The Architect's Newspaper on Curators

The architect's newspaper has it's new issue up this morning, spotlighting the departure of Terrance Riley from MoMA. The issue does a nice in-depth study of Mr. Riley's impact and a survey of the current players on the curatorial scene. They point out this most curios fact...

There’s a great demand at this moment for architecture and design curators, a job that’s evolving in pace with the fields to which it’s devoted. Several major curatorial posts in the U.S. are currently vacant: MoMA is seeking a chief curator to replace Terence Riley, who will leave in March, as well as a curator to fill the position left by Peter Reed, who was promoted within the museum last summer. The SFMoMA has been curator-less for nearly six months, since Joseph Rosa left to assume the architecture curator position at the Art Institute of Chicago. Rosa, for his part, has announced his intention to hire two associate curators to fulfill the Art Institute’s ambition to expand to include design and for its exhibitions to be international in scope. The National Building Museum claims that it still intends to hire a chief curator, though it’s been a more than a year since Howard Decker abruptly resigned from the post. The biggest news is that the Guggenheim is looking to hire a senior architecture curator, having recently hired a junior curator to assist contemporary art curator Germano Celant in producing a massive retrospective on Zaha Hadid, scheduled to open June.

... and never really explain why so many roles remain vacant. DYWSC? finds such positions interesting, (there are many similarities between a blogger and a curator?) and wishes to know why these somewhat coveted titles go unclaimed.