Curators have to embrace digital/social media. If it is a curators job to interpret material culture to engage different audiences then it should be a requirement of the job to be skilled in all the different media used for this interpretation.

Sure, you can hand anything labelled ‘social media’ over to that other department. But all of a sudden you have a marketing/web person intimately engaging an online audience with curatorial content. I think this is where we sometimes fail at ‘engaging’ audiences. If you love 20th century architecture and see a museum tweet about it, is it more engaging to chat on twitter with a museum social media officer? or with the expert in the content? (no offence to social media officers).

Obviously curators need to learn new skills to engage in this way,but i guarantee you marketing professionals and web technologists have had to spend a great deal of time time adopting new practices in the last ten years.

I hear “i dont have time” and think it’s a cop out, i sometimes hear “i’m too old to learn” which is terribly ageist (my grandmother taught herself to swim at 88 and at 95 last year won gold at the World Masters swimming comp, my mother got a science degree at 62). You cant hide in fear of the technology, you have to embrace it and move forward.

It is inevitable that digital skills be adopted by curators. The rise of the born digital object will make it so.

If anything is more telling, i am betting that the majority of people reading this will look at this statement “it’s a curators job to interpret material culture to engage different audiences”. and not think of published journal articles, exhibitions, and guided tours, but associate it with Flickr groups, twitter projects, and blog posts.

Holding onto soemthign because you have it isnt a good enough reason. Taking something on because you are a curator is an even more implorable reason than not getting rid of it afterwards.

Your point about selling to backfill finances is sound, yet (and as is said in the book several times, by several people), if you are willing to make difficult choices with public money (direct and indirect) in the first place (aquiring) then be prepared to make just the same sorts of decisions when it comes to review and rationalisation (disposals).

If curators dont/wont/cant step up to the mark and do the job they are paid for, then someone else will, and most likely that will be someone who measures in £, and not cultural and historical value/significance.

Hope that helps

Peter

There is so much to unpack in that exchange (and thanks for you response) . Museums must guard against losing sight of their stated mission. This is where they get into trouble. Collections should NEVER be used in an attempt to sort out financial troubles. You can only divest works that are well represented in the collection and then only to fill in a weakness.

NEVER divest for reasons of fashion or whim and never based on a curators personality. – this can be especially tricky in the case of the Contemporary collection/museum; they should be engaged locally/currently.