EXPOSED
A large share of a curator's week is text and screen work AI already does passably: cataloging records, wall labels, catalog essays, condition-report write-ups, grant narratives, and literature searches on provenance. What resists is the physical side — handling and installing objects, judging authenticity and condition in the room — plus the accountability for acquisition, deaccession, and repatriation calls that a board, donor, or source community will question for decades. There is no license behind the title, so the protection comes from institutional trust and scarcity of positions rather than from law.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. The write-heavy half of the job — TMS/PastPerfect data entry, label copy, exhibition didactics, loan-agreement paperwork, grant reporting to IMLS or NEH — is now draftable by machine, but selecting what enters an exhibition, negotiating loans with a peer institution's registrar, and standing in front of an unframed canvas deciding whether the craquelure reads as period keep this at 11 rather than in single digits.
Some physical or field component. Curators are in storage vaults and on gallery floors more than the title suggests — checking RH and lux readings, condition-reporting incoming crates, directing mount-making and hang heights, doing site visits to a collector's damp basement — but preparators and conservators do the actual heavy handling and interventive treatment, which caps it at 11 instead of the 15+ of a field conservator.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no state license to curate; AAM accreditation and AAMD guidelines bind the institution, not the individual, and a curator who mis-attributes a work or accepts a piece with a broken provenance chain faces reputational and employment consequences while the museum's directors and insurers absorb the legal exposure — hence 3, not 0, since the field polices credentials informally through a small, long-memoried professional network.
Some relationship component. Donors give collections to a person they have cultivated over years, source communities under NAGPRA consult with the individual who returned their calls, and scholars lend on the strength of a named curator's reputation — but a large share of curatorial output reaches the public anonymously as an unsigned label or an object record, which is why this sits at 11 rather than the 16+ of a private dealer.
Meaningful discretion. Acquisition, deaccession, attribution, and repatriation decisions are made on incomplete provenance in the face of competing claims, and they are permanent — a wrongly deaccessioned object does not come back, and a NAGPRA determination or a Nazi-era restitution call will be re-litigated by successors and press for decades — with the ceiling set only by the fact that boards and directors formally sign off.
Clergy SAFE
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