INTERVIEW Emily Pringle On Curatorial Research Emily Pringle is Head of Research, Tate, a member of the BAN Steering Group and author of Rethinking Research in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2019). Emily was to be keynote speaker at the cancelled BAN Conference ‘Research and the Museum Ecosystem’, scheduled to take place at National Museum Cardiff in March 2019. Here, Emily discusses with Martin Myrone some of the themes apparent in the recorded presentations, now made available with her introductory essay here. M. Something that strikes me about all the presentations is the emphasis on questions of curatorial agency – how curators operate within or against institutional settings. But then there is also a lot of emphasis on sharing, devolving or dissolving curatorial authority. What’s the place of individual curatorial agency in museums? And am I wrong to conflate agency and authority like this? I think there is still a vital need for curatorial expertise within museums and for curators to have agency to make best use of their expertise. I am more troubled by the idea of curatorial authority as it brings to my mind unhelpful notions of epistemological hierarchies and the problematics of the curator being the only person entitled to have an ‘authoritative’ interpretation of art. The recent drive to more collaborative working practices, wherein curatorial expertise sits alongside the expertise of others, both fellow museum practitioners and those external to the museum, in my view can open up opportunities to enrich the curation and interpretation of art without undermining curatorial agency. For me this shift away from a singular curatorial authority is indicative of the changing place of the art museum within contemporary society and culture; a shift towards the art museum as a site of collective knowledge creation rather than as a temple of art. Curators have a crucial role to play in enabling this transformation, but in doing so they have to relinquish the sense that they and only they can determine the meaning and value of art. It is interesting and a bit troubling to me that a number of the papers indicate that for curators to make this move they have to work in opposition to their institutions.
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