Contemporary curating has become an absurdity. Outfits are curated. Salads are curated. Twitter feeds are curated. Bennington College in Vermont invites prospective students to curate their applications. Lorde was appointed “sole curator” of the most recent Hunger Games film’s soundtrack. Everyone is a curator these days. Lakehead Superior State University in Michigan has placed “curator”, “curated” and “to curate” on its 2015 list of banished words. “Since when does one ‘curate’ a list of wine or a selection of salami?” asks StiperGuy on the message board of popular foodie site Chowhound.com. “You curate a museum, or perhaps the art collection of a billionaire.”
Yet to examine the etymology and history of the word “curate” is to find a direct, fascinating link between the professional curator and her pop culture counterpart, engaged in the activity of selecting and displaying. It is also to discover important, perhaps unsettling things about how we currently understand value, and ourselves.
The curator has always been a bit of an amateur. In ancient Rome, where curatores and procurates were charged with the care (cura) of public works or minors or the mentally disabled or foreign territories, the title was largely honorific, a means of promotion. In the medieval church, the curate, centuries later made famous by George du Maurier’s 1895 Punch cartoon that coined the phrase “curate’s egg”, occupied a junior and, according to Du Maurier’s cartoon, sycophantic position. The groundbreaking curators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were dealers, artists and museum directors.
The idea of the contemporary curator originates with the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. Here, curators had motley backgrounds: the Swiss Harald Szeemann was a theatre director; Americans Walter Hopps and Seth Siegelaub were a jazz booker and a plumber respectively. These figures produced exhibitions, texts, even beautifully designed invitations and posters in an attempt to advocate for and make concrete what many saw as insubstantial and confusing. At times they literally gave value to thin air. Siegelaub exhibited Robert Barry, whose Inert Gas Series consisted of the artist releasing gases into the atmosphere.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the transitive-verb form of “to curate” – as in, “he curated a collection of hats” – to the performance-art scene of the early 80s. Other nascent uses pertain to music festivals. In both cases, an audience is integral. The curator gives value to things but also, crucially, performs value – conscious of onlookers.
In the 90s, major art institutions, underfunded and hungry for the attention of donors and audiences, enlisted contemporary curators to roll out the welcome mat. Curators helped institutions collect contemporary work and were behind the major trends of that decade: participatory art, installation art and the renaissance of biennials – temporary exhibitions with global tourism mandates, more than 40 of which were inaugurated in that decade alone. The curator had become the art world’s ambassador extraordinaire.
At the end of the 90s and into the 2000s, pop culture followed suit. The internet offered ever-proliferating data and novel methods of being connected, and watched. Familiar ways of consuming culture and defining taste – such as buying LPs, CDs and books and displaying them on shelves – were falling away.
Two groundbreaking pop-culture “curators” at the turn of the millennium were Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. Stewart’s updated version of 1950s domesticity assumed every corner of one’s home was to be manicured, appraised and surveilled. (Stewart’s successor, Gwyneth Paltrow, does this with her blog Goop, extending such scrutiny to women’s lives and bodies.) Oprah’s Book Club resurrected sales of decades-old classics through simple cover redesigns and the imprimatur of the club’s sticker. Almost 20 years later, readers exhibit perfectly arranged photos of their bedside-table reads on Instagram.
The explosion of social media led to accelerated curatorial ways of thinking. Value had to be performed like never before. Users are hyper-conscious of what they want and choose, performing this for an audience of friends and strangers doing exactly the same thing, often in exactly the same way. Netflix and Amazon tell users what they’d like, based on what they’ve already liked, or what others with similar taste have liked. In the retail world, pop-up shops and artist- or celebrity-designed products lend an air of exclusivity and authority. Distinctiveness and sameness coexist fretfully.
In the art world, real curators are being supplanted by crowd-sourcing. In 2013, the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria, hosted Like It, a permanent-collection exhibition based on Facebook likes. A select group of photogenic, CEO-like celebrity curators has emerged – among them Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach – varnishing a profession in which most work long hours for little pay. Real celebrities such as Pharrell Williams, Madonna and Miley Cyrus also put on exhibitions, or at least put their names to them.
“Childhood is stolen from you with every judgment made, innocence stolen with it,” wrote Kanye West in his recent “curatorial” essay for the magazine CR Fashion Book, for which he selected a portfolio of artworks by Anish Kapoor, Richard Prince and others. Ridiculed online as lame and pretentious, West’s essay seems to me trenchant. Could it be the case that the more we curate, the more unsure of ourselves we become? To perform value is not necessarily to possess it.
• David Balzer’s Curationism is published by Pluto. He will be in conversation with Nicholas Lezard at Waterstones Piccadilly, London W1 on 27 April, and with Zoe Williams at Sutton House, London E9 on 28 April.
