While the power that the curator has in the art world is becoming more apparent to me, what I found noteworthy in this article was its discussion of art from other cultures being presented in another. The altogether disturbing statement that "there seems to be a consensus that when art from one culture is shown in another, it cannot speak for itself" seems, on observation, true (Brenson 57). A recent example is the Hanga of Japanese printmaking, both traditional and contemporary, that was on display in the Ferguson Center. Those who visited the gallery for this show will recall there was also a portion of the exhibition that was comprised of a small display of the tools that the artists worked with, the type of paper they would use, and several textual explanations of aspects of the culture that the work came from.

Brenson explains that, according to contemporary practices in this area, "sufficient clues must be given to enable viewers and to provide viewers unfamiliar with the conditions in which it was created at least some sense of what it means to appreciate it on its own terms" (Brenson 57). I believe that these non-art displays and the textual explanations of everything from the process of printing the image to how they made their ink to what bugs were responsible for the tiny circular holes in the paper. It's also arguable that these displays, meant to legitimize the art, received more attention from some viewers than the actual prints. On one of my visits, I recall seeing and overhearing one person with at least some basic knowledge of the process explaining the cutting procedure to a group of her friends who were gathered around the carved woodblock in the display.

A question that comes to mind here is whether the process by which a work was made is actually vital to the appreciation of the work. As a printmaker myself, I found the small technicalities of how they crafted some of the images fascinating, but for someone other than the artist, wouldn't an explanation of the work just complicate their enjoyment of the image, their experience with simply looking at it's content and feeling something from the action. Knowing the process and thinking about it when viewing an image has the power to flatten the emotional depth in any image and to destroy the illusion of a piece of work as anything other than something that was done to a piece of paper. By "legitimizing" the work in this way, they are allowing the viewers to look at the work, to a degree, the way that an artist does, which traditionally is destroying a large chunk of what the artist was working towards when making the piece; but it also reinforces this culture from which work is on display as an Other. And, along with the other culture, it establishes the Artist (every artist, the concept of the artist) as an Other. This effect of the curator is contradictory to Brenson's explanation that the artist, even within the art community, is held in contempt "... for any tendency to romanticize the individuality, personality, hand, and heroism of the artist" (Brenson 57).

Brenson, Michael. "The Curator's Movement." Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 55-68.