The Curator’s Egg

Once upon a time I used to do really curatorial things - cataloguing collections, researching and writing exhibitions, rooting through the collections* - all the interesting things I’ve referred to elsewhere. One of the penalties of increasing management responsibility is that you end up doing less and less of what you came into museums to do, though I managed to avoid that for the first few years in my present post. These days I hardly see the inside of the museum store from one week to the next, and as for cataloguing objects - well, I have changed a couple of database entries in the last few years, and I did fill in some entries in the daybook a few months ago, but that’s about it.

It has come to this - my role is to pass on wise words of advice, the accumulated experience of some nineteen years in museums, while others do the actual work. As for exhibitions, I’m involved in the discussions, and I do have the final say, but at times it seems my main purpose is to provide titles. Titles for exhibitions, titles for exhibition sections, punning titles, cunning titles - this is my domain. I have to say that I do quite like this. I am inordinately fond of puns, and as we all know, a really good title should feature a pun somewhere.

I wonder occasionally how much difference the title makes. Some I have seen are prosaic (”Gold of the Pharaohs” - an exhibition of, well, the gold of, errm, some pharaohs) was a smash hit in Edinburgh in 1988. A touring exhibition, I believe. A subsequent blockbuster attempt in 1990, on the Incas iirc, fared less well. I wonder if the title (”Sweat of the Sun”) had anything to do with it?**

Sometimes the title just springs out at you. When we were working on the exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the railway from Edinburgh to Berwick (the first international railway line!), a number of things struck me - first that Dunbar was where the various dignitaries had come back to for their mammoth feed; and secondly the stories of itinerant agricultural workers arriving in the town somewhat drunk. All of a sudden it’s obvious: Steaming into Dunbar***.

My favourite though has got to be the exhibition we did about the (now-scraped-away as-if-it-had-never-been) outdoor pool. We were really struggling to come up with a title that wasn’t just really, really dull. Listening to people talking about the pool though, the one thing they all commented on was the coldness of the water (well it was the North Sea that it was filled with). I suggested, almost as a joke, that we should call the exhibition Brrr!**** That just resonated so well with everyone who had ever used the pool (and the local children had their swimming lessons there - such cruelty is not allowed these days).

And so to this year’s exhibitions. 110%, not alas my idea, is an exhibition on sport and health. My only contribution (other than saying ‘yes you can spend that inordinate amount of money’) is the title to the healthy living section For the health of it. Our other exhibition celebrates 30 years of John Muir Country Park, so inevitably it’s called Park Life. Yes, it will be John Muir Country Park - the Brit Pop years.

Still I can’t really complain, I do get to do all the fun techie stuff. And there is a certain pleasure in giving people the go-ahead to take forward a project. It’s just, it’s just… sometimes I miss the objects*****.

*How many exhibitions, I wonder, have had their genesis in someone’s trawling through the collections in search of one item, and finding another that really fired their imagination?

**I had nothing to do with either of these exhibitions, btw.

***Steaming being a common word for ‘less than exactly sober’

**** Gratuitous information… Language change in action. When I was a child (not that long ago), ‘brrr’ was merely a conventional way of spelling the sound people made when they were describing how cold it was (usually while rubbing their hands) - a sort of voiced labial trill. In much the same way that the dismissive sound when being expected to believe some rubbish or other was conventionally spelled ‘pshaw’. Weirdly, though ‘brrr’ is now pronounced as written. I’m sure my grandparents would have thought that very strange.

***** I am however assured, as part of the sport exhibition research, that with practice my aim will improve.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Collections, Exhibitions, Management. Both comments and pings are currently closed.