Curators – The Season Of Their Discontent

Curators are not a happy lot these days. Indeed, they’re “the embodiment of demoralization, resentment, anxiety, stress, and alienation over what was happening in his or her museum.” There is a mounting chorus of voices “articulating this critical disconnect in art museums. The gap is not necessarily between curators and their directors—though in some institutions that exists as well. Mostly the conflict is between the dramatically changing role of the art museum and the mounting pressures imposed by those changes on the people who have traditionally been the custodians, students, and interpreters of the art objects inside their institutions.”