THE CURATOR

The Scholls say the curators are flown down and put up at a nearby hotel, but they are paid only a small honorarium for their trouble.

''It's a very serious, major collection,'' Baume says. ``I was happy to work with it. I would never try to psychoanalyze Debra and Dennis, but art does say something about the artists who make it, and, by extension, the people who acquire it. Maybe what I get to do as a curator is similar to what an editor does in filmmaking or in publishing. Or maybe it's like being a DJ. It's about linking things.''

Before arriving in Miami, Baume was equipped with lists and images of the collection -- plus plans to the house so that he could figure out which walls would work for the stuff he wanted to hang. By the time he showed up, everything put up by the previous year's curator had been carted off and the works that Baume called for were being hauled in, including Donovan's pin cube, which had to be shipped from the Scholls' Aspen home and then painstakingly rebuilt.

''The pins are not glued together; there are no magnets,'' says Baume, who planned Donovan's first major museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, which opened Friday. ``It's purely the friction and gravity of these elements being poured on top of each other that makes them cohere. The artist is very interested in how you can use a form in mass quantities and transform the experience of that object.''

Baume can also go on about five pieces he chose to hang in the living room:

''There is this piece by Julie Mehretu,'' Baume says, walking over to the wall with the fireplace behind it. ``She's a painter but she uses computer systems of rendering . . . You can look at this closely and see there are architectural elements, but they're kind of layered on top of each other. It captures a different visual and spatial experience of the world. And it does become kind of like its own world view. I started thinking that it was kind of representing a new body of knowledge, a different way of approaching the world.''

And that has a lot in common, he says, with the large photograph of a British library by Candida Hofer, going up nearby.

''It's a fabulously huge library with thousands of books, which represents another body of knowledge, another approach to understanding the world,'' Baume says. ``I think all of the pieces in this room have a similar resonance and conceptual link to each other . . .''

Dennis interrupts: ``He's so much smarter than I am. That's why I bring these guys in. Now you understand. They come up with these curatorial revelations which can ultimately be revelations about us. The party is always great. But what's even better is that the works stay up for a year, which means we live with them and start to learn how they talk to each other.''

Debra is particularly glad to see one of her favorite pieces, Palais Jacques Coeur, by Tacita Dean, hanging over her bed this year.

''It's a woman, or scientist, looking out through bags of air,'' she says. ``It's probably the piece that's nearest and dearest to my heart. But the last time I saw it was probably four years ago.''

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