ABSTRACT
The Spring Symposium in March 2009 marked the ending of the five-month exhibition Byzantium 330-1453 at the Royal Academy. For the curators, Maria Vassilaki and myself, that ended a roller-coaster phase in our academic lives. This essay is written too close to that period to be any more than a personal comment, a prequel to any more considered appraisal of the significance of this particular exhibition. It simply touches on a number of (raw) issues that such an exhibition highlights from the viewpoint of a curator, and puts on record some elements which 50 years ago would already have been committed to paper, as Rowena Loverance has discovered in her researches into the archive files of the Edinburgh Festival/Victoria and Albert exhibition of 1958, but which today are lost in the electronic world of telephone calls and emails.
