A curatorial approach to choosing set content

[halle]

I'm going to do something slightly uncharacteristic, and put forward an idea without spending all that long polishing the wording of it, because I've already said the main points on Discord and I want them to be on the forums, but I don't foresee a time in the next month when it'll be reasonable for me to spend more than, like, 20 minutes on a forums post.

A way that I've always looked at working on a question set, particularly when it comes to subdistributing and answerline selection, is to approach it like I'm curating a museum. This frame of mind came pretty naturally, since I've never had sole responsibility for a subject besides fine arts, but I think it applies to literature and the humanities in general for sure, and probably the other categories as well. I don't think this approach is all that novel, in that I think a whole lot of editors have similar thought processes, but I don't think the curatorial language or the explicit analogy to a museum has been made all that recently (if ever? I'm not going to try to figure out the search terms that'd get me that answer so I guess I'll take the credit), and this language might be helpful for clarifying what works about the general approach.

By "curatorial" I mostly mean "as though you were in charge of a museum" or more specifically "as though your set was a museum, with each answerline (or even each clue) being an item in the collection." There are different kinds of museums, of course, but you can pretty much slot in the categories you're responsible for and the aims of the set: for a regular academic tournament for which you are in charge of the history, the project might be construed as curating an "encyclopedic museum of history." I recently took a class on the history of museums so I don't know how much the term "encyclopedic" needs explanation, but basically it means offering a global view without major blind spots. The Met is an example of an encyclopedic art museum because if you started with no real knowledge of art and took in everything it has to offer, you wouldn't end up with any glaring blind spots, although of course no museum can ever have truly complete coverage. I'm mostly going to stick with art museums for the rest of this post, but you can really slot in other subjects as well.

When deciding what to program, well-established art museums have to walk a really interesting line (I don't think smaller or more experimental museums are relevant to non-side event sets). They need to put on exhibits that will appeal to the public enough for people to show up and spend money (or at least drive up attendance figures), they need to maintain their prestigious reputations as arbiters of good judgment and expertise regarding art (either as encyclopedic museums, or in the case of something like the Guggenheim, museums that offer complete coverage of a certain time period or culture. All my examples are going to be from New York, by the way), and they also have individual curators who are talented scholars who want to take creative swings in their own areas of interest. Another factor for many museums, which has grown in recent years much as it has in quizbowl writing, is to make sure that historically underrepresented areas get some spotlight, that previously unnoticed gaps in coverage are filled. This factor interacts with the others that I mentioned: inclusive exhibits are considered appealing to audiences, it's growing harder to be seen as an expert in art as a whole if you only deal with Western art, and the younger generation of curators is particularly attuned to these interests. Other institutions have similar balancing acts (art house movie theaters, opera companies, orchestras, libraries that host readings, etc) but I like the museum analogy. As an example, the kinds of judgments that the people running the Guggenheim make when they decide that it's appropriate to program a show devoted entirely to the history of motorcycles, positioning them as art objects, but that they should wait a whole while until putting on another exhibit that could be seen as similarly gimmicky (there hasn't been anything like it at the museum in the 25 years since) in order to avoid giving the impression that they'd lost their grasp on the fundamentals, strike me as exactly the sorts of judgments that should be made when deciding what quirky or radical answerlines can make their way into an academic distribution.

In other words, a good question to ask yourself when choosing an answerline from a curatorial perspective is "can I include this in my museum without compromising its (and my) integrity in terms of having good judgment about art (or whatever subject)?" And when looking at all the planned answerlines for a category, you can ask yourself whether you're getting close to the goal of being encyclopedic in the sense I outlined above. If you're going to claim that motorcycles can be engaged with as fine art, it sure helps to show that you're in a position to make that claim by really nailing the fundamentals, and to balance out the big swing you're taking with fewer additional out-there answerlines. It can also be helpful to look at the ways museums have framed exhibits on subjects that might seem dusty and tired--recently, the Met has held themed exhibitions on the Tudors and the Medici instead of spotlighting a single Renaissance artist with a solo show, and put on a Carpeaux show framed around slavery and emancipation (I'll note that at least one professor who I respect has criticized this show for pushing a narrative that ignores some of Carpeaux's cultural context; I didn't see the show and don't have his background on the era, nor do I remember his exact criticism, so I can't comment on whether he was right, but it's a reminder that conceits that make things more unique don't always work perfectly in the eyes of those with the most expertise).

I think this approach can also help with some of the rigidity in thinking that can stem from asking yourself questions like "is this art?" or "is this literature?" and even from some of the questions we've suggested as a community to help us approximate those questions, like "is this high culture?" or "is this culturally significant?" or "can you learn about this in an academic setting?" These kinds of questions can lead to some traps like "well, there's a course on Harry Potter in my university's English department so that can be a lit tossup" being countered by "no, that was aimed at mass audiences when it was published" being countered by "but we write about Dickens and Shakespeare!" being countered by "ok well maybe then the problem with Harry Potter is that it's for children" being countered by "so we can never mention Tolkein at all either?" and so on and so on. You're not going to develop a classification system that sorts art from mass media without any exceptions. It isn't possible; in some cases it isn't even objective (although I'd argue that in most cases whether something is art or mass media is not a matter of opinion, there are some things--Tolkein, even--where it's reasonable to fall on either side of the debate). But you can work to strengthen your curatorial eye, to develop your sense of taste and judgment by increasing your level of expertise, so that you can make assessments like "is my museum/subdistribution/tournament complete with the selections I've chosen for it? And do any of the inclusions delegitimize the whole?" with a good degree of confidence. If you can answer yes for both of these questions, your tournament is probably in pretty good shape from a content standpoint.

I realize that saying "you can strengthen your curatorial judgment" without saying much about how to do that isn't the most helpful thing in the world, but I think that for most people who are already being thoughtful about their editing choices in a manner that's close to the approach I've outlined, phrasing the matter in these terms will add clarity to what they're trying to do in a way where the right kind of thinking follows naturally. I'll try to follow up with some more concrete steps one might take to become a better curator in the near future, but developing my curatorial sense is kind of an underlying goal in many of my life choices, so it's hard to isolate the specific things I'm doing. If you're trying to apply this to the category of visual arts, you can just literally spend time looking through how major art museums structure their collections and what they choose to program, as well as what they advertise the most and how critics respond to the various choices they make. At some point in the last 10 years the MoMA completely reorganized its permanent galleries, and almost every art publication responded to the choices they made for the new arrangement; this would be a fruitful place to start, I think.

Anyway, this did take more than 20 minutes.

[alexdz]

I really like this analogy, and I think it's something that holds up when we consider the sorts of sets written for specific audiences (by geography, age, etc.). As Halle mentioned, a museum's collection should probably be understandable by a wide audience, but there are also specific local details that may drive certain decisions. A museum about the history of blues music in St. Louis is likely to contain some St. Louis-specific references and details, whereas a museum about the history of the blues in Memphis would similarly focus on aspects of Memphis. So I tend to think the same way about sets, where considering the specific audience playing will inform at least some aspects of the set's content. This is, after all, the reason we "Americanize"/"Briticise" set content, and the reason behind targeting content to the age group we're writing for.

But I also really like this analogy because a good museum will also provide the right context for the objects on display, much as we should strive for in question writing as well. When the significance and interest of a particular answer or clue is clear in the question, it's much easier to learn from the experience!

[theMoMA]

It strikes me that a useful parallel between quizbowl and curation involves how museums deal with very current material. On Discord, Halle mentioned something along the lines of how any current show about NFTs would probably be awful, but perhaps interesting and worthwhile subjects for a retrospective on NFTs may emerge many years from now with the benefit of hindsight.

I think it would be useful to keep this sort of thing in mind when choosing whether to write on very contemporary topics in areas such as literature and art. I'm not really sure why, but recent literature seems to be the category most susceptible to trendy writing, such that knowing a particular surface-level fact about a recent novel can, at least for a few months, be more profitable than knowing the entire corpus of almost any single writer. I often wonder if these questions are truly finding an audience, because very few people are going to have read even the most widely discussed contemporary book (and almost no one will have studied it in some academic sense). It's also very difficult to know which of these books or authors will have lasting merit.

The approach Halle suggests is an interesting way to look at a problem like this. Museums want to stay relevant by engaging with contemporary topics, but they don't want to go overboard or compromise their reputations for good judgment. Presumably they also don't want to pick some au courant topic that a dozen other museums have recently explored. Similarly, I think there's probably a better balance to strike in quizbowl between wanting to engage with people who read (and read about) contemporary fiction and understanding that those works are competing with several centuries of literary tradition that has already stood the test of time, and that has been the subject of much more serious reading and study.

Although the example here regards literature, the same reasoning applies to just about any subject.