The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns over 1.5 million objects. At any given time, roughly 26,000 of them — less than two percent — are on display. The Louvre holds over 380,000 works but shows only about 35,000. The Tate collection includes over 70,000 artworks; its four galleries can display only a fraction at once. Every museum in the world faces the same fundamental problem: there is far more art than there is wall space. Someone has to decide what gets shown and what stays in storage. That decision — which seems purely practical — is actually one of the most consequential acts of cultural power in the modern world.
What a museum chooses to display shapes what the public sees, values, and remembers. It determines which artists become famous and which are forgotten, which stories are told and which are silenced, which cultures are celebrated and which are marginalized. Curation is not a neutral, objective process — it is a series of choices made by individuals and institutions with their own biases, priorities, and pressures. Understanding how these decisions are made — and who makes them — is essential for anyone who wants to engage critically with art and the institutions that present it.
This article goes behind the scenes to explore how museums decide what to show, who influences those decisions, and why the politics of display matter as much as the art itself.
What Is Curation?
The word "curator" comes from the Latin curare, meaning "to take care of." Originally, curators were caretakers of collections — responsible for acquiring, cataloguing, preserving, and researching artworks. Today, the role has expanded to include exhibition planning, interpretation, public programming, and increasingly, advocacy for diverse and inclusive representation.
Museum curation involves several interconnected activities:
Acquisition — Deciding what to add to the permanent collection through purchase, gift, or bequest.
Collection management — Cataloguing, storing, conserving, and researching the existing collection.
Exhibition planning — Selecting works for display, organizing them thematically or chronologically, writing interpretive texts, and designing the physical layout.
Interpretation — Providing context through wall labels, audio guides, catalogues, educational programs, and digital resources.
Deaccessioning — The controversial process of removing works from a collection, sometimes through sale, to refine focus or generate funds.
Who Decides What Gets Shown?
Curators
Curators are the primary decision-makers for exhibitions. In large museums, curatorial departments are organized by specialization — European Painting, Asian Art, Contemporary Art, Photography, etc. — and each department's curators propose exhibitions based on their research interests, the collection's strengths, and perceived audience demand.
The curator's role involves both scholarly expertise and practical judgment. They must balance artistic merit, historical significance, visual coherence, physical logistics (size, conservation requirements, lending agreements), and audience accessibility. A great curator tells a story through the selection and arrangement of objects, guiding viewers through ideas and experiences that they could not access on their own.
The Louvre Museum, Paris. With over 380,000 objects in its collection, the Louvre can display only a fraction at any time — making curatorial decisions about what to show both essential and consequential. Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Directors and Boards
Museum directors set institutional priorities and approve major exhibitions. Boards of trustees — typically composed of wealthy donors, civic leaders, and cultural figures — oversee the museum's finances, governance, and strategic direction. Board members sometimes influence exhibition programming directly (a trustee who collects a particular artist may advocate for a show of that artist's work) or indirectly (through funding priorities that favor certain types of programming).
This governance structure means that museum programming is never purely driven by curatorial expertise. Financial considerations, donor relationships, political pressures, and institutional branding all play roles in determining what the public sees.
Donors and Sponsors
Corporate sponsors and individual donors fund many exhibitions, and their involvement sometimes comes with influence over content. A pharmaceutical company sponsoring a show about Renaissance medicine may expect positive framing of medical history. A collector who lends works for an exhibition may expect favorable placement and interpretation. Most museums maintain policies separating editorial control from funding, but the line can be blurry in practice.
The Art Market
Museum exhibitions affect the art market directly. When a museum mounts a major retrospective of an artist's work, that artist's market value typically increases. This creates potential conflicts of interest — collectors who sit on museum boards may benefit financially when their holdings are validated by institutional exhibitions. The relationship between museums and the market is one of the most debated topics in contemporary art ethics.
The Politics of Display
Whose Stories Get Told?
For most of their history, major Western museums have told a particular story: the story of Western civilization, progressing from ancient Greece and Rome through the Renaissance to modern art, created primarily by white European and American men. This narrative was not conspiratorial — it reflected the biases of the scholars, collectors, and institutions that built the collections. But it systematically excluded women artists, artists of color, non-Western art traditions, and any work that did not fit the established canon.
In recent decades, museums have worked to correct these imbalances. The Tate Modern's rehang of its collection in 2016 organized art thematically rather than chronologically, placing works by women and non-Western artists alongside canonical male artists. The Met's 2018 exhibition "Heavenly Bodies" explored fashion and Catholicism through a lens that centered diverse cultural perspectives. Many museums have hired diversity officers, established acquisition funds for underrepresented artists, and rewritten gallery labels to provide more inclusive context.
These efforts are genuine but incomplete. The permanent collections of major museums remain overwhelmingly dominated by white male artists, and changing this requires not just curatorial will but sustained investment in acquiring and displaying diverse work over decades.
Repatriation and Colonial Collections
One of the most contentious issues in museum ethics is the repatriation of objects acquired during colonial periods. The British Museum holds the Parthenon Marbles, removed from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris holds thousands of African artworks taken during French colonial rule. The Metropolitan Museum, the Berlin Museums, and virtually every major European and American museum contain objects whose acquisition involved coercion, theft, or exploitation of power imbalances.
Countries of origin — Greece, Nigeria, Ethiopia, China, Egypt, and many others — have demanded the return of these objects, arguing that they were taken without consent and belong to the cultures that created them. Museums have responded with a range of positions, from outright refusal to negotiated long-term loans to full repatriation. France returned 26 Benin Bronzes to Benin Republic in 2021, and Germany returned over 1,000 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in 2022, marking significant shifts in institutional practice.
Exhibition Design and Interpretation
How art is displayed is as significant as which art is displayed. The physical arrangement of objects in a gallery — the sequence, the spacing, the lighting, the wall color, the height of installation — all influence how visitors experience and interpret the work.
Chronological display tells a story of artistic development and progress. It emphasizes evolution and historical context but can reinforce a linear, Eurocentric narrative.
Thematic display groups works by subject, concept, or material across different periods and cultures. It encourages comparison and reveals unexpected connections but can sacrifice historical context.
Monographic display focuses on a single artist's work, allowing deep engagement but potentially isolating the artist from their historical and social context.
Wall labels and interpretation shape understanding profoundly. A label that says "acquired 1897" tells a different story than one that says "seized during the British punitive expedition against Benin, 1897."
Preservation: The Invisible Role
Behind every exhibition is an enormous infrastructure of preservation — conservation laboratories, climate-controlled storage facilities, pest management programs, and security systems. Conservation is the aspect of museum work that the public rarely sees but that determines whether art survives for future generations.
Conservation decisions involve their own ethical complexities:
How much to restore? — Should a damaged painting be restored to its original appearance, or should signs of age and damage be preserved as part of the object's history?
Light exposure — Many works (especially works on paper, textiles, and photographs) are damaged by light. Museums must balance public access against preservation, which is why some galleries are kept quite dim.
Climate control — Temperature and humidity fluctuations damage art. Maintaining stable climate conditions is one of the most expensive aspects of museum operation, which is why admission fees are often higher than visitors expect.
The Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The museum's architecture — a converted railway station — influences how art is experienced, demonstrating that the physical context of display is as important as the art itself. Image: CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
How to Think Critically About Museum Displays
Next time you visit a museum, ask these questions to engage more deeply with the curatorial choices behind what you see:
What is being shown — and what might be missing? — Consider which artists, periods, and cultures are represented and which are absent.
How is the narrative structured? — Is the display chronological, thematic, or organized by another principle? How does this structure shape your understanding?
What do the labels tell you? — Pay attention to the language of wall labels. What information is included? What is left out? How is the work framed?
Who funded this exhibition? — Check the acknowledgments panel. Knowing the sponsors can provide context for the exhibition's framing and content.
How does the space affect your experience? — Notice the lighting, the wall color, the amount of space between works. These are deliberate curatorial decisions.
For more practical museum strategies, check out our guide to how to visit an art museum.
Final Thoughts
Museums are among the most trusted cultural institutions in the world, and that trust carries enormous responsibility. Every exhibition, every label, every acquisition decision shapes what the public understands about art, history, and culture. The decisions are never purely aesthetic — they are inevitably shaped by money, politics, institutional history, and the personal perspectives of the people who make them.
This does not mean museums are untrustworthy. It means they are human institutions, doing their best to serve the public while navigating complex pressures. Understanding how they work — who makes the decisions and why — does not diminish the museum experience. It enriches it, because it helps you see the gallery not just as a passive container for art but as an active participant in the cultural conversation about what matters, who matters, and what we want to remember.
Want to learn more about art's role in society? Read about art censorship through history, or explore what makes art good.
