[Note: Article originally appeared in dezeen magazine.]
At the 2013 AAO Conference, Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation and co-chair of the AAO Exhibitions Network, examined how many architectural exhibitions today strive to push the boundaries of traditional curation. This resonates with what Kieran Long, curator of design, architecture, and digital at the V&A, recently proposed in his "95 Theses for Contemporary Curation," which includes statements such as "Museums must make a special space for the public’s authority." The following is a brief excerpt from the Dezeen Magazine op ed:
Every morning, on the way to my office, I pass a sign that reads: “Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the building is always telling you to do something. The didactic, Victorian and Edwardian decoration asks you to pay attention to nature, to design and manufacture, to the provenance of objects, even where your food comes from. But this particular sign is deeply serious in its upper-case, gilded typeface. It can be seen only by V&A staff, and most often by the people who empty the bins in the service road at the back of the museum.
As a motivational slogan, it's espresso-strength, but it also betrays an emphasis at the V&A on the handmade, the artisanal and the one-off that design institutions, the media and designers themselves share. An object that an artist's or craftsperson's hand has touched has far more chance of making it into the V&A's collection than something mass-produced or anonymous.
In our China gallery, for very good institutional reasons, there are no contemporary, mass-produced objects. The twenty-first century is represented by artisanal glass and works of conceptual furniture design: the museum is more or less silent on the era of extraordinary Chinese manufacturing we are living through. Dezeen has a similar emphasis: while the site is catholic in its tastes, the anonymous, the mass-produced and the semi-designed are suppressed in favour of the work of a fairly coherent group of designers.
There are all sorts of pretty reasonable explanations for this. The most banal is, of course, that star designers are click bait: celebrity matters, especially in the media. On the other hand, some might argue that designers' work is simply better than the anonymous manufactured stuff that surrounds us. It's easier to love the milled aluminium monocoque of Jonathan Ive's Macbook than the awkward black plastic housing of a traffic light.
The emphasis on the authored leads to serious imbalances in the way we see design in the world. In future months, I will use this column to try to broaden the conversation about what design is, to try to move beyond a myopic interest in what designers and architects do, toward understanding what their work tells us about the world we live in. The others writing here (Sam, Alexandra, Justin and Dan) are all much better at this than me: I'm looking forward to reading their work.
But to begin, I want to share with you some thinking I've been doing about what a museum is for in the twenty-first century. Below are “95 Theses” about how museums might think about contemporary practice, offered in a spirit of generosity and for debate.
View the full article at the link below.