Curatorial Expertise

In a few of our previous weeks’ Commentary posts, I took sides with positions held by Drucker and Bodenhamer that public scholarship ought to provide for audience agency, in a consciously interactive or postmodern form of scholarship. This struck me as a useful innovation in DH. But I want to try to play devil’s advocate here a bit, now, and argue against the user-driven museum experiences observed in Macalik et al. The “Discursive Space” assumes (in a postmodern vein) that visitors’ interpretations may be just as valid or useful as the work of curatorial experts. I’m skeptical that visitors enter museums with the expectation that “they want their own identities and interests to be acknowledged” (3); and even if they do, I’m skeptical of the notion that this should be a curator’s priority. In this particular climate of politics, culture, and information, it seems risky to undermine expertise any more than we already have. We can certainly think about museological practices critically and thoughfully, as Kreps suggests, but I don’t know that we must therefore deconstruct or relativize the whole enterprise. To be fair, excessive spectacle or excessive guidance that infantilize the visitor are certainly not productive; but arrangements and narratives can still fall under the purview of the museum rather than bending to the promise of interactivity.

A case study to consider might be the Collector’s Room in an art museum. The Harvard Art Museum devotes entire wings to particular collections and collectors (a common practice at university museums, which get interior name-labels in line with university buildings), but one sees this practice world-famous museums like the Orsay as well. As a museum user, one might rebel against this kind of room (as I have, I admit) for several reasons: the display seems object- rather than context-oriented (see Kreps), user-experienced apparently has no power against donor-demands, etc. But the collection room provides a different kind of experience than the chronological or thematic rules that might be more user-friendly: a visitor in such a room experiences two levels of artistic appreciation and discernment, the collector’s and the museum’s. The personal relationship with the objects is not the user’s own, but he/she can perhaps learn to identify with the expertise of the original users who put this assembly together.

On the subject of personal responses to art museums in particular, I’ll finish by linking a YouTube video that’s been kicking around the Internet this week: John Hughes’s director’s commentary on the Art Institute of Chicago montage in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p89gBjHB2Gs) Here we see users forced to adapt to the curation (even combatively, even “discursively”), but Hughes builds a resonance between artwork and visitor nevertheless.

Enter text in Markdown. Use the toolbar above, or click the ? button for formatting help.