Guest Curating in the Museum: Lost in Translation?

As a social scientist who studies curatorial work, I am fascinated by the number of different ways in which curators of contemporary art categorize their peers, including the “very institutional curators” (who spend years conducting detailed art historical research prior to an exhibition), “socially engaged curators” (who promote artists working for social intervention), and “experimental curators” or “animators” (who push the limits of exhibition design). There are curators who see their role as only to help artists realize their ideas, and curators who more explicitly create the conceptual context in which an artist’s work is seen. In the press, curators of contemporary art describe their work in a variety of ways, including: archivist, librarian, impresario, publicist, publisher, director, producer, social worker, DJ, and anthropologist, to name only a few. What happens, then, when curators with very different aims, backgrounds, and styles of working are thrown together, as in the case of guest curating in the museum setting?

The role of the curator has changed dramatically in the past thirty years. The museum, in contrast, is wedded to important historical beliefs about the role of the state in institutionalizing cultural heritage in perpetuity. There are, thus, enduring professional divisions between museum curators interested in the “objective” presentation of art historical knowledge, and guest curators who see their role as pushing the limits of display, interpretation, and exhibition design. This essay will discuss the tensions experienced by guest curators working in the museum setting, and argue that the consequences of these tensions are likely to be felt most deeply by museum audiences who may be left out of curatorial meaning-making entirely. But first, I will present a very brief history of curating to understand how the relationship between host and guest has evolved.