Abstract
The exhibition of know-how and artisanal technical gestures has become a concern for many contemporary museums and artistic institutions. The following analysis of the ethnography-based curatorial project Les Meilleurs Ouvriers de France at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the group show The Mind Begins and Ends in the Fingertips at Palais de Tokyo, and the two-fold exhibition The Beauty of the Gesture at the City of Ceramics in Sèvres will shed light on the possibilities and pitfalls of displaying know-how and tacit skills. These exhibitions took place in different institutional settings – a technical museum, a contemporary art site, and a museum associated with a porcelain manufactory. The spatial and temporal convergence of these exhibitions related to modern and contemporary crafts in France between 2017 and 2020 will allow us to observe the unfolding of different curatorial strategies. These exhibitions will be explored through several lines of reflection: the recovery of certain curatorial traditions, the presence of the working hand as a curatorial motif, the dialectic between showing and concealing and, finally, some reflections on the role of the museum in identifying and preserving gestural knowledge.
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