Is quality only in the eye of the beholder?

Posted by Nancy Proctor on | February 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

With flight and hotel room in Michigan finally booked, my thoughts turn to the upcoming unconference sessions at THATCamp Great Lakes, and the opportunity to work with the inspiring campers there on some questions that have been driving my recent research.

I am especially interested right now in questions like “What is a Museum? Who is a Curator? In the age of social media.” Particularly in fine art contexts, we see a lot of tension between the expertise of the curatorial/museum voice vs. the ‘citizen curator’ and crowdsourced content. Although ostensibly an advocate for a ‘social media’ kind of curatorial practice, I have been fascinated to find that I’m not immune from this conflict: at times I find myself coming down, rather awkwardly, on the side of ‘quality’ and the expert’s authority. And every time, Chris Anderson’s statement from his keynote presentation at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference echoes in my head: “Quality is in the eye of the beholder.” I don’t disagree, but my heart sings when I read statements like Ted Forbes’, from the Dallas Museum of Art: “Our priority at the museum is the quality of the content we produce.” This is the kind of museum practice I want to be part of. After all, people come to museums in part because they want to see and hear from “the best” – don’t they?

But I hope striving after ‘best practice’ doesn’t have to lead to a new kind of elitism. At the moment my thinking about this is taking me down the direction of a deep semantics of the art experience: if art’s unique role is to give us a way of articulating and reading something that we cannot express or understand through any other medium, then I think the curatorial role in an art context takes on a very particular inflection: rather than shutting down meaning by limiting it to a discourse of “the best”, perhaps it can open up new ontologies for audiences, new modes of expression. This requires both a certain expertise and authority, and a strong dialectic relationship with the museum’s audiences. In order to realize the power of the art object and experience, art interpretation needs to be about more than filling in gaps (in knowledge, in language) – as is the focus of a museum discourse about quality and ‘truth’ – but also about opening up spaces in which new meanings – and new voices – can emerge.

Perhaps these insights are also applicable outside of the fine arts field? I’d like to hear what you, as well as the ThatCampers, think!

Comments

2 Responses to “Is quality *only* in the eye of the beholder?”

Ted Forbes
February 21st, 2010 @ 4:33 pm

Couldn’t agree with you more Nancy. I think if you do this right you won’t have any elitism. “Best” is a tough word because it is very subjective. For me – this means is it something the audience finds useful?

I think the key word you used was “interpretation”. While this could be viewed as “telling people what to think” I think the better interpretation doesn’t have to – nor should it.

I think at the very base level – all any of us want to do is to get visitors as excited about art as we are. If you’ve done that you’ve accomplished something. Getting to that is where all the work is.
Dennis Moser
March 7th, 2010 @ 12:23 am

Nancy,

Ted takes a great tack on this and I’m somewhat in agreement. (I’m not sure about the utilitarian aspect that he alludes to there…)

One problem is recognizing that all humans have a capacity to create; some realize that potential (and it MUST be seen in terms of potentialities) with great facility than others. As they do, there is often a change in the work produced. The word “quality” can be applied to recognizing the fact that the work has changed.

But people are reluctant to acknowledge that kind of difference for fear of “hurting feelings” or “losing face” or “diminishing their self-esteem” … which is pretty sad, really. Too often, the use of the word “quality” is a code-word of exclusion; it shouldn’t be.

We should all be striving to achieve “quality”, which is to say we should all be striving to achieve the best that we can, recognizing and celebrating the differences between us that make the rich variety possible.

Curatorial expertise is not to be trivialized …

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