What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXI with Tehmina Goskar

Tehmina Goskar - Curator

Tehmina Goskar is the Curator and Director of the Curatorial Research Centre, a company she founded in 2018, following 18 years of experience as a curator and academic in large and small organisations, and as a freelancer. She is a Fellow of the Museums Association, an Accredited Facilitator and Research Associate at Swansea University. She is a material culture and collections specialist and holds a PhD in History. The culmination of her curatorial and academic experiences led to the development of the philosophy and methodology of the Curatorial Research Centre which champions the equality of knowledge generation and communication in all curatorial work. She co-founded and continues to help organise #MuseumHour on Twitter, now in its sixth year. In her spare time she is immersed in the world of Cornish traditional music and plays the fiddle (violin) in a folk band.

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What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

I am naturally suspicious of fame, a beautifully decorated but nonetheless empty box. Short-term headline grabbing is not something I value, although even my ego enjoys a bit of attention from time to time. The increasing involvement and influence of corporate marketing and brand in the arts has in part woken up the museum world to the benefits of communicating with a much broader audience than previously self-selecting aficionados. However, it has also fuelled a boasting culture, particularly amongst larger, older institutions who naturally assume the role of “world-leading” or “biggest” or “best” and then others try and copy them and the expectation often falls short of the reality. Nowadays, fame trumps real achievement such as committing to creating and sharing knowledge, democratising decision-making and genuinely becoming a valuable member of communities.

What is your approach to rejection?

My nature expects rejection but experience has helped me to cope much better with it than I used to. Certainly, the skills I have learned as a trained facilitator have opened my mind to the importance of removing the rejection from the self and seeing it for what it really is. Looking back, I have managed to use each rejection as a time to reassess, often courting ideas of leaving the sector entirely, but somehow still getting attracted back into it—I now treat rejection as a reboot opportunity and try not to dwell or over-analyse. A couple of years ago I undertook a leadership course with people from many different sectors including law, IT, corporate business, science, health and HR. It made me realise that many of the problems I perceived as specific in our sector—prejudice, diversity, inequality, lack of value in expertise—also existed in other sectors and in some cases we do actually a lot better than we think we do.

Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

Income is less important to me than financial stability, although I say this with the constant worry that I now own and run a company that regularly employs two people and contracts more. For me, financial stability means I know our mortgage and bills will be paid on time, we can eat well and if there are funds left over to save or enjoy it’s now a bonus rather than an expectation. Real time, my income has plummeted over the last 10 years and this occasionally gets me down. The first couple of years of starting a brand-new business is notoriously difficult particularly when you are based in a place like Cornwall which is dominated by retirees and obsessed with volunteerism. I am proud that although the profit was very modest, we sailed past our first-year milestone. I recognise we work in a tough economic environment which is compounded by the routine under-pricing (and therefore under-valuing) of labour in the arts. When you see invitations to tender for architectural or construction work the budgets are 5-10 times higher than those made available to designers, curators, educators and interpreters. When capital development projects are funded why are budgets relating to facilities and content a small fraction of building costs? What does this really say about the values of the people procuring services in the arts sector?

How do you define success in the arts?

For me my personal success is defined very much on whether I feel I have made a difference, either to a situation, to people or if I have improved something to be better than it once was. I am my harshest critic so when I feel pleased about an outcome, I really celebrate it. Good feedback from colleagues I value is also tremendously heartening, and important to my sense of purpose. As so much of my work is teaching and training my ultimate feeling of success is when I see my students thrive, use the wisdom and skills I have taught them, and when you get that message saying, “look what I’ve done, it’s thanks to you!” Nurturing #MuseumHour by letting go of control has been a particular success I continue to enjoy, even though my general enjoyment of social media has eroded considerably in the last few years. I don’t have a view on how we view success in the sector more generally except I would say that I wish we produced less and attended to getting the basics right first: training, recruitment, decision-making, greater self-awareness.

Do you have role models for success and who are they?

This is a really hard question for me to answer without sounding ungrateful for the very many people I have met in my career who have supported me and my work, but I don’t have any named role models for success. This might also be connected to incidents in the past where I have felt deeply let down by those who I did look up to but who abandoned me at critical points in my career. I regularly mentally honour the people from whom I have learned something new or who have shown me a new way of looking at things. My role models are composites, I suppose, a mixture of people with whom I have worked and those I observe from afar, whose achievements and ways of thinking have inspired me to trust my originality. I think if I had not got involved in museums and history, I would have enjoyed being an entrepreneur.

Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Other people don’t know more, or better, than you. Trust yourself and take risks (I’m still trying to persuade myself of that last piece of advice).

Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

Injustice has always affected my view on the world and issues of race and gender are no different. However, I find myself conflicted with the growing groups, networks and movements of people in the arts centred on race. On the one hand, it brings incredible and well overdue creativity and originality into our museums, and on the other hand, it highlights for me an issue that I have thankfully not had to face, at least not consciously—and maybe I am now re-examining past experiences through this lens. I have been much more concerned that I may be being invited to roundtables, working groups and conference panels because of what/who others think I represent, rather than my knowledge, expertise and way of thinking. Regarding gender, I certainly recognise discrimination more clearly. I spend much of my time with older men on the music scene and perhaps I have developed a thick skin when it comes to the routinely different manner in which I am treated compared to my male friends. As for how this relates to success, we need to give ourselves less of a hard time, not wait for permission to go for the things we want to achieve, and just do the things we think are right. This is hard when you have a living to make, but I think if enough of us like-minded people got together, the privileged white male-centred institutions we are trying to change will soon become obsolete anyway.