I have a stack of theories that I want to prove or disprove or just see where they go so I collect them and make a few comments. Maybe I’ll write a book on some aspects. The trouble is they haven’t played out yet so I can’t make many statements without a big possibility of being totally wrong. That’s the problem with looking at the future of museums through the lens of the present. I’ll sometimes do longer editorials on slower days, but I never pretend they are solid statements… more ideas in progress.
What I didn’t want to do, and what I see too much in museum futurology, is the “safe” idea. Saying something like “Museums of the future will be geared towards families and have to exploit social media” is wasting everyone’s time. Mainly because there are a lot of people already solving this and the museum world is too slow to adopt it. I wanted to raise more questions about every museum fundamental in a future where it could change. Not many people like to think like that.
Why you wish to preserve anonymity?
Because it’s useful. If I came out tomorrow and revealed myself to be Nick Serota, the whole discussion would change. Anonymity also means I can just avoid ad hominem arguments that the museum world seems to LOVE and get down to some real tricky questions without providing my CV first. It appears to me how reluctant museum people are to talk about things for fear of alienating themselves from others who may just have more influence. So I get to talk about what I think is a desperately needed reform on deaccessioning, or the fact that curators should be front-and-centre the most important thing in a museum over that of artists, or the long-running joke with me that David Beckham is the future of museums (long story). I can say these things without any kind of worry about my “reputation”. Being semi-anonymous means that people are also far more ready to open up to me with their thoughts. I doubt they would if I dropped in the fact I was in between meetings about the latest Tate exhibition.
So it’s done me far more good to me than revealing every last detail.
Since there’s more to both art and known identities than meets the eye, here’s to preserving anonymity whilst critiquing a competition in which the ‘process of museums has been brought to the lowest common denominator’.
