Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg appoints its first curator of contemporary art

I’m very pleased to know that the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, has appointed its first curator of contemporary art.

Contemporary art can be intimidating; a curator can provide multiple points of entry

A Nov. 3, 2013 artdaily.com article highlighting the appointment notes:

“Contemporary art can be intimidating, and I feel it is the responsibility of a curator to provide context and multiple points of entry to challenging concepts and artworks.”

Strong point of view of the museum curator

A passage from a brainpickings.org review of a 100 Ideas that Changed Film (2012) brings to mind the central role of the curator in creative enterprises:

• From technologies like magic lanterns (#1), the kinetoscope (#3), and the handheld camera (#78), to genres like slapstick (#21), poetic realism (#50), and queer cinema (#97), to system-level developments like the star system (#23), film schools (#38), and censorship (#48), to cultural phenomena like fan magazines (#31), television (#63), and feminist film theory (#86), the book blends the illuminating factuality of an encyclopedia with the strong point of view of a museum curator to reveal, beneath this changing flow of technologies and techniques, cinema’s deeper capacity for playing on universal emotions and engaging our timeless longing for escapism, entertainment, and self-expression.