2.3 Expertise, Value, and Materiality in Museum Spaces
Before continuing with the evolution of the profession of the curator after the 1960s and 1970s in art contexts, I shall make a short, yet crucial, detour to theorize curating vis-a-vis value production as this will prove helpful in the later chapters. The main idea I would like to examine is that the selection, display, and storytelling of items—all key aspects of curating—are gestures producing economic and symbolic value. We will return to this process of value creation throughout this book as it is particularly relevant to the contemporary curating economy. According to the material culture perspective, objects do not inhabit essences which position them in unambiguous ways within a social order (e.g., Kopytof, 2017; Hooper-Greenhill, 2020; Ssorin-Chaikov, 2020; Kompatsiaris and Chrysagis, 2020; Attfield, 2020). Instead, their meaning and positioning is to a larger or lesser degree contingent upon the interpretations, framing, and discourse enabled in and through social interaction. This is even more so for objects that are perceived as documents or testimonies of knowledge. The status of a document is not self-explanatory or given; from a discourse theory perspective, objects must be inserted within discourses in order to be considered as documents in the first place. For the media theorist Nico Carpentier, discourses are defined “as knowledge structures that consist out of systemically articulated signifiers that together form reasonably stable entities” (2022: 94), that is, ritualistically repetitive claims of knowledge which shape an interpretative stability regarding entities. To give an example, an advertising poster from the 19th century needs to be positioned within a relatively stable discourse, say of “early printing technologies” or “modern marketing methods”, so as to become a document. Once it is a document, it can further highlight or challenge this discourse. In this regard, the role of the curator in a museum is key as it carries the expert narratives through which an object is discursively constructed as worthy of appreciation rather than “mere stuf”. As experts are key in formulating knowledge—precisely because they occupy a higher plane of prestige within fields of knowledge— expert narratives ofer stability to particular discursive formations.
This does not mean that the materiality of objects is irrelevant; on the contrary, materiality provides a given platform with specific possibilities for interpretation, which in turn can dictate which interpretations can be more plausible, popular, or preferred and which can be ruled out. In other words, materiality is not a secondary aspect in shaping knowledge but “intimately knotted and entangled, and in permanent interaction with the discursive” (Carpentier, 2022: 96). Materiality then has a forensic value, so to say, as the given materiality of a displayed object allows it to be framed in a specific way so as to be convincing and thus authorize a regime of value, present or future. The advertising poster, to return to the example above, has certain irrefutable material properties, which can evidence a number of things, such as the technologies used for its production, the style employed by its creators in terms of shapes, colors, and forms or the very material it uses as its medium.
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Homo Curatorius