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A curator's job is highly unknown. In Spanish, the word for curator (curador) can also be translated as, literally, “healer”. Can you foresee all the misinterpretations and confusions this may lead to? Most people will be biased into thinking that a curator is a restorer. It kind of makes sense. I used to think this way. If there's an old, damaged object, we can say it is somehow sick, so a healer (curador) would come in very handy. But, as I later learned and as you know, a curator is not a restorer or a conservator. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the keeper of a museum or other collection”, coming from the latin curare, “to take care of”. On more practical basis, it could be taken as the person in charge of giving meaning to an exhibition in a museum.

But, who is this people? Who made the curator a curator? What institution has the power to appoint a person to be the one giving meaning to our museums? This are very worn

-outed theoretical questions that still arise when talking about this matters, and that probably will never come to an end.

Some museums are starting to come with what could be taken as metacuratorial processes. Let's see what's going on at the ever-museum-example, the Louvre. Nowadays, they offer a series of thematic trails. You can choose to

follow the A Lion Hunt or the The Da Vinci Code trails. While they might be presented as an inocent topic-tour developed by educators, what they really are is a curatorial script based on the public's needs and interests, skiping thematic rooms or expert-curated orders.

Even so, this approach still comes from the museum itself. Meanwhile, a global phenomena has been growing in our computers. Yes. The so called information highway. The web of networks. The goddamned Internet. With it's growth, experts are no longer needed. Why buy the Brittanica Encyclopedia when we have our own community built Wikipedia? The impact of the Internet on the experts' downfall can clearly be seen in the music industry. Anyone with Internet access can open a Blogger account and become a music critic. Many times, a way better and far more interesting music critic than the institution-appointed ones. So, farewell Rolling Stone Magazine, hello Club Fonograma.

Is there such a trend in museums? Sure. Publications like The New Yorker offer their readers podcasts about exhibits that you can take along with you in your iPod. So does Slate Magazine, going as far as subtitling their section The Commentary Museums Don't Want You To Hear. Emerging groups like Art Mobs are threatening to remix MoMA. And there you go: you pay your fee at the museum's entrance, plug your earbuds into your head, and start walking following a curatorial guideline that might be not only different, but straight opposite to the museum's curator idea.

This article was never intended to be a manifiesto to overturn curators. Is just a reminder to them. A warning sign. Are they listening to the public? Are they responding to the visitor's needs?

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Rocking at the Whitney Museum of American Art

What if you ask a Brooklyn lofi indie rock band to perform at an American art museum? What if you ask a bro like Ray Concepcion to come and capture the gig with his camera, doing only one long shot for each song?

Well, what happens is that you get a beautiful audiovisual document like this. Woods at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Rocking at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Mexico and its huge textbooks

A couple of years ago I visited the then brand new MUNE (Museo del Noreste) in the city of Monterrey, Northern Mexico. Stupidly enough, I didn't take any notes, but I'm pretty sure what I remember is accurate enough for making a point out of it.

The flamboyant, shiny and spoiled museum occupied a huge cube building adjacent to the Museo de Historia Mexicana, right in Monterrey's Macroplaza. I roamed from up to downstairs, just as the tour was designed, confusingly following the region's history starting from the present and going backwards intro preshispanic times, supposedly time traveling after a kangaroo rat, the museum's mascot. After one hour, I was not even half the way down, still on the fourth level, with my eyes hurting and trying to make a mental inventory of what I had seen... perhaps 10 multimedia stations, four objects and walls and walls and walls covered with text and pictures illustrating text. Hustling my step, I rapidly went through the halls of the rest of the levels, taking quick glances at those walls with letters and letters and letters... and no more than 10 objects.

As a young museum professional, perhaps I shouldn't be scandalized about not-so-conventional museographical projects. But, although I won't get into controversies like science centres being or not being museums, I do miss collections when visiting a museum.

From my perspective —that is, a Northern Mexico perspective — I can perceive a tendency on Mexican institutions to open as many museums as possible in the shortest time possible. Is as if the only vocation for restored buildings was to turn them into museums. Museums with no collections. Museums with text and text and text and letters and letters and letters and a picture. Literally, six storie high textbooks.

Now, according to the International Council of Museums, a museum is a ‟non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment”. When ICOM sanctions museums as institutions open to the public, I don't think about them having extended schedules or being government funded. More so, it refers to them as being spaces where the people pours its culture, via objects that represent something valuable for that people's society.

Where are our Mexican museums heading to? I visited a museum dedicated to mining. Text, text, text, three computers, a couple of scale models and one object, which was a facsimile of a silver bullion. Now take a look at this video. It sure looks like fun. No doubt it offers a very innovative perspective on a hard-learning human activity that most kids would find repulsive to approach. I bet is a powerful outreaching educational tool. But, is it really a museum?

Mexico and its huge textbooks

I DON’T WANT TO SEE THE MONA LISA, I JUST WANT TO HAVE MY PICTURE TAKEN WITH IT

The “no pictures” has to be the second most popular sign among museums, just behind “don’t touch”. On her very useful blog, Museum Two, Nina Simone lists five reasons why museums won’t allow you to take pictures in their exhibit rooms. First of all, there’s conservation. Yes, your camera flash will damage stuff in there. You don’t think so? Go on and leave a paper sheet under the sunlight for a day and see how it turns. Second reason is intellectual property. Museums don’t allways own the rights of the collections they host. Third comes security. Just as banks do, museums don’t want you to have a blueprint of their facilties so you won’t end up sneaking in at night to steal a Warhol. Finally, Nina mentions revenue streams and aesthetics of experiencie as the fourth and fifth reasons. The first and second reasons appear to be the only serious ones, and they could simply ask you to turn your flash off or mention which objects can or can not be photographed; but is clearly way more practical just to print a lot of “no pictures” signs and post them all over the place.

This rules come from long time ago. They come from radically different photographic times, when cameras actually had film in them. Just 12 years ago, taking a picture was a ritual, an event. Every shot mattered. Somebody not holding still or the flash not working when you clicked was a disaster.

Today things are not the same. Pretty much everybody carries a digital camera in their pockets, with full capacity to capture anything at any time and with almost endless oportunities to do so. Even my 4 year old daughter owns a digital camera since she was 2. And this is the scenario faced by museums now. A society armed with cameras.

And so... why are museums struggling against pictures? Conservation might be the only valid reason, but museum’s staff members could esasily be trained on how to turn flashes off. Intelectual property... not so sure. Why would somebody take a picture in a museum? To make profit selling copies of a painting? To put a historical object in a catalogue? Such means would imply a very specific kind of photo shoot, the kind that uses tripoids and light sets. The kind that would be obviouslly detectable by guards and staff members.

Visitors don’t want a catalogue picture. Visitors don’t care about portraits. Visitors are not interested in stealing from the museum. They are not even interested in the boring postcards for sale at the front desk. All they want is a snapshot of themselves. All they want is to remember they were once part of something culturally meaningful and to have proof of it.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken a step further, not only allowing visitors to take pictures but encouraging them to do so. Even more, they ask them to share the pics and use them in their It’s Time We Met marketing campaign.

The result? A museum taken by people. A place with real interaction between objects and visitors.

Aside from keeping their visitors from building this meaningful experiences, museums not allowing pictures are also missing a huge marketing impact. And I’m not talking about stealing the Metropolitan’s campaign off, but about the power of social media. Most of this pictures will end up posted on Facebook, Twitter and the likes, showing everybody else what a great time a visitor had at a certain museum.

So, museums, you heard me... let us take pictures. Let us continue snapshooting our lives.
Guso Macedo

*This article's title was taken from an idea presented by Dr. Luis Gerardo Morales during his conference "Museum's Narration, Context and Learning" at INTERCOM 2009.

I DON’T WANT TO SEE THE MONA LISA, I JUST WANT TO HAVE MY PICTURE TAKEN WITH IT