O’Neill’s model rethinks exhibition-making as a co-productive organisation of relations rather than a linear act of curatorial authorship. By distinguishing background, middle-ground and foreground, he renders visible the layered social and temporal structure through which exhibitions are made, negotiated and received. The key contribution lies in shifting attention away from isolated objects and toward the organisational ecology that conditions how meanings emerge. Methodologically, the model offers a practical grammar for distributing agency: background names enabling conditions and institutional infrastructures, middle-ground names negotiation and mediation, and foreground names what becomes publicly legible. This has a precise bridge to contemporary organisational theory and institutional critique, because the exhibition is treated not as a neutral representational frame but as a site in which authority, visibility and participation are continuously arranged. Curating becomes an infrastructural practice that must calibrate direction without exhausting emergence.