Curating The Ladder of Escape [Addendum]

My judgment of the Miró exhibition's curation was hasty.  Blogs are so much about producing something coherent and concise quickly that although I didn't publish the entry until the late afternoon after seeing The Ladder of Escape, that still hadn't been enough time for my ideas to form.  It was while I was preparing the entry for a response to 'The White Cube and Beyond' article in this season's edition of Tate Etc. that I appreciated the curators' positioning of Morning Object, Still Life with Old Shoe and the 50 lithographs of the Barcelona Series.

"What we should not forget is that the main focus of today's curators is on the combination of objects in different media.  The field of interest has become so much bigger and more complex, and curators already have enough work on their hands simply showing us things we would not otherwise see" (Thomas Demand in Tate Etc. (21), p. 85).

So, for all my initial scepticism about the layout of these particular artworks, if Demand's comment is borne in mind, it is possible to see the success of this piece of curation.  It may be that my attention was drawn quickly from one piece to another (Morning Object > Still Life > lithographs), and more swiftly than I might have liked, but all three were taken in, noticed, and responded to, if only cursorily in that first visit.  Now I'm even keener to make my second trip.

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