THE POWER OF THE CURATOR
In recent years, the directors of the Museum of Modern Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Brooklyn Museum, among others, have been accused of diminishing the power of their curators. But the Met has remained a bastion of curatorial authority, where curators, not board members or directors, take the lead in conceiving exhibitions based on sound scholarship. "I keep them in line but they keep me in line," De Montebello once said of the Met's 100-plus curators. Will his successor continue that approach?
De Montebello is "the beau ideal of curatorial leadership," said Elizabeth Easton, the director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership. In a news conference last week, De Montebello reasserted his priorities. "Art is first," he said. By contrast, "other institutions have embraced as a primary part of their mission the museum experience, in opposition to the experience of coming to look at a work of art."
De Montebello once referred to the Met as "a great ship that you don't turn around that easily." Maybe so, but things change fast. "If you'd said to people 15 years ago, 'The Guggenheim will become a kind of rental room for Eurotrash and that the Modern will become a museum that's unfriendly to curators,' everyone would have said, 'You're crazy,'" Perl said. Yet both those things have arguably come to pass. "The problem," he said, "is institutional history is not an assurance for the future."
RSS