Can We Still Curate This World?
The zone is flooded. We’re prisoners of the information wars. Words, meaning, and truth have been buried, while the ugly, vulgar, and profane dance on their graves. Dark Mode operates in broad daylight, because it makes for great television.
How is it possible to make meaning when believing in nothing is everything, and everything’s too much?
One answer: curation. Selecting, organizing, and presenting content, information, objects, or experiences; acting according to specific criteria or themes. Curation suggests that what and how we select matters, and that we have at least some agency and control.
It is not too much to say that curation has been one of the bedrock accomplishments of humanistic civilization. From the morass of experience, it defined our cultural and social capital, enabled taste and lifestyle, marked the difference between a productive and a meaningful, beautiful life, and made us human.
The irony of course is that curation is anything but curated these days. To say that the word has been democratized is to miss the point — it’s been flattened, branded, and mass-marketed. With every influencer, tastemaker, content creator, conference organizer, and ‘life designer’ calling themselves a curator, it’s no surprise ‘curation’ has ranked among the worst words of the year. If the idea is to signal authority through an association with specific objects — what the journalist and art educator Miya Tokumitsu calls “prestige appropriation” — curation, as a title of distinction, has come to mean anything but. After his appointment as ‘curator’ of a weekend comedy show at a major London arts venue, the comedian Stewart Lee wrote in the Financial Times, “I am a curator. What a dead word. It sounds like somebody stirring turds in a toilet bowl with a stick.”
And yet the only way to find the shine amidst the shit is curation.
Precisely because it is under attack by AI and autocrats who consider it an expression of critical thinking and direct threat to their regimes, curation matters more than ever.
Curation is the holdout in a sea of sameness and mediocrity. It is the knife that cuts through a world that talks too much, wants too much, consumes too much.
The word curate comes from the Latin curatus, the past participle of curare — “to take care of.” In the Roman world, curating meant maintaining estates, interiors, gardens, and art collections. By the Middle Ages, however, the term had gained a spiritual dimension: the curator is the priest, and cura is the spiritual charge of souls.
It was in the Renaissance that the concept became associated with historians and connoisseurs who oversaw royal and feudal collections. In the mid-sixteenth century, curators compiled Wunderkammern — cabinets of curiosities that displayed wondrous and exotic objects. It was at the beginning of the twentieth century that we saw the emergence of curators who, through their sense of discernment, garnered an aura of celebrity.
Today, in a world at once too complex and too simplistic, curation is a vital navigation device. In an economy that fracks our most precious human resource — attention — curation makes sure it is spent wisely. In a time of “flooding the zone,” curation is a form of resistance. To the rule of brutes, curation is the most delicate response.
Curation is the modus operandi of an attention economy that cares. But we must reclaim it from the art elites, corporate appropriators, influencers, and life designers. We must strengthen its ethos and power.
The latter is hard and soft. The hard power stems from the curator’s role as a gatekeeper, deciding who is included and excluded from the conversation. The soft power is in the ensuing ability to steer the conversation, set the agenda, and influence public opinion. In other words, the effective curator will drive social change.
It’s a power dynamic that inverts the geopolitical rule where soft power is derived from hard power. In curation, the stronger the soft power — the ability to influence what people should pay attention to and how they should think and feel about it — the greater their hard power: their grip on the lock, their authority to say no.
Over the past year, working on a book on curation, I have interviewed more than 30 curators — art and conference curators, creative directors, Instagram influencers, radio hosts, coders, and genetic engineers — and all agreed that saying no is at the core of the curatorial ethos. Saying no defines what matters.
The curator must choose carefully and protect firmly. They must maintain an intimate relationship between themselves and the objects of their curation so it can be intimate for the audience, too. The curator must resist all temptations to talk too much, do too much, show too much, mean too much.
Humility is key: the curator must acknowledge that they are never more important than the artist, idea, or object they present.
They must examine their biases, whilst, humbly, accepting that curation without bias is not possible.
They must stay infinitely curious and remain open to all ideas — then present those they pick and truly believe in with all the conviction and persuasion they can muster.
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This essay was first published as House of Beautiful Business Beauty Shot. Subscribe here.
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