Recently, I have been increasingly interested in authorship through curation, which I think is something that is addressed in both articles. The role of the curator is an important point of discussion in both Kreps’s Curatorship as Social Practice and Macalik’s The Museum as Discursive Space.

In the second reading by Macalik, there is also an introduction of the museum visitor as the museum “user.” I think this is a positive evolution from curation as social practice, because it allows for people to really think about what the curator has done as work, just as a piece of art can be critiqued and be a source of discourse. Relating back to authorship-through-curatorship, I think that the role of the curator is really highlighted by Macalik.

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Ai Weiwei: The Perfect Asian Artist for Lazy Western Curators

“Mysteriously, the Chinese authorities failed to bow to pressure from the staff of MoMA, Norman Rosenthal and the Serpentine Gallery team dancing in the style of a jaunty horse-rider. “

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One big negative part of curatorship as social practice is highlighted by Kreps: “In Western museum culture, objects are stripped of their social attributes through decontextualization, a process by which objects are detached from some social whole and given new meanings as they are recontextualized within the culture of the museum.” One interesting criticism I had been reading involved the fetishization, and a kind of new-Orientalism, surrounding Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei, a famous Chinese dissident and artist, has become a sort of go-to artist for Western curators, almost to a point of removing Ai Weiwei’s meaning behind his work, and ascribing new, Western contexts. Most recently, I remember seeing a sort of retrospective of Ai Weiwei at the Brooklyn Museum, and there did seem to be a lot of removed contexts.

When curation becomes a social practice, the practices and implications of the curated exhibitions should be discussed. It becomes a “pedagogical opportunity,” in which the “users” of the museums can also engage in “negotiation and debate, polarize and politicize…”

Another interesting example is “The Enemy,” not as just a piece that created a kind of actual discursive space, but also thinking about motivations and work of the curator that brought “The Enemy” to the MIT Museum. That exhibition is refreshing– it combines a new and trending technology, with a uniquely MIT-esque artistic project, and centers immensely on the “user,” to encourage discourse not only about the medium, but also the content.