Revisiting the Retrospective: Authorship and Authority in The Michael Snow Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the defining qualities of the retrospective curatorial model using The Michael Snow Project, hosted in 1994 by the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant, as a case study. A source of modern conceptions of authority, the retrospective employs particular canonization criteria by directing curatorial argument to biographical origins. The occasion of the retrospective therefore imposes a set of interpretive limitations on artworks whose themes problematize authorship, channel elements of chaos or accident, or question historical viewing. A critique of three catalogue essays for the Project demonstrates how—despite curatorial awareness of the retrospective model and various attempts to transcend its structures—these canonization criteria shape interpretation. Both the Project’s critical consciousness of this model and the varied nature of Snow’s corpus present an opportunity to consider the enduring influence of retrospective framing on curatorial discourse, and its continued effects on contemporary deployments of a popular model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".