Thus an exhibition of Castillian Golden Age painting at the Smithsonian would be organised by the museum s keeper of Spanish pictures, and so on. Accessibility, in its turn, is measured, ex post facto, by queues at the box-office. The successful professional curator, like the successful circus owner, is thus the one who sells the largest number of tickets. The trouble with all this, of course, is that it introduces the idea of competition into curating. This needn t be a bad thing, except that experience has shown that it almost always is.
Century City is a particularly vivid case in point.
The show, in the end, is not about the works in it, but about its curators. It is rather like a restaurant being judged on the quality of its waiters rather than of its cuisine. If some areas of Century City are shallow Vienna springs to mind it is because the people who curated them were showmen rather than art historians. And if those areas don t fit into a coherent whole, it is because those same curators have been fighting their own corners. It may be that Nittve is right to see the real subject of Century City as being less the history of art than the professional curator.