Curation merges artification with the imaginary of organization, in contrast to that of the artistic; the curatorial is more pragmatic and its rationale is structured by practices of setting up, arranging, networking, administrating. The curatorial thus bears fewer connotations of an independent creative process, free from institutional constraints, than the artistic does, including its reliance on market institutions, sponsorship, and funding, which are essential aspects for the curatorial mandate. To simply bring in the process of artification, for instance, to speak about the organizers of AirBnB Experiences or apps that promise to make you “the most interesting person in the room” by customizing the news you read,2 fails to account for the new business models that entrepreneurs of the platform economy should undertake or for the organizational labor standing behind inspirational content. Similarly, in the self-help and wellness literature (Chapter 6), the construction of the self is not simply an aesthetic process; it is also operational, rational, and guided— setting up the ideal of a higher better version of the self. In other words, if the artistic is magic and the organizational is logic, the curatorial is somewhere in between, combining rational decision-making with contingency, lack, and serendipity.
This chapter places curation in its historical, ideological, and afective registers as it plays out in contemporary mediascapes. I start with a brief historical overview of the curator, from their administrative function in ancient Rome and spiritual role in the Christian Church to that of an expert knowledge worker in museums. In this latter role, apart from caring about objects, curators group them together under narratives of historical, stylistic, or archaeological anchoring points. I focus on these expert narratives from the perspective of material culture highlighting the negotiation of values in institutional formations and human interaction. In this regard, a museum object amalgamates wider networks of expert knowledge to become a document of something that human societies regard as valuable. In this sense, there is a degree of contingency between a museum object, or any materiality, and its cultural and symbolic value.
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
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