012:Innovative Curation

Museopunks regularly digs into some of the more innovative practice in museums, but so far, we’ve haven’t tackled curating. In this episode, Suse catches up with one of the most powerful people in the world of art – Paola Antonelli (@curiousoctopus), Senior Curator of Architecture & Design, Director of Research & Development, MoMA – to find out what innovative curating looks like. What does it mean to collect the @ symbol? Do museums need R&D departments? There are more and more entrepreneurial museum projects and labs beginning to pop up, like the Spark!Lab National Network, started at the Smithsonian in 2008, or the Indianapolis Museum of Arts IMA Lab (which we discussed during our recent MCN2013 session), but what do they offer the museum? And are such projects different when approached from curatorial position, than when driven from (say) the technology department? In this episode, we find out.