steven lubar, "the curator rules," bissel lecture in the humanities, marymount university

The Curator Rules

Steven Lubar Bisson Lecture in the Humanities Virginia Humanities Conference

April 2015

1 It occurred to me, after I gave the title, that it was ambiguous. It could be an imperative

The Curator Rules!


April 2015

2 That’s not what I meant, though… in fact, the talk is very much about what happens when the curator doesn’t rule. So let’s go back to the previous version, without the exclamation mark.

The Curator Rules

Where they come from…

…

and when to break them


April 2015

3 My talk will be both historical and prescriptive…

Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Director’s Agreement with Curators,” June 10, 1886

4 First, though, some actual curator rules. This “Director’s Agreement with Curators,” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the earliest list of rules for curators that I know of.


5 Curators “have entire charge of their respective Departments and are independent of each other.” That’s still pretty much the case today at the Met.


6 Curators are “responsible for the safekeeping and preservation of all art objects.”


7 Curators keep a property book. They’re registrars, not just curators. And again, by department, not across the museum.


8 They report once a month to the director about what they’ve done. This is when the director finds out what’s been collected.


9 There are some practice things here, as well. “No more than one curator at a time shall be absent a whole day from the Museum.” Worth noting that there were only two curators at the time!

Professor William H. Goodyear, first curator of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portrait by Wilford S. Conrow 1916. Brooklyn Museum.

10 This, by the way, is the man these rules applied to: William H. Goodyear, first curator at the Met.

Rules and Regulations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1889

11 A few years later, the Met published an entire book of rules.

Rules and Regulations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1889

12 In these new rules, the director has a bit more say. It seems the curators decide what to put on display, the director arranges it, and the curators label it. Must have made for interesting managerial politics!

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Circular Letter to Curators

I ATTACH a copy of regulations to be followed in recording the location and condition of objects of art in all departments except

the Library and the Department of Prints, which have their own specialized forms of records. I wish you would, as promptly as possible, take the steps necessary to put them into effect. The following notes are for your guidance in so doing:

z. LOCATION RECORDS Cards for use under Rule B are to be obtained from the Storekeeper,

who will have a supply of special guide cards on which to enter case numbers. Ordinary guide cards should be filled in with the number of the gallery, number of storeroom, name of shop, etc., to cover the objects grouped under these heads.

2. INSPECTIONS The special guide cards referred to above constitute forms on which

to enter the records of the opening of cases. The records of the annual checking of each gallery and each storeroom should be entered on the face of the guide cards for these rooms.

While most of the checking of the contents of rooms and cases will probably have to be done by each department during the summer season, the checking of some of the cases will be spread over the year, since a case checked in the course of rearrangement, or opening for some other reason, during the calendar year need not be checked again that year.

3. OBJECTS OF INTRINSIC VALUE Particular attention is directed to these rules. Rules B and C under

this heading are in immediate effect. Therefore, no object of intrinsic

value can be moved out of a department until an extra set of photographs is available. Rule D is not only in effect immediately, but is retroactive; as soon as possible full sets of photographs and descriptions

of objects of intrinsic value now in possession of the Registrar are to be made and turned over to him. The photographing necessary to carry out Rule A is now under way. You will note that one com-

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Circular Letter to Curators, 1935

13 Later rule books at the Met are mostly about keeping good records: recording object moves, photography, conservation, using new forms.

My talk isn’t really about this kind of rules, though. But for a Washington audience, it seems right to show you one more:

Position Classification Standard for Museum Curator Series, GS-1015, Office of Personnel Management, 1962

14 Only in Washington… the Office of Personnel Management position description for curators. These are the 1962 rules, still in use. Museum curators collect, design exhibits, undertake education programs, and do research…. and so on, for 16 pages. *These are the official rules… what are the real rules?

What are the rules?

15 What are the unwritten rules of museums? Before you can break the rules, must know what they are… — a quick set - not definitive, but to get you thinking… — and mostly these are good! Need to know when to break them. I’ve exaggerated a bit here, for educational purposes!

Exhibition rulesYou know you’re in a traditional

exhibition when…

16 Start with exhibitions… What are the assumptions that go into designing exhibits?* Another way to think about this: “You know you’re in a traditional exhibition when…”

Orderly

17 An exhibition is orderly… It takes objects and puts them in an order, to tell a story. Early cabinets of curiosity were not orderly - they were about exceptions, the exotic, the odd, the wonderful. But museums take on their modern form when they are… orderly.

East India Marine Hall between 1825 and 1867, by James H. Emmerton

18 A symmetrical vision of the world, at the East India Marine Society.

United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1880

19 At the Smithsonian: a place for everything, and everything in its place. A tidy vision of the world.

Wagner Free Institute of Science, Philadelphia

20 The Wagner Free Institute of Science isn’t tidy, but from a distance it suggests an orderliness to the world that is quite endearing… even if the material in each case is anything but tidy.

Fusun’s cigarettes, Museum of Innocence, Istanbul

21 Even when displaying the most un-museum like artifacts possible - orderliness suggest it’s a museum. Cigarettes, on exhibit at the Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul

• Alphabetic

• Geographic

• Chronological

• Hierarchical

• By category

In order

22 Orderliness has another meaning - things are arranged in a particular order — arranged so that they tell a story. According to designer Richard Saul Wurman, only 5 kinds of order.

Timelines

23 Chronology is the easiest kind of order for museums. It’s also one that can easily oversimplify, over-order. A history museum focused too narrowly on timelines suggest that history had to happen the way it did, that it follows a pre-ordained path.

“Synoptic Series of Invention: Knife, saw, borer, scraper” Smithsonian, about 1890

24 At the turn of the 20th century, the Smithsonian’s anthropology and technology curators loved to organize things in synoptic series. This was a more complex chronology - not about time, but about progress. Order carries with it ideologies, meanings.

Atwater-Kent Museum, Philadelphia

25 A map filled the lobby of the Atwater Kent Museum, providing a geographic order to Philadelphia history.

But there’s more than just orderliness, or putting things in order. Museums suggest, more profoundly that the world is ordered.

…disciplined …like objects together

…makes sense of the world "Those beautiful structures that are so orderly, intelligible and transparent to analysis." —Michel Foucault

Ordered

26 By ordered, I mean, they instill a sense of order - * of discipline - that they make an argument about how artifacts relate to each other, and how we relate to artifacts - * how the world works. * Foucault argues that we should understand the world by examining the structures of knowledge. Museums the best place to do that…

Nicolas de Pigage and Christian von Mechel, La galerie électorale du Dusseldorff; ou, Catalogue raisonné et figuré de ses tableaux (Basel, 1778), pl. 19-21

27 Lambert Krahe introduced a completely new and modern system of organizing paintings at the Dusseldorf palace in 1770s. His aim was to create a pedagogical display that educated viewers in the art-historical principles of the different schools of art. The art museum, from this point on, was not about individual works, but about art history.

A picture collection not arranged by school and artist is “as ridiculous as a natural history cabinet arranged without regard to genus, class, or family.”

—Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, art historian,

1793

28 Not just art museums, of course - in fact, art museums were modeled on natural history museums. “A picture collection not arranged by school and artist is “as ridiculous as a natural history cabinet arranged without regard to genus, class, or family.”

Charles Wilson Peale, “Portrait of the Artist in his Museum,” 1822

29 You can see this in history museums, too. As Gary Kulik has pointed out, “Peale’s pedagogy and taxonomy were better suited to birds and mastodons than to history and human culture…. His gallery of heroes made the Revolution tamer, more respectable, and more orderly than it ever could have been.” Peale’s museum offers a combination of orderly display, an ordered display, and a suggestion that the world is orderly.

Charles Wilson Peale and Titian Peale, The Long Room, Interior of Front Room in Peale's Museum, 1822. Detroit Institute of Art

30 Ever wonder what was behind the curtain? This picture gives a better sense of the order of the Peale museum.

Prehistoric Archaeology exhibit in Upper Main Hall, Smithsonian Institution, c. 1879-1903

31 Archaeology and anthropology exhibitions also found order in the world. At the Smithsonian, George Brown Goode urged that exhibitions be classified in a double system: by race, and by “the evolution of culture and civilization,” across race. (Museums of the Future, p. 259.)

“The people’s museum should be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system.”

George Brown Goode, Museum-History and Museums of History, 1888

32 There was disagreement about how best to organize exhibits, but there was complete agreement that there had it be organization. Goode, the museum philosopher of the 19th-century Smithsonian, put it thus: museums should be “arranged with the strictest attention to system.”

Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. Renoir and chest room 18, 1942. Library of Congress

33 Note start of red triangles… exhibitions that break the rules! when you see these - ask what’s different about these…

Dr. Albert Barnes upset the museum world by breaking the rules… put furniture and wrought iron on display with his Renoirs… - he saw these as aesthetic similarities, not as art-historical evidence.

Martha Glowacki, “Rooms of Wonder,” Chipstone Foundation / Milwaukee Art Museum, 2008

34 Chipstone installation at Milwaukee Art Museum — fine American furniture embedded back into nature… harking back to a pre-museum world of wonder cabinets - not about order, but about exception, oddities, even dreams and nightmares.

Fred Wilson, “Mining the Museum,” Maryland Historical Society, 1991

35 Part of the power of Fred Wilson’s work is the way he plays with categories. The label says: metalwork. But somehow fine silver and slave shackles don’t seem to rest easily in our categories.

“The Lost Museum,” Brown University, 2014

36 This from a long case of artifacts that survive from the Jenks Museum of Natural History - arranged, in a new installation by Mark Dion at Brown University, by degree of decay… not the usual way of thinking about museum artifacts, but an appropriate for an exhibition on a museum that’s disappeared.

Haitian vodou altar by Mambo Maude, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012

37 Mambo Maude, a voudou priestess, mined the collections of the Haffenreffer Museum for artifacts that spoke to her of the water goddess La Sirena - many cultures pulled together because of what she saw as a spiritual similarity.

Some of the most interesting museum exhibitions of recent years are those that break the rules, bend the categories, move beyond system.

Designed for looking

38 The next set of rules: exhibits are designed for looking. I’ll come back to the fellow peering at museum exhibits with a skiascope in a moment.

Karin Jurick, from the “Museum Patrons” series, 2010s

39 Exhibits are designed for looking. Artist Karin Jurick captures the essence of museums in her series on Museum Patrons: people looking.

Frank Waller, “Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fourteenth Street,” 1881

40 There’s a long history of paintings and photographs of people in museums, looking.

Adolphe Vasseur, “Palace of Fine Arts,” Lille France. 1883

41 Looking closely.

Alécio de Andrade, Louvre Museum, 1993

42 Looking very closely.

Visitors viewing Brontosaurus skeleton, American Museum of Natural History, 1937

43 Looking and pointing.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leningrad, 1973

44 Staring.

Thomas Hoepker, “Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” The Museum of Modern Art, 2005.

45 There’s a good literature on the particular kind of looking that museums encourage. Here, a fine illustration of the male gaze.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Museum of the City of London, 2014

46 Even when art and artifacts are replaced by screens, it’s about looking. Maybe even more so. We know so well how to look at screens.

“American Enterprise,” National Museum of American History, opening soon!

47 There are new possibilities for moving beyond looking with new kinds of screen. A new kind of attentiveness, of interaction, is possible.

Designed for looking closely

48 Museums encourage a particular kind of close looking.

The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art”. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.”

—Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 1976

49 Brian O’Doherty explains this in his famous “Inside the White Cube.” How we look at art — how we look in museums — changes over time, from many things to look at, to intensive looking at one thing.

Art Institute Of Chicago, 1990 Photographer: Thomas Struth.

50 And so we have the white walls of the gallery, each painting given its space, framed in many ways: it’s literal frame, but also by the edges of the wall, the rope in front, the lighting, the circulation of visitors.

Benjamin Ives Gilman’s skiascope, from Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method, 1918

51 The best expression of this framing is Benjamin Ives Gilman’s skiascope - outlined in his Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (1918). He presents the skiascope as a device to limit glare, but metaphorically, it does much more than that: it isolates each piece of art.

“In a wide range of institutional discourses and practices wIthin the arts and human scIences, attention became part of a dense network of texts and techniques around which the truth of vIsion was organized and structured.“

—Jonathan Crary , “Unbinding Vision,” 1994

52 Jonathan Crary calls our attention to the ways that close looking becomes part of not just the museum but other areas of research in the late 18th century.

Let’s look at some exhibits that break the rules of close looking

“Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts,” presented by the American Folk Art Museum at the Park Avenue Armory, 2011. Photo by Gavin Ashworth.

53 A remarkable show that broke museum rules by hanging the quilts high in the air - not to be looked at closely, but to be appreciated as a collection, as a set of patterns and colors - as a quilt of quilts!

“Return to the Sea,” National Museum of Natural History, 1964

54 Occasionally, museums are designed for other senses, but not very often. or very well. Hearing - but only as an adjunct to looking. Almost never touching.

“Classical Room,” Museum of the Rhode Island Museum of Art, 1939

55 Alexander Dorner at the RISD Museum tried a range of techniques in his “atmospheric rooms”: colors, environmental sounds, close listening.

Saturday Morning Class in the Print Room, Art Gallery of Toronto, circa 1931

56 And museum educators have devised many ways to move beyond just looking. Here, first close looking, and then drawing.

Next: another category of rules… how museums use objects.

Object Rules

57 I’ll talk about three kinds of object rules - collecting rules, rules about treating objects, and the notion that museums keep objects forever

Collecting Rules

58

Clara Lieu, The Art Prof blog, 2013

59 First, what to collect: What is “museum quality?” Prof. Lieu, the Art Prof, says: “museum quality work is work that talks about contemporary issues, yet is timeless.” While I don’t like the notion of museum quality - museums collect should collect work defined in many ways - this combination is not bad: meaningful today, and meaningful in the future, maybe in different ways.

“Relics, curiosities, personal memorabilia, glorification of specific individuals or specific families…do not belong in a public museum…. No two-headed calves. No bricks from the old school house or mementos of prominent families.”

—G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 1975

60 There’s a long history of rules about what to collect - and what not to collect. This is Burcaw’s famous listing of what isn’t museum quality - rules superseded now that we’re interested in not just history but also the way the public understands and uses history… Still no two-headed calves, though.

Many museums collect contemporary objects, stories, images and sounds. But reasoned policies and procedures are very often lacking. And – given the uniquely detailed record of contemporary life recorded by today's ubiquitous media – how best are museums to record and present contemporary life in their collections?

61 A new interest in contemporary collecting - breaking old rules about waiting to see what might be worth saving… Some museums are setting up new categories of collections - objects easier to deaccession if it seems collecting them was a mistake.

Respect the object

62 This means each thing seen separately, protected, held for ever.

The “Rembrandt Rule”

63 The Rembrandt Rule - treat everything like a Rembrandt. All objects equally precious - click once for both images - the historic house museum world is starting to ask the question about whether this is true - whether it would be better to tilt more toward education and less toward preservation - a hot topic in the museum world. They talk about the “Rembrandt Rule” - the idea that everything needs to be treated like it’s a Rembrandt.

Bryan Collection, New-York Historical Society, before 1908

64 This was not always the case. Note the way these paintings are hung - floor to ceiling, overlapping - not respectful in the current sense.

"Primitive Negro Art,” Brooklyn Museum, 1923

65 In the Brooklyn Museum’s 1923 “Primitive Negro Art” exhibition, blankets were hung on the wall and draped over stools. Perhaps the Brooklyn Museum thought it OK to break the rules because it was displaying “primitive” art?

Forestry Hall, American Museum of Natural History, 1911

66 The ultimate taboo: Open the case and touch the flowers. Museums are supposed to keep the cases closed!

“Open House,” Minnesota Historical Society, 2006

67 Benjamin Filene, the curator of “Open House,” broke many rules: Not “authentic” artifacts from the house; words and artifacts mixed promiscuously; many of the artifacts not “museum artifacts” - bought for this exhibit. Many different voices overlapping.


68 Artist Mark Dion’s imagined reconstruction of the office of John Whipple Potter Jenks. A biographical sketch in objects - even though none of these artifacts have any actual connection with Mr. Jenks.

“Dangerous Liasons,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004

69 One of the most shocking exhibitions ever at the Met. Not shocking because of the sex… but costumes from the collection shown in a lively way and placed into period rooms. And broken objects!

“Party Time,” by Yinka Shinobara, OBE, Newark Museum, 2009

70 Yinka Shinobara re-imagines a period room as a dreamscape - breaking all of the rules! A wild party in a Victorian dining room! Headless manikins with their feet on the table!

“Maira Kalman Selects,” Cooper Hewitt Museum, 2015

71 Maira Kalman not only cuts open the back of the chair to install a screen… she has handwritten labels!

Artists bring a refreshing willingness to break the museum rules.

“The wistful, sentimental appearance of this head made it a favorite of romantically inclined visitors until Dorner corrected the false impression by as truthful a restoration as possible.”

—Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum, 1958

72 Conservation philosophies and guidelines change over time. Alexander Dorner, director of the RISD Museum of Art in the 1940s, had strong feelings about what it meant to do a “truthful” restoration - what we would call a reconstruction.

Keep objects safe, forever

73 Museums like to think they keep objects for ever. I want to ask two questions. Do they, and should they? Answer to the first: they don’t really. (Of the 174 paintings that were part of the Metropolitan Museum's first purchase in 1871, only 60 are in the collection now. Only 19 are on view today.)

And to the second: 99 percent of the British Museum’s collection is in storage - it seems to me that there’s an ethical issue here: museum objects aren’t useful if they are never used.

Storage, Old Sturbridge Village

74 Behind the scenes of every museum are storage rooms - usually with more than 90 percent of the museum’s collection hidden away, most of it never to be displayed.

When I’ve taken students to visit museums, this is always what they like best - what they remember most.

Bird Storage, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

75 Collections are essential for research, especially in natural history

Anthropology Storage, Museum Support Center, Smithsonian Institution

76 And to a lesser extent, in anthropology

Firearms Storage, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, about 1920

77 But perhaps less so in history. In fact, the history of collections in history museums is a discourse of constant worry about what to do with collections? How do we use them? How do we prove that they are valuable, useful, worth the high price it costs to store them?

“No matter what standard measure objective scholars use they can hardly avoid the conclusion that the study of artifacts has contributed to developing the main themes of American history almost not at all.”

—Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg, 1978

78 Cary Carson’s 1978 worry is still mostly true.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” 1981

79 I couldn’t resist…

We need to think of storage as more than just - dead storage. And museums have started to find ways to use their stored collections for their educational goals, to bring them to life.

CultureLab, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012

80 At Brown, we put our museum storage racks inside of glass exhibit cases. We literally put storage on display!


81 The collection of the Jenks Museum at Brown was lost, literally carted off to the dump - here, its storage recreated as an art project. 80 student artistss were given lists of collections that did not survive, and summoned forth their ghosts.

Glasgow Museums Resource Centre

82 The Glasgow Museums Resource Centre is open for occasional visits - organized mostly for storage, but also for display.

Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, Metropolitan Museum

83 Many museums have densely packed open storage rooms - in combination with access to collections data on screens, a way of letting the public see collections that would otherwise be hidden.

Visible storage in the porcelain galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum

The Clothworkers’ Centre for Textile and Fashion Study and Conservation,

Victoria and Albert Museum

84 And, of course, visible storage and study rooms are becoming more common. Here, the Victoria and Albert Museum. *

“We aim to remove every barrier possible between the public and the collections…There’s a special intimacy that comes from encountering an object first hand. I personally believe we can trust the public more with things, and perhaps it might even be worth changing our policies on conservation to enable such access.”

—Kieran Long, Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital, Victoria and

Albert Museum

85 The V&A is asking: How can we reinvent museums - how do we change the rules - so that the public can make use of our objects?

The expansive Art Study Center allows visitors to request objects not currently on display in the galleries, facilitating self-directed teaching and learning from works in all media…, the Art Study Center encourages extended interactions with original works of art.

—Harvard Art Museums

86 Harvard Art Museums new Art Storage Center - anyone can ask to come and see any work of art.

Curator RulesCurators are experts, and

make the choices

87 Finally, some more general curator rules.* These are really about moving from “The curator rules!”, with an exclamation mark, to that phrase, without an exclamation mark.

The museum must remain “firmly in the control of a trained elite [to] maintain standards of quality independent of the contingent values of daily life.” Museums “must direct public taste…and not be dictated [to] by it.”

—Paul J. Sachs, Harvard Museum Program, 1920s

88 Curators make choices both because they are trained to - they were what Sachs called the “trained elite.” Paul Sachs was head of the Harvard Museum program in the 1920s and 30s - trained most of the museum directors of his day - and this still stands as widely held belief - even if most museum directors are less likely to be so blunt.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/reverence-for-the-object.html

“The strong sense of high purpose and personal responsibility and the strict intellectual integrity…mark the museum curator.… As a professional he is a stronghold of individual initiative and responsibility in a world threatened by the ant heap of collectivism.”

—Remington Kellogg, Director, USNM, 1952

89 Remington Kellogg at the Smithsonian: the curator as “a stronghold of individual initiative and responsibility in a world threatened by the ant heap of collectivism.”

A fine example of Cold War rhetoric! Curator as John Galt!

"If an exhibition hall is to approach its ideal, its plan must be that of a master mind, while in actuality it is the product of the correlation of many minds and hands.”

—Carl Akeley, In Brightest Africa,

1923

90 Akeley was the mastermind of the natural history dioramas at the AMerican Museum of Natural History.

“Our exhibitions represent primarily the judgment of the curator-in-charge as to the best method of dealing with his subject.”

—Robert Multauf, Museum of History and Technology,

1965

91 Robert Multauf, explaining why the Museum of History and Technology - today’s National Museum of American History - was divided into exhibits organized according to the specialized interests of the curators.

The first task of every museum is “adding to the happiness, wisdom, and comfort of members of the community.”

—John Cotton Dana, 1917

92 John Cotton Dana is represents another tradition - museums looking not to their own interests or expertise but that of the community. This has become increasingly common in recent years.

Mark Dion, sketch for “The Curator Vanishes,” Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2011

93 Mark Dion’s “Sketches for Curator's Office 2011” - an installation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts that offers the empty office of the museum’s mysteriously vanished first director of contemporary art.

He asks the question: what happens when the curator vanishes?

“Expression,” Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, 2013

94 One answer: Ask non-curators what they think. Let them make choices about art and artifact to display.

“Exquisite Things,” Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012

95 Write on the outside of cases and give people pens

“One Room,” RISD Museum, 2013

96 Give artists uncharted spaces to work in, and to present their own work.

Photos courtesy S. Hollis Mickey, RISD Museum

Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, 2011

97 Or, as an important recent book suggest… let go. Letting go means working with the community, working with your audiences in new ways.

Alternative Museum Organizational Chart

98 It might mean reorganizing the museum so that curators are part of a team responsible for visitor experience, not collections.

Theory of Change, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2015

99 It might mean moving beyond thinking about museums be only about education - and individual education - and think about what the museum does for the community.

To sum up… let’s think about rethinking the rules.

Rethinking the rules

100 First, the display rules:

Display rules

• Designed around looking (not other senses)

• Clear lines and divides between exhibit and visitors, narrator, audience and subject

• One story, beginning to end; neutral, unbiased, single voice, a simple straightforward narrative

• Focus on objects, respectfully treated

• Conveys authority

101 Some of the rules for exhibition; Model is an old-fashioned university lecture!

What would happen if we broke these rules?

Object rules

• What counts as an object is narrowly defined: “museum quality,” old, original condition, of interest to a curator’s scholarly interest

• Display objects in a respectful way

• Keep objects safe, forever, even if that means not using them

102

To what extent are curators thinking of the big picture of the museum, to what extent their own work? what structures shape collecting?

Curator Rules

• The curator is the expert

• The curator is an academic subject-matter specialist, not a generalist

• The curator is anonymous, the voice of the museum

• The curator is not part of the story

103 And finally: the curator rules? The traditional rule is that the curator is an expert, and a specialist - and that expertise is defined as academic, subject matter expertise. This assumption about the nature of expertise allows the curator to be not a person, not part of the story, but an anonymous voice of authority.

This last rule seems so central to museums - but broken now in every other medium. What would happen if we broke these rules?

• Let go. Share authority. “It’s not about you.”

• Put the audience first.

• Overcome bureaucracy.

• Make museums useful.

Breaking Rules

104 Some final thoughts on how we might break the rules. What if we put the audience first? If our collections and exhibits overcame the bureaucratic structures of the museum? If we first asked, as John Cotton Dana suggested, how might we be useful?

Thank you

George Scharf, Staircase of the old British Museum in Montagu House, 1845

105

steven lubar, "the curator rules," bissel lecture in the humanities, marymount university

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