<p>I wrote in Cooper hijack thread this morning about MoMA curator who scored Picasso’s guitar sculpture which his superiors failed to acquire. It must be different time yet here is another example
Barbara Haskell is now a bigshot curator of Whitney for 35 or so years. she got only BA from UCLA when she started out at Pasadena museum doing inventory as a summer job.
worked up her way to eventually mount shows that impressed Geogia O’Keeffe enuff to become her favorite, then headhunted by Whitney’s board prez.
but her biggest achievement might be to gotten married to possibly the best East coast “in” circle guy.
If she did no go up to Bard college on her own, it would not have happened. The reason being plain she was a fan of Milton Avery and wanted to see the opening.
there is no proof here but one would not plan something as
“I am gonna wear this dress and met up with Leon Botstein and he will ask me out or else!!”
say, not usually, like Steve Jobs’ wife had done.
It is her intelligence, charm, poise and whatelse whatelse brought her this status and famous ski hi achieving hubby, not her pedigree nor phD.
when you compare say, Williams grad and Bard CCS grad school’s requirement, you’d wonder how that can be even start to measure up if you are supposedly getting a degree that lead you to eventual museum job?
If you need to research and read old catalogs written in native language, sure you’d need German Italian Latin French Sanskrit whatnot.
But if you are only going to deal with conceptual contemporary art and able funded enuff to hire translator just in case the other guy would how dare not speak English, you don’t really need it.
It is hard to say at this point for art kid to do this then that then this would happen.
we never know.
language skill is something one should know if you are good at or not by the end of high school. It is very hard to catch up if you don’t “have” it. like musica said, it is not just be able to buy loaf of bread in German Italian French.
wish big is good, I am all for dreaming, yet misguided false hope is cruel thing to give. If you are not that kind of student, you are the one know it best. love what you love and do the best on what you do.
love art and have one thing that you are really passionate about, that reading researching pile and pile of miniscule information is never a chore, but pure joy.
^ that’s what my kid learned from his mentor while interning at a museum and seeing what the guy had to deal with made my kid stop talking about becoming bigshot curator, at least for now.</p>