A Curatocracy: Who and What is a V&A curator?

Abstract

In 1989 at the opening of the contemporary Design Museum in London, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, encapsulated an attitude to museum culture that was to revolutionize the future of such institutions in the UK. ‘I call it an Exhibition Centre and not a museum—a museum is something that is really rather dead.’ Some months before, the Victoria & Albert Museum had experienced a ‘management revolution’ which became the focus for polarized debates about its meaning and the role of curators’: as one interviewee put it, ‘by separating knowledge, care of what the objects were from physical care of the objects, they were in effect planning to destroy the curatorial profession as I understand it’. The battle struck at the heart of museum expertise that involved ‘developing a type of scholarship […] people outside such a museum as the V&A had no opportunity of developing’. For curators the Museum is both a milieu as well as a lieu de mémoire as defined by Pierre Nora, contrasting an ‘organic’ community of memory with the constructed ‘histories’ of modernity. As an institution that emerged during the ascendancy of 19th century British imperialism and manufacturing, this legacy is both sustained and reinterpreted within the Museum which proclaims itself ‘the world's greatest museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity.’ Although the events of ’89 seemed to mark a watershed, curators’ narratives are evidence of the enduring power of their milieu embedded in a structural hierarchy and an ideology of exemplary art and design set in place in the mid-19th century.

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