Art Conducting and Conduct

(Non-musical) notes on curatorial leadership.

Leopold Stokowski in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940)

Recently, I  have been drawing a lot of parallels between visual art and classical music as I think one world can help us understand the other. Let’s take, for instance, the subject of autocratic orchestra conductors.

 The 20th century has a gallery of conducting personalities who were famous not only for their artistry, but also for their authoritarian behavior: Fritz Reiner, who conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is often described as an abusive autocratic conductor whose behavior bordered on sadism. Arturo Toscanini was feared for his incredibly violent outbursts against his orchestra, sometimes outright screaming at them as he did in this rehearsal:  “NO! NO! NO! Vergogna!! Porcheria!!". And Leopold Stokowski, conducting Barber’s Adagio, telling the strings: “you are playing like mices!!” (sic).  One of my personal favorites, which I sometimes revisit with guilty morbid pleasure, is a clip of the behind-the-scenes documentary of the 1985 recording of West Side Story, where an exhausted Leonard Bernstein berates a stressed-out José Carreras during their recording of “María”, culminating in a moment where Bernstein explodes at his staff for not marking his instructions in the orchestra’s parts: “ 4 o’clock in the fucking morning I was up doing this! Why doesn’t someone deliver these messages?” My uncle, the cellist Guillermo Helguera, had no love lost for the composer and conductor Carlos Chávez, under whose direction he worked. Chávez was a towering figure in 20th century music, a major artist and impresario who introduced many modern orchestral works to Mexico and built the world-class Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. But his ways, by all accounts, were brutal and dictatorial. My uncle did not respect his aesthetics either. “He treated us in the cello section as if we were a panzer tank battalion”, he said once. At a meeting with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra years ago, while we were planning an education program in collaboration with the museum I worked at, the staff admonished us that every time we referenced the orchestra’s conductor (Daniel Barenboim at the time), we were required to use the suffix “Maestro”.

Some believe that  the era of the conductor as dictator is over. A case in point that might exemplify how much things have changed was the spectacular downfall of the late conductor James Levine, whose career once at the very top of his field ended ignominiously due to accusations of sexual harassment.  Many of these individuals sought to excuse their behavior by implying that workplace culture had changed on them and that they were learning to keep up with the times.

But has culture really changed? Progress has not been nearly enough. As we consider the arts in general, and particularly the art world, I have always argued that we are a particular species that is deeply committed to experimentation and progressive cultural politics, and yet in our actual social and institutional behavior are deeply cautious and conservative, particularly as we balance our artistic ideals with the economic and political realities of that undergird the system. One of those areas that has not changed quick enough is the equivalent of orchestra conducting:  curatorial management.

I am deeply respectful of the curatorial profession and admire those who undertake it. I have had the privilege to meet and work with some of the most brilliant and generous curators,  and also involve them in countless symposia, lectures and panel discussions. I have happened to be an observer, collaborator and active participant of every step, at every level, of the curatorial process for two dozen years in many museums and places all over the world; whether as a fly on the wall or as active interlocutor, I have witnessed the incredible challenges and difficulties that curators often face. I have also worked with curators who, partially or entirely, lacked the positive qualities I have previously described, and, their curatorial talents notwithstanding, woefully underperformed as human beings. I recall one of them using their intern top pick up their dry cleaning; and also another who fired an assistant on the spot at a meeting, literally ordering them to take their things and leave (which landed this curator in serious trouble with HR).

My thoughts on the matter are no doubt also influenced by my early experiences working in museums — in particular one which had at its helm a chief curator who hailed from the UK. Being as we were in the Midwest, there was an implicit aura of sophistication around everyone who came from Europe (a professor of mine once told me that “collectors here love British accents”). Accent notwithstanding , his relationship with the director was bad, his curatorial ideas were cryptic and his demeanor arrogant and authoritarian, which led to a lot of infighting.  Word in the street at the time was that half of the board wanted to get rid of the chief curator, while the other half wanted to get rid of the director. In the end the director prevailed and the chief curator stepped down and left town. Many years later I ran into him, by chance, on the subway in New York. No longer in that position of power, he was amiable and warm. He gave me his business card: he worked at Christie’s. That was the last time I saw him or heard of him.

On another occasion,— and to the point of questioning whether these behaviors are merely generational— I was invited to serve as a curatorial advisor for an MFA exhibition that would involve around one hundred students. I was one of three curatorial advisors and an emerging curatorial collective who would help curatorial students in curating the show. At our first advisor meeting, where we were going to try to figure out how we would collaborate,  the members of the curatorial collective informed us that they already had a plan in place and would proceed in curating their own breakaway show. This would mean that instead of collaborating we would have to break the exhibition into four exhibitions or that the rest of us would curate one show and they could create a rival show of their own. When we objected to their plan,  arguing that the objective was to work together, the conversation got more heated until one of the members of the collective said something along the lines that “sometimes the curatorial practice requires making dictatorial decisions.”

I have thought over the years about that exchange and mainly what it represented in terms of the ways in which curators need to balance their own personal vision with institutional compromise and the need to be part of something that is larger than them.

One of the most basic skills required of the curatorial profession is staff management, institutional planning and vision —one which becomes ever more important as curators start to ascend into the higher ranks of leadership and begin to set institutional policy. Curators often come from art history, with doctorates in specific areas, and most of the curatorial institutional practice comes with on-the-job training (which is necessary because real-life curatorial work is in essence a public practice).

The problem with the academic focus of the profession is that, for the most part, curators who want to ascend to leadership positions are usually left on their own, seeing no other path but to replicate existing models in order to ascend in the curatorial echelon and sometimes with limited understanding of the critical issues that the responsibility of leadership in art institutions entails.  In fairness, there are programs (such as the Getty Leadership Institute and the Center for Curatorial Leadership) that support this vital kind of knowledge and are sine-qua-non programs for those curators who are serious about truly learning how to take on leadership positions in museums. However, these are programs that are external and exist in addition or complement to the traditional academic channels and can’t in themselves entirely satisfy the great need for arts management experience in the profession.

To summarize, there are at least four areas in particular right now where we generally see a lack of preparedness, all of which are entirely separate from art historical or art-theoretical  knowledge: one, on expertise in flexibility in the process of ideation and production;  second, on public engagement and the role as public figure, and third, on collaborative skills.  There is no space here to outline each in detail, but in brief: the way that art is made today requires curators to truly engage in a deep dialogue with the artist and become part of a process journey that can have unexpected results. Second, the curator does play a role that requires leadership in taking the pulse of the cultural and political moment, and this is not one that can be met from the safety of the confines of their office. As I have argued before, being out in the public and engage with it is more important now than ever; this requirement involves both authenticity and a performative dimension that can border on the absurd and superficial (because people pay attention to the chief curator’s looks, the curation of their own image inevitably becomes an issue). And lastly, the process of research must include a generous spirit, intellectual curiosity, and ability to listen and generate participation from others. This is not something that comes naturally amongst most of us; rather, it is a learned skill. 

But given that it is difficult to function institutionally without these skills, an understandable protective gesture amongst up-and-coming curators that ascend into positions of influence is to retrench and recreate the old hierarchies — at times the very same ones that they themselves had to endure in their early years.  I can only hope that curatorial programs are considering some of these issues and placing safeguards so that we don’t produce new generations of maestros who wear Prada.