Curating

Ben Street argues that curating a show should be like making a mixtape. My experience hanging the Scarecrow show at Reed's Cooley Gallery, with it's various themes unfolding through works of art felt much like the days I patiently recorded tape-to-tape in an undoubtedly underappreciated effort to convey all sorts of things through other people's music.

It left me with a fresh understanding of how to treat each work with the respect it deserves, especially in the context of competing artworks, expectations, and exhibition spaces. One of the best books on art, Thomas Crow's The Intelligence of Art, argues convincingly that artworks can be understood through a careful analysis of their internal elements. How does this translate to a curated environment, how can a curator encourage viewers to look beyond the thematic emphasis?

It's something I struggled with while hanging Andy Warhol's polaroids, and something I still haven't resolved.