Finally, the book aimed to contextualize the ascent of curation from the realm of art to a dominant cultural trope by pointing to the wider social logic it inhabits. Distributed curation, as this book argued, is not a market aberration vis-à-vis art curation but an expansion of the latter’s logic of value production. Businesses embrace this logic of value production in the realm of economic transactions for boosting market value, while for audiences and users it becomes an imperative pertaining to the question of what stories to tell about oneself to oneself and others. The term “imperative” here signifies a push in a direction, instead of a totalizing and overpowering regime. As with all social injunctions, the curatorial imperative is an efect of hegemonic economic, technological, and social forces. Via this imperative, platform capitalism shapes an anthropological condition across contemporary mediascapes and beyond, a homo curatorius whose embodiment of the “story you should be telling on your own” informs desirable horizons of class, status, and belonging. Its logic encompasses diverse spheres ranging from high-brow art and the fashion world to low-brow experience economies and economies of authenticity, from confidence cultures and pick-up artists to algorithmic rationalities. To put these diverse spheres under the umbrella of homo curatorius is to underscore how the questions of who to be, how to appear, and what to consume—the imperative to curate and be curated, the logic of guiding one’s practices, emotions, and life paths as if these will lead to a higher vision or concept of the self—cut through various spheres of contemporary platform cultures. It is a globalizing yet situated mandate where the artification of social and economic life—creativity, art, and design—meets the rationality of the market actor, rational consumer choice, and the spirit of entrepreneurialism. To curate and to be curated in the context of platform capitalism marks socializing processes of (especially) urban subjectivities surrounded by a seemingly abundant choice. If anything, it deepens the preoccupation with the self as the fundamental unit of analysis, which requires constant examination and reflection amid bewildering social complexity.
Note
1 The Runpee app: https://runpee.com/
References
Concluding Thoughts
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