What is a Curator? by Tom Morton
frieze - London,UK

The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock. I am still alive.
He crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for somewhere to hide.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003)

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In Vladimir Nabokov’s short story The Visit to the Museum (1939) a Russian émigré arrives at a French provincial museum, where he meets the curator, Monsieur Godard. Godard leads him through the collection – which includes a sarcophagus, a whale’s skeleton, ‘large paintings full of storm clouds’ and even ‘a gigantic mock-up of the universe’ – before unaccountably blinking out of existence. Thrown off-balance, the émigré stumbles through a door and fetches up not in another exhibition space but in the mother country he thought he had long ago left behind. Is Godard a ‘curator as magician’ or a ‘curator as angel’? No, Nabokov leaves such constructions well alone. The writer describes him simply as a curator, somebody who is both present and absent, somebody who marshals objects and images and histories to transport and transform.

Tom Morton is a contributing editor of frieze and Curator of Cubitt, London.