Californian ideology as described by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996) yet lacking the countercultural and communitarian twist that the latter upheld, at least in its earlier years. If Californian ideology amounts to a “blend of libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and technoutopian visions” (Turner, 2008: 208), then the curatorial imaginary voids out counter-aesthetic and political visions in favor of a positivist, technoutopian prophecy with an exclusively entrepreneurial outlook. In the digital marketing and business literature as well as in the countless online guides of the past decade with titles such as, “what media curation is” or “how to curate content”, platform curation and its satellite terms—internet curation, digital curation, social media curation, brand curation—relate entirely to business solutions (e.g., Rosenbaum, 2011; 2014; Bhaskar, 2016). In this discourse, curating, curation, curated, and curator denote activities of selecting, displaying, and authorizing content, including music, food, or film, so as to raise the value of a service or to make it more attractive to buyers; the language used is unashamedly entrepreneurial, with constant references to brands, networking, leadership, profit, and target audiences. Having been detached from the critical edge of the histories of museum and gallery space, the curator here becomes a blanket-title of an empowered, mediasavvy, entrepreneurial expert, who can package the best for their clients or followers. As the curator moves from galleries to hashtags, there is a marked shift from curation as an activity intervening in the public sphere, or a sort of Bildung enterprise of civic cultivation, to curation as a streamlined activity for generating market value.
There is an understandable discomfort among professional art curators and critics about the seizure of the term,10 suggesting that the market is abusing the more ethical or morally elevated practice of gallery curation. In the 2017 article, Curating and the End of Professions, Lianne McTavish aptly captures this discomfort as now even “a dry-cleaning business”, that is an ordinary profit-making enterprise, “boasts of its ability to curate your laundry”:
How can these diverse and in some cases rather mundane activities be considered curating? Why does the verb “to curate” continue to be used so broadly, with apparently little regard for the skills, education, and training of professional curators?
(2017: 181)
On top of this, there is another abuse, McTavish continues, as media curators snub down the history of art curating not only by having “little to do with the identity of the professional curator” but also by considering it “largely irrelevant if not entirely defunct” (2017: 188); while “real” curators are the ones who have degrees, education, and knowledge on the subject of museums, media curators are sort of disrespectful imposters. This appropriation signals the broader blurring of the professional roles in advanced capitalism, as job titles are fluid—if not irrelevant—in the context of a “post-professional world” (McTavish, 2017: 183).
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
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