Saturday 23 January 2016

Curators.

This is a good read about Curators.

Taken from the above article.
"One thing that's bound to annoy any museum curator is other people abusing the word for what we do. In a world where department stores talk about "curating" their shoe selections or whatever, people think that curating just means choosing nice things. But this is only half of it. Our real job as museum curators is to look after artefacts from the past, yet also to be the repository of knowledge about them, to be expert, to have spent 10000 hours immersed in the subject. Curating isn't just a matter of taste. It involves building up real knowledge of the items in your care. As the world gets quicker, and shallower, and bite-sized, retaining our ability to take a deep dive into history is more and more important."

The term is often loosely used. And if you look at the above opinion by Lucy Worlsey, chief curator, Historic Royal Palaces, many of the art curators in Singapore don't fit the definition with really superficial knowledge of the shows they are asked to curate. 

Just like the term art collector. Whence one has one or two paintings of value on a wall, you are bestowed with the title art collector. The definition of collect is just to bring or gather things together so the word collector is correctly used. But there is more to it to earn the title of art collector, which along with collecting has to be an aficionado too. Or maybe we should use the term aficionado more?

My 2 Cents.

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