Meltdown works best when the curator approaches it as a kind of musical autobiography, and certainly that is Hegarty's intention this year.
She concocted "Manicurated" after a curator approached her last spring and asked her to create an installation to kick off the museum's Conversations With the Permanent Collection initiative.
Ms. Salvesen of the Los Angeles museum says she believes this generation of curators approach the medium with a broader outlook in part as a response to the way artists are using photography.
The project's curators approached at least three members of the Kremlin élite, with no success.
The projects in the show -- organized by Craig Buckley, an independent curator -- approach problems not by introducing elaborate, made-from-scratch solutions, but by using elements already there, with the idea that the results, however useful, are also organic and provisional.
The game went like this: A curator would approach a collector with a deck of cards and lay them out on a table, face-up.
A few large health systems, including Kaiser Permanente and the nation of Australia, have adopted this curator-docent approach, which has been shown to improve doctors' clinical decision making.
Joan Cohen recalled, "One curator I approached said to me, 'We don't show Third World art.' " When Cohen contacted the Guggenheim, she says, "not only would the curator not see me but his secretary wouldn't see me".
Another tactic has been to prompt the staff to see Longwood as a museum, and for the gardeners to think more like curators, an approach that should be evident when Longwood opens its first full-scale show, "Making Scents: The Art and Passion of Fragrance," on April 10.
When MoMA curator Kathy Halbreich approached him about a retrospective almost a decade ago, he was reluctant.
