What’s Love Got to Do with It? Crowdsourcing, Curating and Love in the Neo-liberal Museum

Using the Museum of Fine Art, Boston’s exhibition Boston Loves Impressionism (2014) as a case study, this article engages the problematic ways that the term ‘love’ has been mobilized to promote the ideology and technology of crowdsourcing, diminish the labour of curating and narrow the experience of art viewing. While love might have radical potential, I argue that love is increasingly used as a conservative straightening device enforcing sexual, gender and racial norms and distancing audiences from art and ideas deemed unlovable or foreign. Curating, however, can be mobilized to not merely reproduce a neo-liberal vision of love, but to promote a more inclusive and varied access point for audiences.