Aside from a slew of mean-spirited reviews there is perhaps nothing more demoralizing to curators than having (parts of) a show canceled last minute. It almost happened to me once. And it is something that occurs with astounding regularity. The public rarely ever gets wind of it. But behind the scenes shows get the axe for manifold reasons. One that has become increasingly common in recent years may be surprising: self-censorship. 

In 1958, at the Brussels World Expo, a case of political rope pulling derailed a courageous curatorial experiment. As part of the American team’s contribution a pesky small three-part carbuncle was built next to the Edward Durell Stone’s drum-shaped main pavilion. “Unfinished Business,” the theme of this form-follows-function tunnel, was meant as a preemptive strike at criticism of America’s inequity and racial discrimination. It illustrated the 1950s status quo in three segments. A whirlwind of graphic newspaper collages gave way to photos of political initiatives for change toward a utopian image of children holding hands in a meadow. On the outside the colorful boxy volumes symbolically moved from an abstracted crumpled paper ball to a smoothed out surface: a simple metaphor. The kinks got ironed out. Shortly after the opening Southern congressmen managed to derail the exhibit as they felt that old Dixie was falsely painted into a corner. The federal government caved and a redesigned exhibit opened weeks later with mandatory exhibition guides. 

Such a failed attempt at tackling a contested societal issue through the medium of an exhibition seems like an ominous foreboding of today’s tactics of curatorial censorship. The mere prospect of dissent or unfavorable reviews is often enough for a project to kick the bucket. And if a potentially controversial topic does get the go ahead it is usually museum-educated to death. The audience’s unfiltered opinions are too much of a risk. What is lost is the magic of discovering an exhibition—a full-scale walk-in story—as a powerful medium with a distinct voice and attributable authorship. Who would go to the movies if an interpreter talked over the entire film?

tf.