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# Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

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Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies

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5 The Babushka–Nonna Experience Curated Authenticities and the Aspirational Gastronomical Imaginary

5.1 Biennials and Babushkas

In November 2021, I enrolled for a private tour of the main venue of the 6th Ural Industrial Biennale (UB6) taking place in the center of Yekaterinburg in the Ural region of Russia. The venue of this tour was Salute Cinema, a constructivist architectural monument whose avant-garde history conversed with popular culture as the cinema entered the Guinness Book of Records for the longest showing of a single film in history. This film was the James Cameron blockbuster Titanic (1997), which Salute showed for eight years due to its unprecedented demand, with visitors often watching it several times. The co-existence of Soviet avant-garde architectural legacies and Hollywood’s sensationalism was, no doubt, a perfect narrative entry point to the biennial and was the first thing mentioned by my exhibition guide, Gleb. However, Gleb was not an ordinary guide he was a “mediator”: “Do you know the diference between a guide and a mediator?”,1 he asked, to which I replied, “No, I do not.” He explained the diference between these two figures as the following:

You know the babushkas (grandmothers) which are traditionally working as attendants in Soviet-style museums, right? When you ask these babushkas a question they would usually reply in a rigid and pedantic manner. The museum guides, too, navigate the same rigid paradigm, which is very diferent to what we do here. The museum guide belongs to the world of babushkas, as they explain what the work is about, in contrast to the mediator for whom there is no correct or wrong interpretation of the work. The mediators discuss interpretations together with the viewer.2

Indeed, during the tour, Gleb asked for my opinion on several occasions: “What do you think Russia should do with its Soviet monuments?”, he asked in relation to Clemens von Wedemeyer’s work Open Objects. “What do you think about performing ritual dances to opera music?”, he asked in relation to Clément Cogitore’s film where a group of mostly black dancers re-enact the Enlightenment opera piece Les Indes Galantes in a style owing to the black

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-7

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riots in California in the 1990s. For Gleb and the UB6, mediation is a process open to the viewer’s feedback, quite the opposite of the babushka model where the rigid explanation of what “the artist wants to say” prevails. In its paralyzing stifness, the babushka model was too close-minded, too conservative, too sclerotic to adapt to the viewer’s feedback.

The same day, however, I encountered a babushka, whose uncompromising stifness was mobilized as a key asset in the experience economy instead of discarded as old school. This was a local Airbnb Experience titled PELMENI WITH BABUSHKA (capitalized in the original), where pelmeni refers to a traditional Russian ravioli-like dish. According to this Experience, the visitor pays 5,000 rubles (around €60 at the time) for a 2.5-hour training session led by a babushka on how to cook hand-made, authentic pelmeni, which they would eat with local beverages. While it was implied that the babushka was the organizer’s grandmother, her picture was absent from the advertisement so that it could be potentially any babushka: a generic babushka, as the floating signifier “babushka” was mobilized to uplift the practice of cooking. The concepts surrounding this signifier, including rigidity and inflexibility, were here mobilized positively, denoting authenticity and dedication.

No doubt, for the biennial world of mediators, it would probably be cringeworthy—rather than cool—to mobilize the babushka as a prop for gaining status; yet for the world of experience tourism the babushka was the perfect prop. I wrote a message to Katya, the organizer of this Experience, to clarify the presence of this totemic figure—the babushka—in the event and book an Experience. Katya got back to me with bad news: unfortunately, the babushka could not cook with us because of the COVID-19 escalation in Yekaterinburg at the time of visiting but she and her friend could guide the cooking experience of pelmeni instead. However, the babushka’s absence made the Experience look uninteresting as an ethnographic event and, in an ironic reversal of the terms, turned the Experience too generic, almost unauthentic: “Why”, one could ask, “learn how to cook pelmeni from a young Airbnb entrepreneur and her friend?” The babushka was the figure gluing the unique character of the Experience together, as it ofered a story to narrate that could be shared with oneself and others; she was the curatorial linchpin around which the food Experience revolved.

Both these instances—the biennial and the Airbnb Experience—are part of the same urban plateau of the creative economy, referring, however, to diferent types of creativity that correspond to diferent worlds of production and consumption. If the biennial is part of the highbrow, conceptual milieu, as seen in the previous chapter, then the Airbnb Experience actors are lifestyle entrepreneurs conceiving themselves or their immediate surroundings “as a form of capital to be invested, and of their income as the return on such investment” (Bandinelli, 2020: 5). Katya mobilized a generically authentic babushka as a form of symbolic capital whose investment could yield financial capital by tapping into the experiencescapes of contemporary tourism (Mossberg, 2008; Mei, Hågensen and Kristiansen, 2020). Contrary to highbrow actors aiming for the niche, luxury, and sophisticated worlds— intellectually, artistically, or economically—the target in Airbnb is mass society and curation is customer-oriented.

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In this chapter, I look at curatorial practices on platform and wider cultural economies as they move from the exclusive to the less exclusive and from atmospheres of highbrow coolness to experiences with locality and authenticity. This, of course, does not mean that food does not have a luxury side similar to fashion; luxury gastronomic experiences are conceptual, deconstructive, and photogenic, as we shall discuss in more detail in Section 5.5, inhabiting canons and norms of prestige. These include world-famous restaurants, like Noma in Copenhagen, prestigious prizes, like Michelin stars, celebrity chefs, like Salt Bae and preferred gastronomical patterns, like ethical food. Underneath and beyond these canons and norms, there are millions of curated gastronomic practices with a less elite address and varying degrees of curation unfurling in hyped urban neighborhoods or in everyday social media accounts. Despite the diferences, we can argue that these food practices share some common features in the age of platform cultural economies: (a) food is performed as a form of distinction instead of simply a biological need, (b) there is an emphasis on locality and authenticity, and (c) there is a tendency to artify food, for instance via stylized dish photos uploaded in platforms, expert language in menus, food and restaurant descriptions, and an emphasis on dish design.

I start this chapter by delving into the business literature on the experience economy as it is a key site for understanding Airbnb Experiences and the wider entrepreneurialization of food from the perspective of capital (e.g., Gilmore and Pine, 2007; Pine and Gilmore, 2011; 2013; Lewis and Bridger, 2011). The idea of staging experiences recalls Böhme’s concept of atmospheres that we discussed in the previous chapter. While these obviously depart from diferent disciplinary traditions, the critical exploration of the experience economy ofers a better understanding of Böhme’s concept, as it helps contextualize the purposeful enactment of atmospheres in entrepreneurial enterprises. In the next section, I focus more specifically on food and discuss the ideals of new upper- and middle-class gastronomical imaginary, which, according to the theorist Margot Finn, revolves around cosmopolitanism, purity, sophistication, and thinness (2019). I argue that the food-experience economy capitalizes on these ideals, which take global visibility through media platforms. These ideals are embodied in celebrity chefs, culinary contests, and diet plans, among others, where the practice of eating, drinking, or cooking is recontextualized so that it acquires meaning. In the last sections, I look at two case studies of authentic and post-authentic food economies—a virtual cooking class with an Italian grandmother, a nonna, and the reframing of tradition in the gourmet scene in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece. In both cases, platforms allow for performing the dish as a work of art via photos and elaborate descriptions which promise unique and memorable food experiences.

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5.2 Experiences and Authenticity in Business Literature

Katya’s mobilization of the babushka as a means to curate an Airbnb Experience is evocative of a business literature that, at least since the late 1990s, has emphatically dealt with the concept of “experience” and its commodification. This literature suggests that economizing experiences is the business answer to the new hyper-informational world that renders consumption homogenous and unexciting (e.g., Lewis and Bridger, 2011; Pine and Gilmore, 2011). The idea of experience as a separate economic unit was popularized in 1999 [2011] with the book The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, whose influence has been significant in marketing, tourism, and management studies. Pine and Gilmore suggest that businesses need to think of themselves as theatrical settings that can provide experiences to the emerging new customer of the information age, who is increasingly willing to pay for narratives, memories, and unique moments. The atmosphere around consumption, to repeat Böhme’s critical thesis, marks its potential for economic exchange. Pine and Gilmore ofer the example of cofee beans; when harvested they cost 1–2 cents per cup, when sold as a good in a store they cost up to 25 cents per cup, when sold in a fast food chain they costs up to 50 cents per cup, and when ofered in a café in Saint Marco’s Square in Venice the same quantity of cofee can reach up to 15 dollars. This dramatic price diference between a fast-food chain and a café in Saint Marco, the authors argue, occurs because in the latter the consumer has a memorable story to tell; while the actual drinking experience of the two is almost the same, the atmosphere around “Saint Marco” curates a unique moment that increases the experience’s value.3

Pine and Gilmore, however, go a step further arguing that the economization of experiences is key for maintaining a global regime of capital accumulation and growth,4 stressing in the updated edition of the book in 2011 that “goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity” (2011: ix); even more dramatically, they later claim that the focus on goods and services “leads down the road of economic austerity” as experiences hold “the key to promoting economic prosperity” (2013: 20). Companies should be staging themselves “as in a theatrical play” (Pine; Gilmore, 2011: 3), as the consumers should sense, remember, and communicate the products. In a saturated world of sameness and information overload, the capacity to frame a product around memorable stories is a professional skill for winning the hearts and wallets of the consumers. Or, as in the example with which we started this chapter, the consumer does not pay for cooking pelmeni but pays for cooking pelmeni with babushka, which promises the feeling of “cooking authentically”.5 As we shall see later, with the purposeful selection of rare and local ingredients in restaurant curation, the feeling of “cooking authentically” codifies a sense of sophistication and prestige that subsequently negotiates forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1987).

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The argument in Pine and Gilmore’s book has been employed in diverse business settings, from retail shops to theme parks, giving rise to a new field of marketing, customer experience marketing, where the focus of potential monetization regards the experiential relation the consumer builds with economic oferings. In this broader employment of Pine and Gilbert’s idea, the consumer should generally feel pleasant when they consume, as “ugly feelings” may prevent them from spending money and time (Ngai, 2007). At the heart of this business imperative then is the experiencification of consumer time, which is time mediated by capital. For instance, Sanat Rao (2021), a Chief Business Oficer writing for Forbes, exalts the persisting potential of the experience economy (“The Future Is Experience”), arguing that the currency of the new consumer is time: in a hectic metropolitan context, consumers have to calculate whether time spent in economic activities is worth it and assess future transactions accordingly.6 This drive of capital to compartmentalize time into commodifiable moments has the efect of shrinking free time, that is, the time not policed by commodity relations. For instance, a curated two-and-a-half-hour tour that specializes “in the most Instagram-worthy sights around Athens downtown”7 occurs at the expanse of the time that could have been spent discovering the city by simply roaming around; if the latter’s time is up to a degree free from the commodity relation, the former subsumes time into it. There is yet a further demand from this experiencified time, as the time spent in an Experience should ideally connect to the future as potential investment, in the sense that spending experiencified time should yield cultural or symbolic capital (e.g., raising one’s status, expertise, social circle, networks) so that the future looks more uplifting. The Experience guarantees that posting these Instagram-worthy highlights from Athens would gather more positive reactions than posting “ordinary” ones. Or, in the case of the babushka, the Experience implies the possibility of unique stories, memories, tags, and pictures that can magnify one’s cultural or symbolic capital among social media followers and friends. As the virtual and the physical interweave, experiencified time—which is ideally all time under the regime of capitalist consumption—is heavily marked by the question of aspirational investment, in other words, experiencified time colonizes the future; rather than time simply spent on present gratification, it is time spent as a future venture mediated by the commodity relation.

The drive to experiencify time corresponds to the internal dynamics of capital accumulation and growth for continuously bestowing value upon previously non-commodified areas of social and biological life in order to avoid social crises, delegitimization, or collapse. Given the physical constraints that the environment sets for unlimited growth (e.g., Harvey, 2007), capital needs to intensify consumer desire by colonizing the emotional, communicative, linguistic, biological, and cognitive capacities of human beings as evermore spheres are subsumed to the value relation and the sociality of capital (Virno, 2004; Harvie and De Angelis, 2009). In this regard, the experiencification of time interweaves into the fabric of social reality as it attempts to colonize free time and the feelings, thoughts, and lifepaths connected to it. In a disorienting world of the constant outpouring of information, the curation of experiences in the form of memorable moments taps into the broader demand “for meaning in life” in the form of stories that captivate (Mei, Hågensen, and Kristiansen, 2020: 94). The stories around “I cooked pelmeni with babushka” are richer, more unique, and more unusual than the stories around “I cooked pelmeni”. The storytelling involving a babuskha tells us that I have spent my time in a memorable way as I participated in something local and authentic. This is not to say that the babushka, or the nonna who we discuss later, are themselves driving this process; on the contrary, they are productive vessels in an expanded labor regime that capitalizes on their properties. Both the physical persons and their properties are used to perform platform work for a globalizing gastronomical imaginary that regards originality, locality, and authenticity as signs of superiority (see also next section).

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To win the soul of such new consumers, as the marketing literature argues, businesses then need to move “from abundance to authenticity” (Lewis and Bridger, 2011: 6), that is “learn to understand, manage, and excel at rendering authenticity” (Gilmore and Pine, 2007: 3) and ofer real services that would satisfy a new consumer’s “quest for authenticity” (Lewis and Bridger, 2011: 6). In their later Authenticity: What the Consumers Really Want, a book aiming to “help executives, managers, and workers see the world diferently and thereby figure out what to do about it” (2007: xii), Pine and Gilbert posit authenticity as the main resource for a flourishing experience economy. As in the previous book, the authors are here categorical from the start: “Now more than ever, the authentic is what consumers really want, […and] organizations today must learn to understand, manage, and excel at rendering authenticity” (Gilmore and Pine, 2007: xii). Their reasoning of why authenticity is vital for business is indicative of how this new managerial ethos perceives the social tensions of the disorienting information landscape: tensions are simply a further opportunity for capitalization. In the world of internet, avatars, and virtuality, reality becomes “a scarce resource”, for Pine and Gilmore (2007: 18), and thus experiences of living irreplaceable moments are in high demand. The more fakeness traverses every aspect of social life, from political lies and corporate deceit to broken educational institutions, and futile non-profit organizations, the more consumers are under the suspicion that they live in a Matrix-like world. For Pine and Gilmore, the rise of lifestyle politics, as in New Age, spiritualism, mindfulness, and wellness programs, is a further indication that the search for meaning is in high demand (2007: 28). Like all prudent capitalists, however, Pine and Gilmore do not seek political solutions to this frustrating condition (for instance, in enhanced civic participation) but suggest capitalizing on social dissatisfaction for generating further profit. If people feel “faked” by everyone around them and the demand for authenticity is high, why do businesses not jump into this grim bandwagon and sell “reality”? Pine and Gilmore, however, in a Baudrillardian twist, argue that when it comes to developing authentic products, the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity does not matter; what matters instead is “the customer perception of authenticity” (Gilmore and Pine, 2007: 3). In this sense, as we shall see later with the examples of cooking and restaurants, authenticity is a matter of the customer’s perception, and thus it can be adjusted to customer demand, which usually derives from an already formulated middleclass habitus.

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These authentic-seekers, for the marketing researchers Ian Seymour Yeoman and Una McMahon-Beattie, aspire to an “alternative to the perceived ‘homogenisation’ of contemporary culture, food, and leisure experiences” (2019: 116), as they simply want to be diferent. The experiences they desire should have “clear links to a place, time, or culture”, that is experiences that are “produced in a traditional way, that are unique, and that have a genuine story behind them” (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2019: 115). Yet the quest for authenticity cannot be seen as categorically separated from other consumer micro-trends in the experience economy, including what Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie call the “fluid identity” or the “everyday exceptional” (2019: 116). For example, the quest for authentic food may be just one quest out of several for a consumer who perceives their identity as “fluid”, that is one who buys both low-end and occasionally high-end and makes hybrid consumer choices. Or it may be part of a consumer behavior defined as “everyday exceptional”, that is of consumer behaviour that is characterized by constantly pursuing occasions to break the everyday routine (2019: 116). In other words, the quest for authenticity is a non-linear, distributed practice across urban and middle-class milieus rather than an identity strictly corresponding to a particular group of consumers (similarly to the aspirational class as I argue below).

The consumption of authenticity can grant a romantic sense to reality, and assembles, in this sense, a “romantic view of consumption”, reminiscent of the first travel and hospitality encounters of Northern Europeans in the 19th century involving orientalizing exotic places (Makkar and Yap, 2022: 3464; see also Buck-Morss, 1987). Romanticism, as a cultural and artistic movement, emerged as a reaction to industrial modernity and historically assumed various political forms, either regressive or progressive. The experience economy mobilizes a romanticism devoid of political narratives apart from the single incitement to consume. To go back to the babushka example, she acts as a promise of authenticity, a communicable sign that can provide the self and others a moment of alleged transgression from supposedly inauthentic, industrialized food practices. This transgression from the norm guarantees an individual encounter with romanticism packaged as a commodity that can turn into a badge of authenticity shared visually or orally with acquaintances, friends, and followers. Devoid of a political vision, such as that of movements challenging dominant eating practices, including the slow food movement or even dumpster diving, romanticism is here exclusively a business imperative. Authentic consumers expect to be enchanted by consumption and give themselves over “to something greater than the self”, thereby becoming part of an encounter that transgresses the profit motive or, even better, “becoming part of the enchanted object or lifestyle” (Makkar and Yap, 2022: 3462). Food authenticity, as we will see in the next section, is part of a difused gastronomic imaginary which gives rise to questions of identity, class, and selfhood.

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5.3 Aspirational Food and the Gastronomical Imaginary

As we discussed in Chapter 3, the aspirational consumer is the ideal consumer group for engaging with curated content and thus for engaging with aspirational food practices. In this section, I specifically look at the aspirational consumer and their gastronomical imaginary in the context of what Margot Finn calls in Discriminating Taste the “food revolution” of the past decades (2019: 6). For Finn, the food revolution is assigning social status to food according to four central ideals: “sophistication, thinness, purity, and cosmopolitanism” (2019: 20). In platformized cultural production, the food revolution appears as an expert discourse, communicated by authorized social agents, including critics, celebrities, influencers, star chefs, and pundits, who regulate not only what “good taste” is but also what kind of food and dietary arrangements correspond to ideal, beautiful, and ethical bodies. In this way, the practices of eating, drinking, or cooking are recontextualized as carriers of distinction-based meaning. The popular figure of the foodie is evocative in this regard, as it refers to “somebody who thinks about food not just as biological sustenance, but also as a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle” (Johnston and Baumann, 2014: 2), that is, to someone whose diet is suggestive of their overall “self”. Expert gastronomical discourse transforms the thinking and practicing around certain foods and drinks by defining what is more and what is less appropriate to do with them. For instance, “[b]eing interested in wine”, in the context of wineries, wine tasters, and wine seminars, classes, and schools, “became a sign of refinement instead of addiction, impoverishment, or the dangerous— if sometimes alluring—sensuality and lack of self-control associated with wine-drinking immigrants” (Finn, 2019: 4; see also Inglis and Almila, 2019; Inglis, 2022). To know about wine and especially wine in its global dimension is a sign of sophistication and cosmopolitanism rather than addictive or potentially problematic behavior. In the age of mass communication and platforms, this expert gastronomical discourse becomes an everyday—rather than an exceptional—encounter. Yet it is often the elites that legitimize it rather than everyday people. Celebrities, for instance, are key in the proliferation of certain food patterns and they can both embody and propagate the proper food ideals. Finn mentions how in American popular culture of recent years, a president-celebrity like Barack Obama was the epitome of the foodie in particular via “his afinity for gourmet or upscale foods […] his body size and its relationship to his eating habits and health […] his knowledge of natural foods […and] his appreciation for diverse regional and ethnic cuisines” (2019: 20). Both a president with refined taste as well as a “man of the people”, Obama personified ethical values, healthy choices, and sophisticated style in his gastronomical persona. This persona encountered audiences with middle-class habitus or aspirations for a lifestyle of “critical eating”, that is, the experience of eating as a “form of collective belonging and meaning making” (Mihalache, 2016: 318) rather than merely a response to body instincts and being hungry.

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