ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, discusses her thought leadership approach for the £45 million refurbishment and rehang of 500 2D and 3D objects covering five centuries of British Art. The rehang aimed to devoid the galleries and showcases of thematic overheads and conventional interpretative support material. Instead, Curtis devised a gallery-by-gallery ‘walk through British art’, a chronological display from 1545 to the present day, with artwork stylistically hung in a loose mimicking of the ways they would have been presented in their respective points in time. Addressing (and playing with) the polarisation and controversy around her approach, especially from art critics, she takes a stance against the prevailing orthodoxy of deploying grand institutional narratives to provide a marketable purpose and meaning to museums. Her post-narrativist position translates into an object-oriented programming approach in which the curator, at scale, attempts to abstain from a subsumptive tastemaking process – aiming to work at a distance from ‘distinction’ – even declining the provision of local interpretative resources to accompany artworks. The text argues for supporting the possibility of a subliminal acquisition of taste, beyond the operationalised cultural capital transaction within the field of a (narrative) museum that Pierre Bourdieu would recognise.
