Consciousness and Curation

In this week’s blog post I am going to explore art history through a philosophical perspective. More specifically, I want to apply concepts from studies of injustice to examine what drives people, in particular curators, to value and study artifacts of the past. Our in-class seminar delved into the acquisitionary practices of museums such as the Getty and how such institutions motivate and create demand from the shadowy underground world of forgeries and the illegal art trade. As a philosophy student, I perceived many of the questions posed as questions more of logical morality with applications in law than anything else: how do we ascribe ownership of artifacts to countries? What about artifacts that were removed generations ago? If they were stolen or looted, does that change anything? How do we go about evaluating authenticity of artifacts? How thoroughly do we evaluate them? Do we place more value on preserving artifacts, their find-spots, or displaying them to a broader audience?

What I found most interesting was the role of curators and their own personal motivations for studying, acquiring, and displaying artifacts. The idea that Western classicists feel something akin to ownership towards the objects they study and acquire is revealing of the societally-constructed role that curators hold in both the art world and the real world.  Personal anecdotes and writings of many curators, both modern and older, use fascinating emotional descriptions of newly-acquired or favorite artifacts. Curating for high-profile and wealthy museums combines power and money, effectively creating the deep connection that borders on ownership that many curators seem to display. However, at the center of the motivational factors lies a passion for the study of art and history, revealed in the pathos of curators describing artifacts they feel connections with. What inspires this more sentimental drive?

I believe it lies within a love of the very cultures of the past that curators and other such professionals dedicate their lives and careers to. Understanding the past through a society’s artifacts is our best and only option in some cases. Because physical objects can be so limiting in what they conclusively tell us, I suspect that curators subconsciously utilize other ways of connecting with both the artifact and its past to deepen their own academic relationship with it. This requires a kind of embodied engagement similar to a concept called third-order change in the field of epistemology, specifically as it is manifested within studies of oppression. Third-order changes are used to address contributory injustices, which are willful ignorance that maintain and utilize structural prejudices and their resulting prejudiced resources. A third-order change, colloquially understood as a practice of “world-traveling,” “requires perceivers to be aware of a range of differing sets of hermeneutical resources in order to be capable of shifting resources appropriately.” (Dotson, 2012) Described as almost a mystical connection with another culture that allows one to simultaneously understand and appreciate genuine cultural differences of others, it is very difficult to do — some argue that it is actually unattainable. The innate, indescribable need of curators and other to connect with ancient cultures on a deeper, “mystic” level that is nearly unattainable in order to totally connect with that society’s social collective resources can be best understood by borrowing these concepts from epistemology. This intersection of epistemology and injustices with modern wrongs (aka a lack of understanding or knowledge) to ancient objects effectively marginalizes original owners of artifacts owing to their static location in history. I think that curators use their own form of third-order changes on a personal level to overcome the static nature of histories and cultures of objects of the past that are essentially a form of contributory injustices.

References:

Dotson, Kristie. “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, 2012, p. 24., doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.33.1.0024.