Museum curators have certain ways of doing things, certain rules they follow. It’s important to know what these rules are – and also to realize that they can be broken.

These are notes from my talk to Catherine Whalen and Sarah Carter’s “Curatorial Practice as Experiment” course at Bard Graduate School. Catherine asked that I talk about creative curation, to inspire students in the class working on an exhibition project.

The assignment got me thinking: what’s creativity? Some part of creativity is breaking with tradition, breaking the accepted rules.

And that led me to: what are those rules? What do we take for granted when we curate exhibitions? What do we take for granted when we collect for museums? What do traditional curators do?

You need to know the rules before you can break them…

And so I tried to sketch out those rules, and offered some thoughts on where they came from. I tried, to use the academic phrase, to denaturalize them. They’re not natural laws: they are customs we have accepted.

Some of these rules are good. Some I think we should do away with. But in every case, we should not just take them for granted. How might we improve the work of museums if we’re willing to break the rules?

Here’s my talk: use the gear button at the bottom to view the presenter notes. I’ve also included, below the slide show, a printout that might be easier to use.