Should Artists Run Museums?

The idea of artists running museums sounds to many like allowing the inmates to run the asylum. A profile in the current issue of The New Yorker of Tate Gallery Director Nicholas Serota by Calvin Tomkins titled “The Modern Man: How the Tate Gallery’s Nicholas Serota is reinventing the museum” characterizes Serota’s secret formula for success as taking an “artist-centered approach” in which the museum asks contemporary artists what they would want in a museum. Serota, once considered an outrageous and outraging outsider by the British art establishment, now stands as the gold standard for art directors worldwide thanks to his track record of bringing contemporary art to the masses and getting them to enjoy it. If Tomkins is right and Serota’s “reinventing” the idea of the museum, does this mean that artists (at least indirectly) should run museums? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Should Artists Run Museums?"