Museum and the role of curators

What is the role of the curator in the contemporary art world? Often working behind the scenes in an opaque job, curators actually greatly influence the art we see in galleries and museums, and, as a result, help determine which art critics write about.

Today, curating as a profession means at least four things — first, it means to preserve, in the sense of safeguarding the heritage of art. It means to be the selector of new work. It means to connect to art history. And it means displaying or arranging the work.

As such, curators are involved in nearly all facets of a museum’s functions, such as preservation, communication, and study.

Curators also play a key role in the acquisition and selection process of institutions, deciding on how to allocate budgets and deciding which works are displayed.

Finally, curators decide how works are hung in galleries and how the viewing public experiences the exhibition, by researching how to show artworks in art historically coherent and entertaining way.

In today’s market-driven contemporary art environment, curators retain the important task of highlighting art’s noncommercial dimension.

Curators validate some kind of intellectual content because art, no matter which crazy value it can demand, is still needed by society.

The dual capacity of acting as a tastemaker and validator has resulted in a small group of prominent “star curators” gaining influential positions in the contemporary art environment, where they can make or break an artist’s career.

However, the role of the curator is changing, and there are many factors that have influenced this change in recent years – an emphasis on education in museums and the arts, advances in technology, racial demographic changes, the coming-of-age of the millennial generation – to name a few.

Today’s curator is more like a television producer than an academic scholar – they need to capture the attention of the audience through entertainment and engagement.

While being knowledgeable of the subject matter is important for the integrity of the arts, it’s only one slice of the pie for today’s curators.

Therefore, the 21st century curator will be “called upon not only to select and organize arts programs, but to diagnose need in their communities, seek out new and unusual settings for their work, forge partnerships with a wide array of disparate stakeholders, and, in some cases, cede a certain amount of artistic control in order to gain broader impact.

• Adeleke is of the National Museum of Unity, Ibadan.

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