I should then say from the start that the omnipresence of curating, as I understand it here, is not merely linked to the increase in the usage and trafic of the very word “curation” and its linguistic derivatives. This book will discuss how this omnipresence echoes a larger cultural economic logic that exceeds the employment of the particular word(s). It is a logic of value production which, via forms of selection, narration, and expertise, mediates labor practices, self-identification, and patterns of consumption intertwined with techno-social afordances and the impositions of platform capitalism.3 I will speak in more detail about how I employ platform capitalism in Section 1.2 and in Chapter 3, but for the sake of clarity let us now say that the term intends to highlight the centrality of platforms in the circulations of the digital economy, that is, of corporate digital infrastructures of data extraction which bring together multisided markets, with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta being some of the leading examples (Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Srnicek, 2017). Platforms mobilize the mass production and circulation of communications (that they then capture as data and value), efecting in what Mark Andrejevich describes as “infoglut”, a disorienting social space of constantly contested meaning and information narratives (2013: 38). In order to generate new forms of value, platforms ofer curatorial afordances to everyday users or themselves ofer curated services. Platform capitalism, I assume, is a dominant productivity model which privileges, encourages, and generates “cultures” in the anthropological sense, that is, forms of interaction, values, meaning, and symbol-making. I use the term “curation” as an overarching concept that allows us to speak about and shed light on these cultures.
Based on these initial assumptions, I conceptualize curation around two main axes that will interweave and feed of each other throughout this book, and the areas to which I apply the term—fashion, food, and life coaching (Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively). First, curation is a free-floating signifier sounding vaguely positive (similarly to say “creativity”), the employment of which indicates a progressive, forward-looking activity. Curation is an art-related concept that suggests sophistication and up-to-datedness and thus potentially generates customer desire across media markets. This, as I will show in Chapter 2, owes to the global ascent and popularization of the contemporary art curator, an independent, semi-institutional and authorial persona that both creates and organizes.4 In the artworld, the ascent of the curator to a creator-auteur, instead of merely an institutional worker, owes itself to the institutionalization of avant-garde art since the 1960s (I refer to the employment of Duchamp and Warhol as suggestive figures of this process throughout the book). Curation implies a guided creativity instead of a chaotic one, a more prudent form of creativity that triggers bohemianbourgeois or middle-class aspirations. Curators are perceived as neither boring bureaucrats, like blue- and white-collar workers or nerdy academics, nor autonomous workers, like artists. They speak about “posthumanism over pizza”, to refer to the curator boyfriend of the Elle article, and are simultaneously self-reflective, knowledgeable, organized, and partygoers, to refer to the protagonist of the film The Square. In this sense, this first axis looks at distributed curating in relation to the popularization of the term itself, which inscribes, as I will suggest, the afective and historical registers of creativity and organization at once, which correspond to some of the hegemonic subjective investments in contemporary capitalism.5
Introducing the Curatorial Imperative
5