The Inner Logic Of Curation

As an opening public space welcoming all kinds of visitors,exhibitions in art museums convey both the time-honored art history and prosperous status of creativity today.While the colorful forms of exhibitions satisfy the need of sense organs,we can easily notice that the inner logic of art museum curation is also developing under the influence of ideology,ideology of art museums and their relationship with art history.This essay is written under such a background.This essay is arranged in line with two clues,which are from objectivity to subjectivity and from ancient times to contemporary times.Four types of exhibition are discussed.The first type is collection exhibition held by art museums under the logic of linear development of art history.It is held for the sake of displaying the national culture resources and popularizing the art history to the public.The subjective consciousness of curator is low.The second type of exhibitions is a restudy and redisplay of art museum collections.Under such a circumstance,exhibitions work as a tool of displaying ideas and logics.The subjective consciousness of curator is relatively high in the process of curation.The third type is the functional display of newly-created art works,which expresses the strong voice of the ideology of authorities who control cultural resources.The last type of exhibition bases on the subjective explanation of newly-created art works.We can't observe these exhibition works in the narrative of art history,but only read them under the current moment For this reason,the inner logic of curation is presented as a subjective explanation of the curator.Accordingly,this type of exhibitions expresses an enormous richness.Certainly,such method of division is not absolute.This essay selects the relatively extreme cases under the two clues to discuss.I sincerely hope that my essay can serve as a modest spur to induce more valuable studies on the complicated narratives of curation.