The curator’s caretaker role in ancient Rome was multiple yet mostly administrative; starting from the Middle Ages and in the context of the Catholic Church, this role became more explicitly spiritual: the cure of the soul. In the Middle Ages, “curate” (as a noun) was a title given by bishops or other high clergy to another member of the clergy who was in charge of the spiritual well-being of a parish (the title still exists today). The curate’s tenure, permanent or temporary depending on the circumstances, was a period of training on curing the souls in the form of a shared ministry, which works in and through the larger collective of the church rather than as an individual endeavor. Indicatively, in a 1964 letter titled Letter to the New Curate, the Irish poet Conleth Ellis addressed their new local curate as someone for whom the community has “an awe of the powers of your hands and your voice”, someone who they look to as “the incarnation of His powers, a continuation of His work among men”, assuming that he is “uninterested in money and the good things of this world” (1964: 494). Implying asceticism, the curate’s role concerns the well-being of members of the ecclesiastical community, catering, preserving, and elevating their souls to a loftier, godly state. In this religious context, the curate inhabits a figure of spiritual power and prestige, with the tropes of asceticism and sacrifice potentially confirming his (and later hers) legitimacy: to better curate souls.
In the 20th century, with the birth of national and later modern art museums, “curator” became a title given to permanent museum staf5 in charge of the institution’s collections varying from art, national, and natural history to technological, heritage, and ethnographic exponents. In museum cultures, the curator is expected to rationalize and give meaning to a museum’s collection, that is to group, archive, and arrange objects under a common narrative (Horie, 1986). They are expected to be experts in the area related to the collection, an expertise which should result in the efective cataloguing and contextualizing of objects. Efectiveness here relates to how successfully a museum performs its prescribed public role, which is mainly to educate the public and enable knowledge which improves, in one way or another, human societies. The objects in these collections, as we discuss in more detail in the next section, are not random but selected for their capacity to stand as testimonies which index a specific age, space, or culture. This
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
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