Textile Collections by Sikarskie Amanda Grace;

Author:Sikarskie, Amanda Grace; [Sikarskie, Amanda Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

3

Curation

Susan Sontag once said that style is “the principle of decision in a work of art.”1 Most people, while they might not buy designer labels, have their own innate sense of style in selecting and combining pieces of clothing and accessories to wear each day. Museum curators, too, display their own personal curatorial style in the choices that they make: themes for exhibitions, works put on exhibit, meaningful juxtapositions. While most everyone can be trusted to curate their own wardrobe, relatively few people—those with years of graduate school behind them—are trusted to curate the history of dress in museums. But, since everyone has some innate sense of style, some means of making decisions about combining works of art into a more or less cohesive whole, what would happen if clothing and textile objects were curated outside the museum setting by people without an advanced degree?

Increasingly, on social websites like Tumblr and Polyvore, individual users are curating such objects. On Polyvore, these curatorial creations are called “collections” and combine historic fashion photographs and magazine layouts with contemporary dress and textile objects. This chapter explores this growing trend toward user-curation online, with a focus on user-curated collections of mid-twentieth-century fashion, such as “Audrey Hepburn on the Moon”2 (see figure 3.1). Everyday people with an interest in design, fashion, or crafts are organizing objects both for their own inspiration and to share with others. Those who work in dress and textile collections can learn a lot from the themes and juxtapositions created by people outside the museum’s walls. Indeed, the Internet has proved an interesting laboratory in which museum staff can sit back and watch what happens when people who aren’t professional historians curate collections. The results, as we will see, are rich and exciting.

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