Overall, these perceptions are shaped in the process of cultural exchange, where consumer taste and preferences are negotiated in various hierarchies of prestige and where culture is deployed as an economic resource that creates understandings of class (Skeggs, 2013). For Beverly Skeggs, class is not just an objective category but is expressed in symbolic struggles; the middle class, as a desirable ideological apparatus for hailing working class and subaltern populations into the system of consumption, has therefore “no frontiers other than those continually produced and transformed through struggle, and these cannot be defined abstractly” (2013: 5). This is an important insight in terms of ethically or generally curated consumption because the symbolic frontiers of class-making are constantly reshaped and rearticulated. For example, as we will see in later chapters, in curated consumption there is a strong emphasis on the authentic, the genuine, and the meaningful. To be authentic, therefore, in what you choose to buy is a trope for both performing middle-class values and for mediating contemporary understandings middleclassness (see Chapter 5).
There is also a valorization of the “genuine”, which is opposed to both pretension and restraint and which is seen as a real moral value, rather than simply as fun; hence the middle-class interest in the authentic object and the authenticity of the other.
Curating and Platforms
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