You Are Not a Curator

The Information Superabundance. It flows all around us and drowns us. It saturates our increasingly mobile computers. It follows us around through our increasingly powerful phones. It engorges our still-infuriating television. It invades more and more space.

It managed to turn the music industry inside out. It turned the film industry into a paranoid delusional inmate. It scares the living daylights out of the newspaper and journalism industry. It has proved the fiction publishing industry to be delightfully stubborn.

In response to the Superabundance, the buzzword has become “curator”. There’s too much stuff and even that stuff is being repeated so how do we get to the good stuff? Well, curators just select stuff, don’t they? We need curators to sort this stuff out for us. The definition of a curator is becoming mutated. So, I’ve come up with the carefully designed test.

Ask yourself: Am I a curator?

The correct answer is: If you had to ask yourself that, you are not a curator.

You are, at best, a filter. You may make a name for yourself by excelling at some kind of selection process, but you are not a curator. “Curator” does not mean “I have good taste”. That just makes you some kind of fleshy gauze for the rest of us. The good come to us whilst all the pus and snot that came through your information media streams stay on your side. You are a makeshift step before a more advanced algorithm is invented.

Also, anyone calling themselves a “curator” when it is clear that they are dealing in merchandise should have their thumbs removed. You are not trying to fool us into believing that your job is anything outside marketing, branding and selling. Be proud of what you do without assigning the make-believe title of “curator” to sound more important. You have not reached some cultural apex through the range of shoes you have on offer. You are not a Connoisseur of a Stock-Take.

You Are Not a Curator. Don’t worry, there’s no shame. Just keep repeating it to yourself. You aren’t an editor of a newspaper by just simply choosing what articles to print. You aren’t an army general by simply shouting, “Charge”. So an inflated sense of worth in your Pick ‘n’ Mix does not a curator make.

I have becoming increasingly frustrated by the nonsense being stuck to the term “Curator” because people struggle to find the word for “Someone (Else) to Sort Through This Rubbish”. I still maintain that a curator, a job with actual skills, is starting to be abused by people from industries notorious for abusing definitions. This is why I sometimes despair at my Museopunk group when they start straying into territory that I covered in the Death of the Curator articles and calling it punk. It’s all well and good to get lots of involvement from your visitors/users/patrons/etc. but if you don’t have it based around an honest-to-God curator, do you know what you end up with?

Reality television. Prove me wrong. Very high participation from an audience who get to crowdsource the answers/outcomes/selections to the most base and voyeuristic products of the underculture.

I believe an antidote to this may well be Nina Simon’s new book, THE PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM. At the very centre of everything Nina says in this book is the curator (or more specifically, museum staff) as facilitator, designer and collaborator. Not just a presenter, as I fear curators will become when someone thinks participation means voting for favourites.

I warn you again; there needs to be a proper handle on curatorship before others start claiming it or misrepresenting it (I’m looking at you, U.S. NEWS). The very notion of a museums is integrated with the action of analytical thought. We go to museums to define ourselves, the world and the civilisation around us. If the curator is devalued cheapened through this woolly thinking then museums could lose all respect as cultural bastions. When I asked what the most important function of curators was, we saw how complex and varied the job was and not a single person said “selecting“.