--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781032023007" library_document_id: "d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406" source_sha256: "ff294dd3ca9b5a5b39076c941b15334b4f7db869335dfc45500c5e5500ae6681" pdf_physical_page_count: 177 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 30 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406?start=30&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406.md?start=30&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406.md?start=20&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406.md?start=40&limit=10" --- # Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=30 | PRINTED_PAGE=20 Chapter 4 looks at the curatorial imperative in the field of luxury fashion. More precisely, I explore what I dub “banal luxury”, which includes the milieus around the brands Balenciaga and Vetements and the designer Demna Gvasalia. I employ the concept of “the Warhol economy” to talk about the highbrow interweaving of art, fashion, avant-garde aesthetics, and the underground in these milieus, which is evocative of the interdisciplinary crisscrossing of Andy Warhol around his studio Factory. Banal luxury curates atmospheres of coolness in digital platforms that qualify a memesavvy, subversive, forward-looking, extrovert, and socially aware outlook. In the chapter, I discuss Gvasalia as a figure actualizing these elements in his self-presentations, the function of the selfie as a counterintuitive lowbrow portraiture in Vetements’ Instagram account and the launch of provocative luxury items aiming to create internet buzz especially around youth cultures. Platform connectivity and participation here are the raw materials that actors of banal luxury curate for inscribing atmospheres of streetwise coolness in luxury undertakings. Chapter 5 examines gastronomic curation as part of the economies of experience and authenticity. In particular, I look at Airbnb gastronomical experiences with grandmother instructors, which promise “real” cooking, including a Russian babushka and an Italian nonna, and the Facebook posts of a conceptual Greek restaurant, which involve elaborate dish descriptions and pictures. These cases, which echo countless others in mediatized foodscapes, curate food through forms of storytelling and which present it as a bearer of symbolic value and status. Curated gastronomical experiences ofer the consumer not only distinction fixes but also the potential to share food moments among their followers in social media. In this way, curated food and curating oneself through food are parts of the endless circulations of platform economies in which daily activities and industrial production constantly feed of each other. Chapter 6 looks at the curatorial imperative in the field of life coaching by analyzing material from podcasts, coaching school websites, and the two coaching courses I studied. I analyze both the self-curation strategies from the side of coaches as well as the curation strategies which the coaches preach in their platform-based interactions. In this regard, I look at how platformized life coaches are on the one hand curating themselves as micro-celebrities by making a claim to spiritual charisma and monetizing their services on this basis. On the other hand, I look at the narratives that coaches advocate to followers, students, and general audiences that emphasize self-curation as a quest toward personal vision and which should encompass qualities of self-discipline, confidence, and resilience. In the last section, I focus on the coaching address that aims to curate men in the intimacy and dating scene inscribing traditional gender roles in light of newly updated optimized and streamlined masculinities. I argue that the coach is an exemplary figure of the curatorial imperative as the cultures of inspiration, rationality, and self-focus they disseminate endorse adjacent curated lifestyles while helping them to curate their own professional credentials as spiritual guides in contemporary platformscapes. 20 Homo Curatorius ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=31 | PRINTED_PAGE=21 Finally, Chapter 7 summarizes the book emphasizing how the curatorial imperative confronts users with questions of who to be, how to appear, and what to consume. This questioning shapes an anthropological horizon, a homo curatorius, whose “story that you should be telling on your own” supervises desirable prospects of class, status, and belonging. Notes 1 This is according to Books Ngram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngr ams/graph?content=curating&year\_start=1800&year\_end=2019&corpus= 26&smoothing=0 2 See: www.discogs.com/fr/master/922324-Various-All-Tomorrows-Parties-31- Curated-By-Matt-Groening 3 David Balzer similarly spoke of this “curatorial impulse” as becoming a “dominant way of thinking and being” in modern societies since the 1990s (2014: 2–3). The term “impulse” implies an instinctive action or reaction that is almost uncontrollable. Similarly, the impulse to “curate and be curated” is ingrained in contemporary social worlds to the point that it is invisibilized. 4 The 2019 post by the women’s magazine Elle, arguing that the “Curator Boyfriend” was the hottest accessory of the year, is indicative of the popular understanding of curators and their lifeworlds: The Curator is endowed with qualities that include, but are not limited to: the business savvy to navigate the high-stakes art market, enough sensitivity to appreciate the latest Marina Abromovic performance piece, and the occasional invite to party on a boat with Stavros Niarchos. They’re well-read, worldly and engaged in shaping critical dialogues of our times. The kind of guy you can discuss post-humanism with over pizza, who comments on the decor while ordering you a cab but letting you split the bill. We’re about to enter a new decade, and being self-aware and socially conscious has never been more attractive. Someone who can point to a favorite Louise Bourgeois sculpture or be brought to tears looking at an El Anatsui assemblage is not only in touch with his emotions but also cares about wider social, geopolitical and cultural issues. A Curator may still ghost you, but it’s probably because he’s doing something legitimately interesting with his time, like scouting in the foothills of the Himalayas. (ELLE, 2019) 5 The theorist David Levi-Strauss argues that the curators “have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest” (2012), they crisscross modalities between the extremes of bureaucracy and spirituality, rationality and emotion, administration and care. Introducing the Curatorial Imperative 21 6 These political powers depend on the distinct places concepts occupy in wider social imagination, especially at the specific time and space when their evocation ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=32 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED occurs. To claim that there is a singular social imagination occupying the world is of course a politically problematic—if not colonial—gesture; the task of critical theory is to mobilize these concepts that efectively account for a critical view of the present, questioning structures of exploitation, capitalism, and power. 7 The chef protagonist in the film The Menu, to give an example, is not only a creative (and paranoid) genius composing eclectically élite tastes for trained palates but a rational entrepreneur conceptualizing dishes and heading an extremely demanding business. 8 The digital market, as any another market field in capitalism, demonstrates monopolistic tendencies. 9 This approach does not regard media conglomerates, entertainment corporations, and SVODs as parts of platforms as the latter are the digital manifestations of corporations and do not encourage users to create their own content. 10 In market parlance, the invention of new areas of commodification goes under more positive terms, such as “market innovation”. 11 In the post-2000s critical theory, there are varying concepts used to refer to the non-hands production in capitalism that point on how the “immaterial” aspects of labour, including emotions (Illouz, 2013), communication (Dean, 2013) and cognition (Moulier-Boutang, 2012), become a key terrain for capital’s valorization. 12 One can ask why to refer to “platform cultures” instead of capitalist or neoliberal cultures, which are relatively established terms? These terms are closely related and often I make reference to terms neoliberal or capitalist cultures throughout the book. In fact, the so-called sharing economy that platforms mobilize “appears as almost the neoliberal ideal” as it turns everyone into a potential entrepreneur (Hall, 2016: Chapter 2). By speaking specifically about the platform cultures, I want to highlight the globalizing pervasiveness of platforms in shaping contemporary cultural production and identities, which occurs independently of Western neoliberalism. Platforms are key to global cultural circulations, including those of non-liberal political formations (see also Chapter 6). References 22 Homo Curatorius ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=33 | PRINTED_PAGE=23 Introducing the Curatorial Imperative 23 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=34 | PRINTED_PAGE=24 24 Homo Curatorius ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=35 | PRINTED_PAGE=25 Introducing the Curatorial Imperative 25 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=36 | PRINTED_PAGE=26 26 Homo Curatorius ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=37 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 2 From Galleries to Hashtags The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating 2.1 Everyone Is a Curator “Imagine”, the curation guru Steven Rosenbaum tells the readers of his book Curation Nation, “a time when your love of travel, fine wines, and collectable lunch boxes each provides a revenue stream” (2011: Ch.1). “Imagine”, he continues later, that you not only get a revenue stream but also empower society, harnessing “the power of formerly powerless consumers and pick a topic, brand, or endeavor to aggregate and curate” (2011: Ch.4). Curating is not just about making money by filtering and organizing what you enjoy doing; it is also about guiding, impacting, and bringing about change. This curatorial imaginary stands at the crossroads of good taste, global travel, educative judgment, and middle-class aspirations; as a general anthropological paradigm, it celebrates innovativeness, entrepreneurialism, and nomadism while hinging on the promise to turn one’s passion into a business: curators are now as diverse as “rappers, DJs, and bloggers” and generally anyone able to “create value from personal passions and niche expertise” (Rosenbaum, 2011: Ch.1). They even entertain a higher purpose, that of purifying society, removing the garbage of digital chaos, and making sense of “all the content that others are creating” (2011: Ch.1). In Rosenbaum’s enthusiastic account, which typically echoes Silicon Valley’s tech-optimism, curating helps professionalizing your passions while empowering society. This chapter addresses and assembles this aspirational goal of contemporary curation, which involves the entrepreneurial mandates to professionalize your passion, make money, and benefit society. I argue that the spillover of this aspiration from contemporary art to media, business, and popular culture involves two complementary areas: the “artistic” and the “organizational”. The former privileges genius, inspiration, and creativity, which are traditionally art-related tropes, and the latter rationality, administration, and networking, which are tropes pertaining to organization. The artistic encompasses the afective and cultural predispositions of the figure of an independent curator, which emerged with the institutionalization of conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. If, according to the conceptualist motto, “all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually” (Kosuth, 1993: 843), then any concept perceived as appropriate by the artistic milieu can hold, one way or another, artistic value. The curator, as the author of artistic events instead of a behind-the-scenes caretaker and museum staf member, embodies the institutionalization of this “after Duchamp” moment, which has the potential to assign artistic value through selecting, arranging, describing, and displaying works (Alberro, 2004). DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-3 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=38 | PRINTED_PAGE=28 In the post-1990s globalized visual arts field, the selections, arrangements, descriptions, and displays of the independent curator are creative gestures with the potential to span from city to city and biennial to biennial, from Athens and Dakar to Taipei and Sao Paolo (O’Neill, 2016; Green and Gardner, 2016). The work of the independent curator is both intellectual and inspirational, combining the Western (and globalized) imaginary of nomadism and cosmopolitanism with attention to local sensibilities and knowledge. While the ascent of this figure to a global art mediator cannot be reduced to a single cultural-ideological paradigm, the space it primarily inhabits is linked to the Western-driven cultural and even geographical imaginary. For instance, traditional trendsetting biennials, such as documenta and the Venice Biennale, occur in contexts that favor Western and middle-class mobility and afordability, ranging from the Schengen visa requirement to familiarity with liberalintellectual codes. Western curators, or graduates from Western institutions, are disproportionally represented in international exhibitions (Philimonos and Kompatsiaris, 2021; Chao and Kompatsiaris, 2020). Similar to the 19thcentury travelers and explorers that Mary Louis Pratt describes in her book Imperial Eyes (1992), the “global”, English-speaking curator can produce the rest of the world for art-curious publics by simplifying and storifying the complexities of local “contact zones” (Pratt, 1992: 5; Buurman, 2018; Cliford, 1988). The curatorial figure and their artistic sphere already inhabit the middle-class values of education, cosmopolitanism, improvement, and a desire to map out the “other”. The artistic is certainly not exhausted in the curatorial aspirational address but has been infiltrating the political economy of capitalism in various ways at least since the 1970s, such as in the rise of mass advertising and consumption, and later the precaritization of labor and mass customization. Indicatively, and notably, Jean Baudrillard highlights the dominance of sign-value over use-value in post-war consumer societies (1998). Later cultural study theorists (drawing from Baudrillard, among others) show that the self in these consumer societies is increasingly aesthetically fashioned (e.g., Featherstone, 1987; Lash and Urry, 2002; Skeggs, 2013). What these debates tell us is that aestheticization is an arena of contestation, as class, gender, and ethnicity, among other variables, are marked via consumption practices (more in Chapters 3 and 6). Shapiro and Heinich maintain that aestheticization is part of an overwhelming process of what they call the “artification” of social life in modernity, afecting not only persons but a “motley collection” of phenomena, including “painting, printing, crafts, cartoons, grafiti, tribal art, outsider art, cult objects, national heritage, photography, cinema, theatre, circus, breakdancing, magic, luxury fashion, gastronomy, and jazz” (2012: 3). As mentioned in the previous chapter, artification refers to the process of individualizing, recategorizing, and intellectualizing social phenomena by linking them with art-specific tropes. There is, for instance, the example of luxury brands, which cannot simply increase supply to cover demand as they pursue growth as this would inflict damage to their luxury status (Kapferer, 2014). One way to do that, for Jean-Noël Kapferer, is to strive for artification, described as a “growing multiplication of associations of luxury brands with artists, galleries, and museums”, as a means to safeguard their status (2014: 372). Luxury brands artify themselves through these associations by linking their name with an atmosphere of exclusivity and uniqueness, traditionally associated with the art world. As we shall see in Chapter 4, fashion’s artification increasingly exploits the “subcultural capital” and bohemianism of artistic figures, as with the examples of Balenciaga, Burberry, and others (Thornton, 1996). In areas such as gastronomy and life coaching, as we shall see in Chapters 4–6, the artification of an entity (e.g., a dish, a chef, a coach, a client) is processed via curated photoshoots and highlighting discourses around individuality, inspiration, and creativity. From a political-economic perspective, artification is an outcome of the growth imperative and market competition in advanced capitalism (a point that Shapiro and Heinich do not themselves emphasize), with uniqueness and singularity being potential value adders.1 28 Homo Curatorius ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=39 | PRINTED_PAGE=29 Curation merges artification with the imaginary of organization, in contrast to that of the artistic; the curatorial is more pragmatic and its rationale is structured by practices of setting up, arranging, networking, administrating. The curatorial thus bears fewer connotations of an independent creative process, free from institutional constraints, than the artistic does, including its reliance on market institutions, sponsorship, and funding, which are essential aspects for the curatorial mandate. To simply bring in the process of artification, for instance, to speak about the organizers of AirBnB Experiences or apps that promise to make you “the most interesting person in the room” by customizing the news you read,2 fails to account for the new business models that entrepreneurs of the platform economy should undertake or for the organizational labor standing behind inspirational content. Similarly, in the self-help and wellness literature (Chapter 6), the construction of the self is not simply an aesthetic process; it is also operational, rational, and guided— setting up the ideal of a higher better version of the self. In other words, if the artistic is magic and the organizational is logic, the curatorial is somewhere in between, combining rational decision-making with contingency, lack, and serendipity. This chapter places curation in its historical, ideological, and afective registers as it plays out in contemporary mediascapes. I start with a brief historical overview of the curator, from their administrative function in ancient Rome and spiritual role in the Christian Church to that of an expert knowledge worker in museums. In this latter role, apart from caring about objects, curators group them together under narratives of historical, stylistic, or archaeological anchoring points. I focus on these expert narratives from the perspective of material culture highlighting the negotiation of values in institutional formations and human interaction. In this regard, a museum object amalgamates wider networks of expert knowledge to become a document of something that human societies regard as valuable. In this sense, there is a degree of contingency between a museum object, or any materiality, and its cultural and symbolic value. The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating 29 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406.md?start=40&limit=10)