Interview with Rajeev, part 3 of 5.

After his experience in working with auction houses, Rajeev now works as an assistant curator here at the Arab Museum of Modern Art. For today’s blog, I’m posting his thoughts on working at a museum:

The museum world is something else entirely. When the economy is a mess, the museum is a very safe place to be. It’s not a profit institution so there’s no drive to make money and your job is not at risk you just have to be an expert or a scholar and be passionate about art and not worry about selling that object.

The curator at a museum is the one who has to put together the message or the idea behind the exhibition. The curator looks at the collection of the museum and thinks, what story can we tell with this and how do we present that. So it’s something very conceptual where it’s coming up with the idea, just sitting down and doing the research to then the hard brass tasks of physically putting the exhibiting together. The logistics of shipping the artwork, designing the space, what kind of pamphlets are we going to give out, what’s the audio tour going to sound like, publishing the catalogue, so the very physical things as well.

A huge problem that the museum world is facing is almost losing its authority as an academic institution and becoming more of like an amusement park. Museums used to be the place where they were the highest authority, a pool of academics and scholars and they researched everything and was very much like a temple. Now it’s devolving into this very fun family amusement center and it’s more about the cool café, the interactive stuff that it does, and all these other outside programming which didn’t use to be a part of the museum. But now it’s so competitive and such big money that if you have those things you’re going to have revenue from ticket sales, which before wasn’t the case, but now that’s a huge way for them to get funds.