Confessions of a Recalcitrant Curator: Or How to Re-Programme the Global Museum

Chapter abstract:
This chapter is a critical response to notions of a ‘post-taste’ museum where hierarchies of taste are said to be flattened and no longer relevant to understanding the dynamics of the global museum of today. In three principal sections, the chapter draws on the author’s years of curatorial practice both inside and outside of a major ‘global museum’ – Tate Britain – to assess the institution’s attempts to embrace the global in its curatorial and discursive programmes. The first section comments on the nature of the supposed ‘post-taste’ global moment through an analysis of an important art work by conceptual artist Richard Wentworth that anticipated many of the hollow claims about globalisation and taste that many museums have adopted since the 1990s. The second section reflects on the author’s practice at Tate Britain as head of the Cross Cultural Programme which attempted to come to grips with questions of globalisation and migration in British art. The final section is a selection of ‘mantras’ or inspirational ideas drawn from important artists and critics who have influenced the author’s approach to forging a more self-reflexive and critical approach to curatorial practice in a global museum.

About the book:
This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. It brings curators together with sociologists and art theorists and artists with design historians, art historians and cultural historians, with the common aim of developing rigorous and relevant ways to approach the practice of taste. The contributors to this book engage with the practice of taste as this relates to encounters with art, engagements with cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life in national and transnational contexts. While taking account of Bourdieu’s legacy, the book addresses the larger question of why it became important to seek out the social value conferred by taste and whether this form of value will persist in future.