curator

n. An individual responsible for oversight of a collection or an exhibition. The administrative head of a museum or collection.

Notes

Often carries the connotation, especially in museums and galleries, of an individual who selects items based on artistic merit or connoisseurship.

Citations

Schwartz 1995, p. 56 Yet when archivists focus on a single photograph, they are quickly denounced as 'curators,' suggesting somehow that single photographs are less deserving of individual attention than are single written documents. The pejorative tone attached to the term 'curator' usually derives from the erroneous assumption that a photo-archivist is motivated by the same concerns as the curator, namely artistic merit or connoisseurship. . . . The curator, with a mandate to collect for aesthetic reasons, isolates the photographs from the context of creation and offers them up for, what Svetlana Alpers calls, 'attentive looking' and thereby transforms documents into art.