The curator's role and issues of conservation Tanya Barson, Curator It’s certainly something which I think that, increasingly, the amount of knowledge a curator has to have about conservation problems is greater and greater because the spectrum of materials that the artists are using is greater; the potential issues and problems or questions about how a work of art operates or is displayed or can be preserved or whether or not it is intended to be preserved – whether there is an inbuilt ephemeral quality to works that the artist is comfortable with – but which the museum, the institution, may not be – but the curator is the conduit between those two people. Then you have to have a certain level of knowledge and consciousness of the issues around in conservation, although the expertise perhaps lies with the conservators – one nevertheless has to learn as much as possible about how those problems might impact on the curator’s role and that dialogue between the artist and the institution and how their work is going to be seen in future – I think that’s very important. It’s becoming increasingly complex and increasingly challenging. |