Curator

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Curator is Latin and means guardian or overseer

A curator of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., archive, gallery, library, museum or garden) is a person who cares for the institution's collections and their associated collections catalogs. The object of a curator's concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter alia artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections.

The role of the curator will encompass: collecting objects; making provision for the effective preservation, conservation, interpretation, documentation and cataloging, research and display of the collection; and to make them accessible to the public.

In the United Kingdom, the term is also applied to government employees who monitor the quality of contract archaeological work under PPG 16 and are considered to manage the cultural resource of a region.

In contemporary art, the curator is the person who organizes an exhibition. Thus, to curate means to arrange a collection to achieve a desired effect -- usually, this entails the attempt to find a theme, however tenuous, linking a disparate body of work. Recently, the freelance curator, who does not have affiliation with any particular gallery or museum, has come into vogue. Harald Szeemann of Switzerland is a good example of such a curator.

Today, as art institutions face an array of new challenges — management and financial to media and digital related — the role of the curator is being re-thought. One consequence of this has been the emergence of academic courses in contemporary art and curatorial practice (e.g., at the Goldsmiths College, UK, Royal College of Art, UK, Bard College, USA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA, Université de Rennes II, France, etc.). "Independent curators" can develop their own idiosyncratic methods for exhibition, be invited by museums and galleries to curate exhibitions in their spaces or operate in hybrid roles (publishing, collecting, installing, designing etc). "Tactical curating" is a term used by independent curator Roger McDonald (based in Tokyo with Arts Initiative Tokyo) to refer to the peculiar characteristics and advantages of operating independently.

[edit] Criticism

Some argue that when curators prevent others from capturing and reproducing digital representations of their art, they are failing to act as stewards of human cultural heritage, and preventing people who are not able to afford to travel to see the original collections from enjoying them. Cory Doctorow criticized the Neon Museum in Las Vegas [1] on these grounds. The Digital Michelangelo Project [2] has also been criticized for not releasing 3D data of the David sculpture.