There is yet another reason why the ascent of the media curator is not irrelevant to the ascent of the contemporary art curator as a professional category. The curatorial logic of selecting and framing objects under an expert narrative has been embedded in contemporary art curation, the histories of art, and the readymade and the contingent object of contemporary art, at least since Duchamp. Yet this is also a key productive logic of neoliberalism and platform capitalism, as we shall see in the next chapter. For instance, the mandate to organize one’s practices, emotions, and life paths as if these were part of a narrative—as I defined distributed curation earlier—is a larger social imperative of platformized lives. The incorporation of this logic is not a deviation from a “real” curatorial norm as the norm itself is constituted through this logic; it is simply part of the process of expanding the market economy into more spheres of life. Curation, as a social technology which incorporates the artistic and the organizational, promises a re-enchantment of a world pervaded by computerized rationality through the guidance of an expert, a micro-guru of knowledge who can tell how to discover uniqueness amid the chaos. Finally, the engagement with the term is not just a mistreatment but arises out of the market necessity of unceasingly inventing new regimes of value. The necessity to invent regimes of value sets in motion concepts to linguistically accompany these regimes. While the two can be thought of independently, there is a dialectical relationship between the name which market actors use to describe their activity (“curation”) and the activity itself, that is, making value out of organized narratives in platform capitalism. It is in this latter configuration that we will now turn our attention to.
Notes
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
45