Curator, your love’s on display

The aptest statement on museology was given to us by art historian Hubert Damisch: l’amour m’expose.1 1  - Hubert Damisch, “L’amour m’expose,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, No. 29 (fall 1989): 81-90. [The phrase may be literally translated as either “love exposes” or “love exhibits” me, just as the French term exposition may refer either to the art exhibition or to the physical sense of exposure. – Trans.] That was in 1989. I have often cited the phrase and still find it as relevant as it is necessary, twenty years later. Those few words will always do better, for me, than any attempt at defining the curator’s elusive role, especially in these times of “Hollywoodization” in the visual arts. For the difficulty comes from the fact that this maker of art exhibitions, who was longtime a museum curator and a specialized art historian, has, since the opening of the exhibition market and the invention of the term independent curator in the 1970s, taken a plethora of faces. As such, the professional development of museological functions in the last forty years, particularly in Quebec, was paradoxically and simultaneously accompanied by the erosion of its specialized expertise, first and foremost that of the museum curator and the independent curator.

We see as much in several art museums, where “in-house curators” are in the process of becoming, as Yves Michaud put it, “professionals of the profession,” with interchangeable skills. Here and there, generalist curators emerge who, replacing the specialists (or putting aside their own speciality), can set themselves the task of coordinating exhibitions of any type or content, without necessarily producing knowledge that contributes to the advancement of the discipline — an expression that stands on shaky ground, unfortunately, when we speak of pure research. Unfairly, the institution will not put such a curator in charge of the most important or most appealing projects, frequently preferring instead to invite star curators, not necessarily for their expertise, but for a change in perspective and to draw the media’s attention, and hence the public’s. The contributions of the art critic and philosopher are familiar to us. At their best, their forays in the curatorial domain can generate thought or discourse capable of situating and enriching one’s encounter with the works in the exhibition. One may also think of the writer, movie-maker, or even the visual artist, called upon as curators in order to propose a personalized mise-en-scène or unique theme concerning the artworks and their time. But now many museums show little compunction about offering the role to personalities of the most varied competencies, preferably from outside the specialized discourse, as long as they are celebrities, inspiring, charismatic, impassioned, and of course so very touched by art!