A Fox and a Hedgehog Walk into a Museum

Educators are foxes, curators are hedgehogs

If you have ever worked in an art museum you will probably know that one of the perennially contentious relationships there, often worthy of a low-grade soap opera drama, is the one between its curators and its educators.

Educators are for accessibility; curators are for excellence. Curators hate when educators “dumb down” the message of their exhibitions; educators see curators as elitist. Educators see themselves as the liberals and see the curators as the conservatives; curators don’t spend much time thinking about educators but instead compete with their curatorial peers in other institutions. Educators have second city complex; the curators’ blind spots primarily stem from existing in the provincialism of the center. Educators believe that everyone is an artist; curators instead know that museums make no sense without a criteria about what is worthy of being exhibited.  

I am not a believer in the use of reductive formulas to understand the world ( of the “men are from Mars; women are from Venus” sort). However, it might be helpful to make an exception and use a playful comparison here in order to better understand  this problem.

The reason why the curator/educator dichotomy exists, and the reason why neither can be entirely dispensed with, is because curators and educators offer two complementary forms of artistic knowledge, best exemplified by the ancient Greek adage formulated by Antilochus: ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. If we were to apply that analogy, it becomes clear that educators are foxes and curators are hedgehogs.

Why is that? Two reasons: one has to do with their professional development and the other is the institutional needs that each need to meet.

Starting with curators: curatorial practice is primarily nurtured by art history. Most of the top-tier modern art curators come from graduate and doctoral art history programs (contemporary curators often share the same background but tend to have a more diversified education, including graduating from university curatorial programs). Even when a curator does not come from that background, curatorial culture in museums is largely influenced by the academic discourse and it thus become necessary for them to engage with it and it is the way by which a curatorial practice is validated.

Museum art educators generally have very different backgrounds. Some of them are practicing artists (as was my case); others do come from art history but also from areas as diverse as psychology, early childhood learning and community activism. The smaller portion have a formal background in museum education (out of which art interpretation is only a small sub-field). The specialty of the art educator can be best described with something that the American educator Myles Horton once said: “my expertise is in knowing not to be an expert.” What this means is that the educator, as a fox, needs to base their efforts in ensuring that the proper structures of learning are placed and effectively put into motion. In practical terms of art museum education, this also means that while the art educator needs to know and deliver art-related content, their larger role is being a specialist in tailoring forms of production of knowledge for specific audiences taking into consideration the ways by which they learn (“we are audience scholars”, a colleague once quipped in a conversation). This is sometimes conveyed by the term “generalist”.

As to the institutional function of the educator, aside from being a generalist, they aim at inclusion, and their skills and training are geared to ensure that everyone, regardless of their age, background, intellect or ability, will meaningfully be able to engage with art.

The curator, in contrast and in true hedgehog tradition, is pushed by the field  to specialize in a particular art practice or period. There are curators who specialize in late 19th Century European art, or in Dada, or in performance art, or in Surrealist film, or in contemporary painting, etcetera. The gravitational pull created by specialization is largely unavoidable, and it is difficult to produce meaningful work in the field if one is not up to date with the current debates in that particular area. At the highest level, you can’t produce, say, a major and consequential historical exhibition of a given artist or topic if you have not read the work of the top 10 or so scholars in the world  who have published books or articles on that topic, and as curator you would need to be capable to properly represent, examine and hopefully contribute to the set of concerns and ideas that those top scholars have put forth in the past. And because the curator’s job is to produce public exhibitions, these are heavily scrutinized and judged by that particular community of specialists (something that keeps most curators on their toes).

Given this landscape, the hedgehog/specialized curator  religiously delves into their specialty, and the fox generalist educator needs to work with the product of the hedgehog to amplify it.  And here is where, inevitably, the aims, needs and purposes of both collide.

In contention mostly are questions around how one side might get in the way of the other as they try to accomplish their mission. The curator recoils at the vulgarization of their message. In an extreme case of this, one curator once accused my colleagues of “raping” the exhibition labels. In other, actually justified cases, working as an independent artist with contemporary curators to develop a project of mine, I have had to negotiate with some education departments who are mired in 18th century methodologies trying to teach Conceptual art as if it were Impressionism.

The generally self-effacing educator, in turn, is critical of  the curator’s desire for wide visibility but  who in practice appears to dismiss the general public. From this point of view, education is less of a  public service goal and more of a PR means for a self-serving end.  This is what educators mean when they say that curators treat them as a service department.

More than hedgehogs and foxes, one could picture cats and dogs. But it is in essence that incompatible vision of knowledge, and the employment of their unique skills that produce that vision, that find themselves at odds with each other.

Isaiah Berlin, in “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, his classic essay on this topic by way of discussing Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, writes:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel —a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance— and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or artistic principle.

In the best of all worlds, these complementary types of knowledge can, and often do work, in concert. It is perhaps not too different, to use yet another analogy, to the human brain. Much has been written on how the brain is dependent of the integrative performance of its two hemispheres. Most notably this relationship was explored in 2009 in The Master and His Emissary, a monumental work of cultural theory and psychiatry by the author Ian McGilchrist. Described in the most basic way, McGilchrist studies the biological and philosophical implications of the fact that the left hemisphere focuses on details while the right focuses on the big picture. Without the left hemisphere we would be incapable to do anything in practical terms; without the right hemisphere we would have no idea what we are doing. For him, this duality is a metaphor of something larger and some kind of indicator of the cultural opposition between the specialist and the intuitive thinker. In a way we could say the left lobe is our hedgehog and our right side is our fox.  But the key point is that it is the complementarity of them together which gives us meaning; only with them together we can truly be and function as ourselves.

The problem is that this complementary equation is often unbalanced due to pre-established institutional hierarchies. More importantly, this unbalance results in a status quo that is unsatisfactory and ultimately intellectually stagnant; a landscape where those who can provide meaningful content get lost in the weeds, and those who can offer the big picture are instead chained to those weeds.

To be clear, am not here to condemn one side nor the other.  I have worked in museums long enough to encounter the full range of richness and talent of both the curatorial and education disciplines. And again, I am working with imperfect metaphors:  I have met foxlike curators and hedgehog-like educators; I have been both rewarded and exasperated, repeatedly, by their innumerable quirks and flaws. Both curators and educators are human.  But  I believe both sets of expertise are distinct from one another, and not only valuable but vital. It is their coordination and the hierarchy where they are placed that results in unsatisfactory results.

What can help is  more honest communication and a recognition of the inherent flaws of common philosophical dogmas and practices within both disciplines. In the case of educators, for instance, preaching that everyone is an artist becomes awkward when you later have to quietly acknowledge that not everyone in the world should receive a mid-career retrospective.  In the case of curators, the cult of connoisseurship often devolves into missing the forest for the trees.

One day someone might write a novel about an art museum presented in the fashion of Orwell’s Animal Farm where its various characters ( in this case, hedgehogs and foxes) at some point realize that they all live inside a beautiful but misleading NEA grant narrative; one where the world is a harmoniously conceived, but ultimately unrealistic, collaborative project with a joint sense of purpose. And that realization might lead to the recognition of one another and the good things they can do together.

But until art changes them, we will continue having hedgehogs and foxes, quietly complaining about each other from their respective cubicles.

[with thanks to Sheetal Prajapati and Creative Capital for inspiring this week’s topic].