In the unpredictable and often baffling way that hip, new meaning can glom onto even the stuffiest of words, “curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4 fireworks and light show for Macy’s. On its website, a strip club in New York promised a few years ago to “curate a night of Curious burlesque.” Self-help gurus suggest that by self-curating—decluttering your life—you can find inner peace.
To understand how “curating” came to acquire such star power, let’s take a quick trip through the showy side of American museum history. In the 19th century, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York offered visitors an experience that was literally spectacular. Barnum showcased “industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary,” and much more. His intention was to “make the Museum the town wonder,” and it worked because “my ‘puffing’ was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic.”
For much of the next century, museums settled into a more sedate and refined existence; during this time, curating was for the most part an amateur calling. But then came J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in the 1970s and ’80s. As historian Neil Harris argues in his book Capital Culture, Brown launched a “new age of museums.” He organized such blockbuster exhibitions as The Treasures of Tutankhamun and Treasure Houses of Britain; his combination of panache and show-biz smarts transformed the National Gallery into a place of wonder.
Brown’s orchestration of blockbuster exhibitions reinvented the contemporary museum experience—and profoundly transformed the workings of American museums. As museums stepped into a more prominent place on the public stage, the notion of “curation” took on a certain élan. “Museum studies” emerged in the academic world. Amateur putterers were left in the dust as curating came increasingly to be a matter for credentialed professionals.
In his new book Inside the Lost Museum, Steven Lubar traces curating’s transit to professionalism. Lubar began his career as a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; he later moved to Brown University, where he is a professor of American studies, spent a decade directing the Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and ran the university’s anthropology museum.
Lubar’s interest in writing this study grew out of his work at Brown and his research into the career of a sort of predecessor. In 1871, John Whipple Potter Jenks, a natural history professor, opened his own museum at the university. This was during the era in which academics launched a national mania for dinosaurs: Paleontologists led rival expeditions to discover fossils in the West, in a headline-grabbing competition known as the “Bone Wars.”
Jenks used his own vast collection of 50,000 taxidermied animals, ethnographic items, and “curiosities” to create his museum. But in the years after his 1894 death the university lost interest, and the museum was shuttered in 1915. Most of Jenks’s collections landed in the university dump in the 1940s.
Lubar was part of a group of museum-studies faculty members and students at Brown that became intrigued by Jenks’s work. They formed a “Jenks Society for Lost Museums” and curated an exhibition to examine what Jenks had accomplished. It had three parts. The first used a staged setting to depict how Jenks worked in his shop—tables were strewn with fossils and paperwork, and a taxidermy project was shown underway. The second part was an art installation in which 80 artists reimagined Jenks’s artifacts and “curiosities” and painted them a ghostly white. The final section was presented as a more traditional museum exhibit, with a display of about 100 objects that survived from the original Jenks museum.
“We used the story of one museum,” Lubar writes, “to consider the fundamental nature” of museums in general. Working on the project inspired Lubar to consider “how museums preserve objects, learn from them, and tell stories with them; and how visitors interact with and learn from exhibitions.” His book is organized in sections that reflect these themes, focusing on such essential curatorial tasks as gathering, preserving, and displaying collections. He concludes with an essay on “the usefulness of museums” today—how they help us understand past and present, and how they foster a sense of connection.
Exhaustive research frames Lubar’s entire study, and he broaches some of the most difficult issues facing museums today. One especially timely section deals with how collections are selected and how historical “significance” changes over time. The recent outcry over Confederate statuary exemplifies how historical interpretation and “purpose” change; over the last few decades, debates about diversity, representation, and “political correctness” have been a constant challenge for museums. As Lubar writes, “Quality, significance, and usefulness mean different things to different people, at different times.”
Lubar also offers illuminating chapters on key curatorial questions about museum life: Who decides what to collect? What are the stories objects tell? How do visitors encounter objects? What do objects “teach”? In some cases he hints at answers using tales from museum history, like the story of the Air and Space Museum’s controversial Enola Gay exhibit in the 1990s. Sometimes, though, he uses thought experiments and broad hypotheticals:
Lubar also discusses how attracting and engaging new audiences is a priority for museums today, as they devote much energy to “opening the fourth wall and allowing visitors into re-created spaces, to give them a more immersive experience”—sometimes using mockups and dummies, sometimes using imitated or refurbished items, sometimes using photographs and screens and digital trickery. And in addition to interactive media, performing arts have increasingly been introduced into the once-quiet halls of art museums. For example, the National Portrait Gallery, my former professional home, now has the Smithsonian’s first choreographer-in-residence. Dana Tai Soon Burgess’s troupe explores the American experience through dance; he says his choreography can “enliven” the gallery’s exhibitions.
Lubar’s highly accessible book sits comfortably on museum-studies shelves alongside such works as Stephen Weil’s Making Museums Matter, Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum, and Adrian George’s The Curator’s Handbook. And although Lubar’s book stays firmly within the academic bounds of museum-studies concerns, it could be of practical interest to people who participate in any organization, large or small, devoted to preserving or displaying art or artifacts.
Unfortunately, Lubar’s imagination is not attracted by the magic of curating: the dazzling combination of scholarship, storytelling, and “eye” that elevates a curator to greatness. Nor does he offer a hint about why curating has taken on its quirky recent expanded meaning. More’s the pity. The broadened, democratic use of the word “curating” seems in part to reflect our growing need to impose order and organization on the busy, buzzing abundance that surrounds us. It also suggests the ways that we are increasingly using social media to put ourselves on display, making ourselves into spectacles. Perhaps some future author writing about this strange, new kind of curation—of our world and ourselves—will find practical and ethical wisdom in Lubar’s fine examination of what curating has been.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
