Last year’s
Annual Meeting was the first I attended.
It was an amazing spectacle that was nearly too much to take in. The 2013 Annual Meeting was different. This year I felt an undeniable sense that I
re-dedicated myself to art history and a whole slew of professional standards
that sometimes seem ancillary even though they are the forces that drive nearly
all of my decision-making on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps I felt this because I spent a fair
amount of time preparing for a Pecha Kucha presentation that made me analyze my
relation to museums and the history of art in a broad sense. Delivering my presentation gave me an
unexpectedly strong sense of ownership in the AAMC and curating as a
profession. I believe this experience is
at the heart of the AAMC’s mission and the reason we share our experiences and
research.
The panels
on Museums & Civic Responsibility,
Innovative Conservation, and Participation,
Engagement & the Curator all dealt, to some degree, with the profound
challenges of collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting art in the name of the
public trust while still fulfilling our profession’s high academic standards,
standards that often seem to alienate the aforementioned public. There does not appear to be a singular
approach that will bridge this gap. What
became apparent to me as I tried to articulate an answer to this quandary for
the sake of a blog entry was this; the answer starts with curators and then
other museum professionals. It is the
human element in our interpretations and how we articulate them that will make
our institutions relevant both civically and academically. If both of these goals are taken into account
when a project is in its gestational period, I think both will be more easily
attained. This is more or less the tact
Holland Cotter urged us to take in his Keynote Address, and I agree with
him.
Thank you to all presenters for sharing your
work with us and giving us all a great deal to discuss.
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