Autocorrect

The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs

- Rachel Wetzler

Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently framed the curator’s central dilemma in terms of the problem of storage: at any given moment, only a tiny fraction of a museum’s collection can be displayed, leaving the vast majority of its holdings to languish unseen in warehouses and vaults. At the same time, even as the storage rooms threaten to overflow, the imperative to collect persists; we no longer conceive of the museum as a repository of unquestioned masterpieces but as a living organism, open to debate and contestation, preserving the past and interpreting it according to the priorities of the present. A great many works find a more or less permanent home in the bowels of storage for good reason: ultimately, some stuff just doesn’t age well. But shifts in taste and priorities go both ways, as artists whom one generation thought weird, provincial, or minor can be revelatory for another. As Temkin writes in a 2010 Artforum essay, “We cannot afford to allow the displays in the so-called permanent collection galleries of painting and sculpture to be static, precisely because of what awaits us in storage.”