Satisfy Your Inner Curator: Select The Walters Art Museum's Next Exhibition
Mar 8, 2012
No disrespect to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, but its collections of watercolors, Renaissance statuettes and ancient Chinese teapots haven't exactly inspired any recent trips to Maryland. It's not that we don't like religious artifacts from medieval Europe, but their exhibitions aren't what you might call "visually progressive." So that said: pleasant surprise to learn about "Public Property,"a participatory exhibition opening this June. What's on view depends completely on what you want to see. Don't care for Japanese military armor but just love yourself some rare books? Try and make it happen. The Walters wants you to see only what you want to.
How to do this is mighty simple: Head on over to their voting site, where you'll be prompted to decide between two objects. Click on the one you like best and you'll be given the choice to decide between two more. The more items you vote for, the more curatorial impact you have.
As far as we know, The Walters is the only museum to throw caution to the wind and let their visitors curate a new exhibition themselves. Not to sound like a commercial, but we find that pretty forward-thnking. So far there's a staggering 41,000 votes on 840 objects. The top ten contenders are little surprising, actually; two of them are old Chinese teapots (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not our thing.) Luckily, we have until March 11th to rock the vote.
-- Perrin Drumm
