ABSTRACT
Many recent initiatives propose continuum with established models of intervention as curatorial and archival research resulting in temporary exhibitions. Such was the case with Modern Art Oxford's collaboration with the artist George Shaw, who curated Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World (2011). At the start of the twentieth century civilian casualties amounted to just 10 per cent of all fatalities in war but by the end of the century the figure was a staggering 90 per cent. It was during this time too that the clichéd aphorism that 'one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter' came to pervade public consciousness. This chapter suggests that the host museum often intends to signal a shift in the way its collection and itself, as an institution, are understood. It therefore places the growth of artists' interventions since the 1990s in close relation to museums' incentives to change and update their social and pedagogic roles.
