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

Hans Ulrich Obrist (HAU). In the last twenty years, Obrist has recurrently been included in the artworld’s Powerlist, often figuring at the top; one can argue that the dissemination of the curatorial imaginary to the global artworld and its adjacent fields, owes much to Obrist’s popular persona as mobile, path-crossing, interdisciplinary, cosmopolitical, networked, innovative, and experimental (Buurman, 2018). For instance, Obrist is credited with enlarging the boundaries of the art field through “infinite conversations” not only with artists but with figures arousing cultural interest as diverse as Björk, Michel Houellebecq, Ken Loach, and Tariq Ali, in marathon interviews as director of the Serpentine Galleries and in a series of books (Obrist, 2014: Ch.9). The interview format, a format associated with journalism or academic research, in the hands of Obrist becomes the primary material for establishing art curation as a more expansive practice (e.g., by selecting the participants, setting up the debates and themes, or designing the interview space).

The theorist Nanne Buurman captures Obrist’s own self-fashioning in the autobiographical Ways of Curating (2014) that crafts a “hyper-mobile globally networking way of life” that not only feeds the curatorial global imaginary but “epitomizes neoliberal norms of subjectivity” (Buurman, 2018: 302). For instance, his autobiography refers to how his tireless art traveling taught him to sleep in unconventional places, like in night trains that he refers to as “a travelling laboratory for testing such practices”, and drinking 50 cups of cofee per day to keep himself awake (2014: Ch.11). Instead of acknowledging the privilege of an educated Western middle-upper class professional with possible burnout symptoms, Obrist romanticizes these experiences as “attempts to try out alternative ways of organizing daily life” (Obrist, 2014: Ch.11). Here, Obrist exemplifies the new curator not only as an uprooted global auteur but also as a hyper-productive worker (Balzer, 2014), while his work ethic rhetorically demolishes one of the last frontiers of capitalist value extraction, that of sleep (Crary, 2014). As a more-thanartworld persona, Obrist performs the “implications of curating in times of neoliberal globalization” (Buurman, 2018: 301), and, as such, is an ideal bridge between the figure of the independent art curator and the distributed curatorial imaginary.

2.5 “Organize Your Passion”, or Curating as Business

The distribution of curating as an afective and wider cultural modality in the post-2010s, borrows from Obrist’s and generally the independent curator’s creative, nomadic, and inspirational façade. Yet it more explicitly directs this persona to business rather than to the aimless drifting or the potential decadence linked to the artistic imaginary. Contrary to the independent curator’s frequent questioning of the structures of domination, the discourse around internet curation is underpinned by a techno-utopian vision that holds the liberatory promise of technology. This is the spirit of the libertarian

40

Homo Curatorius

Californian ideology as described by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996) yet lacking the countercultural and communitarian twist that the latter upheld, at least in its earlier years. If Californian ideology amounts to a “blend of libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and technoutopian visions” (Turner, 2008: 208), then the curatorial imaginary voids out counter-aesthetic and political visions in favor of a positivist, technoutopian prophecy with an exclusively entrepreneurial outlook. In the digital marketing and business literature as well as in the countless online guides of the past decade with titles such as, “what media curation is” or “how to curate content”, platform curation and its satellite terms—internet curation, digital curation, social media curation, brand curation—relate entirely to business solutions (e.g., Rosenbaum, 2011; 2014; Bhaskar, 2016). In this discourse, curating, curation, curated, and curator denote activities of selecting, displaying, and authorizing content, including music, food, or film, so as to raise the value of a service or to make it more attractive to buyers; the language used is unashamedly entrepreneurial, with constant references to brands, networking, leadership, profit, and target audiences. Having been detached from the critical edge of the histories of museum and gallery space, the curator here becomes a blanket-title of an empowered, mediasavvy, entrepreneurial expert, who can package the best for their clients or followers. As the curator moves from galleries to hashtags, there is a marked shift from curation as an activity intervening in the public sphere, or a sort of Bildung enterprise of civic cultivation, to curation as a streamlined activity for generating market value.

There is an understandable discomfort among professional art curators and critics about the seizure of the term,10 suggesting that the market is abusing the more ethical or morally elevated practice of gallery curation. In the 2017 article, Curating and the End of Professions, Lianne McTavish aptly captures this discomfort as now even “a dry-cleaning business”, that is an ordinary profit-making enterprise, “boasts of its ability to curate your laundry”:

How can these diverse and in some cases rather mundane activities be considered curating? Why does the verb “to curate” continue to be used so broadly, with apparently little regard for the skills, education, and training of professional curators?

(2017: 181)

On top of this, there is another abuse, McTavish continues, as media curators snub down the history of art curating not only by having “little to do with the identity of the professional curator” but also by considering it “largely irrelevant if not entirely defunct” (2017: 188); while “real” curators are the ones who have degrees, education, and knowledge on the subject of museums, media curators are sort of disrespectful imposters. This appropriation signals the broader blurring of the professional roles in advanced capitalism, as job titles are fluid—if not irrelevant—in the context of a “post-professional world” (McTavish, 2017: 183).

The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating

41

Yet one can argue that the shift to the curator-entrepreneur was already implicit in the previous shift from the museum curator, an institutional employee, to the independent curator, who, as we saw, became an authorial figure shaping their own intellectual agendas. It was implicit as the profession—and thus the linguistic and afective usage of the term—opened up to the market, including competition, global opportunities, project work, and risk-taking as well as traveling, cosmopolitanism, and all-round conceptual thinking. In this sense, the term’s market appropriation and distortion are not straightforward, the seeds of this appropriation were present in the “liberationist moment” of the curatorial profession itself: as an independent actor, the art curator had already become an integral part of the capitalist economy of creativity, public relations, connectivity, and networking. While there is a certain misrepresentation of the profession in its entrepreneurial usage, it is also not entirely coincidental that so many market actors choose to employ precisely this term to speak about their business practices. The appearance of the independent art curator and the curator-as-entrepreneur are both an efect of the same growth paradigm based on the incessant production and valorization of objects and information, which in turn requires experts to sort out the mess and make communication purposeful.

This is also the implicit raison d’être of media curation in the entrepreneurial literature as its rise occurs at the moment when big data and digital abundance makes it extremely dificult for users to discern valuable content. These entrepreneurial guides, handbooks, or reflection pieces naturalize the growth paradigm that capitalism is based on, with the social role of the media curator framed, if not explicitly in terms of Bildung, then at least as a practice that improves societies by filtering out the noise. For instance, in Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess, Michael Bhaskar reserves a unique role for curation: it is an empowering response that restores prudence and logic against uncontrollable excess: “in the context of excess, curation isn’t just a buzzword. It makes sense of the world” (2016: 45). Thus, curation is about knowledge and expertise not simply random selection: “it’s not just that curators are selectors; they’re expert selectors” and curation’s value “is never just about selection. It’s about knowledgeable selection, knowledge you can’t fake” (2016: 208–209). Curation, according to this market logic, responds to a social need, that is, the customer’s need for selffashioning and belonging in the contemporary chaotic world, which emerges as an outcome of the “natural” development of capitalism. This is similar to the Bildung idea of self-cultivation, yet its fundamental unit is not the citizen but the consumer.

In this story, “real” contemporary art curators can be seen as the “founders”, the role-models who embody the inspirational, informed, mobile, and unique subject of the art field that strives for innovation, originality, great ideas, and travel. For example, Bhaskar is fascinated by Obrist’s “high-impact” activities, that is, his entrepreneurial abilities:

42 Homo Curatorius

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon are two of the world’s most celebrated curators. Known in the art scene as tastemakers and jetsetters— Obrist alone has made over two thousand trips in the last two decades— they are power curators. The fast-talking and hyperactive Obrist in particular, with his record of “high impact” shows, series of books, and globetrotting agenda, has become the model of a contemporary art curator. Clad in distinctive transparent glasses and scribbling endless notes, Obrist has topped the ArtReview Power 100, an influence bellwether. That a curator could top the list is an indication of how far curating has come. No longer niche players, curators are now what the German critic Willi Bongard has called “Popes of art”.

(2016: 125–126)

The fascination for Obrist here expresses a business-savvy alpha-maleness, such as with words like “power curator” and “pope”, combined with a sense of awe and wonder in respect to unstoppable traveling (“two thousand trips”), which in the context of global capitalism is essentially an uppermiddle-class afordability. Bhaskar further praises Obrist’s idea to endow curatorial agency to multiple actors and blow the profession “wide open” in the 2007 Lyon Biennale, which he co-curated. Here, the “genius” of Obrist feeds into the orbit of an entrepreneurial and innovative success story, which nevertheless maintains its philosophical playfulness and expressive freedom as it can be bold enough to perform a self-referential deconstruction of the curatorial profession, a sort of meta-curating:

But back in Lyon, Obrist and Moisdon wanted to be a little diferent. Rather than selecting and organizing artists and artworks, they selected a further sixty people to get involved. Many of these were curators in their own right and had now been designated players in an intricate art-world game. Each of these “players” would select an artist for inclusion in the program. Each player chosen by Obrist and Moisdon was a mini-curator. So, efectively what you had is—wait for it—curators curating curators curating. And then, given that they also made artists and critics curators, the whole category of curator had been blown wide open. Everyone was a curator. This was hyper-curation, curation cubed. The thinking behind the show was that, as the world becomes more complex, so no artist or curator can individually represent it.

(2016: 127–128)

Bhaskar speaks with a similar fascination about the genius of Duchamp: “Marcel Duchamp was a troublemaker”, Bhaskar tells us (2016: 136), bringing to mind the now classic 1997 Apple Think Diferent campaign that was devoted to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things diferently—they’re not fond of rules” (Street, 2016). This embodies the wider cultural mandate to “think out of the box”, to innovate and to be diferent. The explicit market appropriation of their creative imagination is probably not what these artworld actors signed up for—Obrist himself warns against the boundless curatorial spillover from art to popular culture—this “contemporary resonance, however, risks producing a kind of bubble in the value attached to the idea of curating, and has to be resisted”, he says (2014: Ch.4). Yet the entrepreneurial fascination with the afective and sophisticated tropes of contemporary art is not something that can simply be attributed to a misrepresentation of the market actors: by becoming “independent” in the context of neoliberalism, art curating itself had already embraced entrepreneurial tropes and modes of subjectification (see also Esanu, 2021).

The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating

43

2.6 Conclusions

This genealogical reading of curators as professionals and curating as a socialized activity places the curatorial imperative in the context of a globalizing aspirational imaginary. From the 2000s onwards and especially after the 2010s, the title of the “curator”, through the symbolic capital it gained in art contexts as an expert of good taste, has opened up to explicitly embrace market actors, that is, actors who pursue economic capital. Curating in the post-2010s context has pivoted to a neoliberal rationality of individuals seeking to “galvanize and publish their passions and knowledge in a way that will create value from personal passions and niche expertise”, as the curation guru puts it (Rosenbaum, 2011: Ch.1). Curators are now the countless micro-experts of a new world of information abundance and creativity, personas who mediate value production via their own CVs, networks, and cultural capital and who can organize their passions as business endeavors.

I argue that the ascent of the media curator is not a simply a result of misappropriation nor is it irrelevant to the historical development of the museum curator, but instead, it is specific to how the art field has been both commodified and dematerialized in capitalist modernity. The very usage of the term curator and its linguistic derivatives is a vehicle of artifying a social relation, that is to say, adding value to a product or service by associating it with art-related tropes. The necessity to touristify cities through art events, grabbing the audience’s attention in an attention economy, and making “every business a stage” (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, see also Chapter 5), is a market imperative capitalizing on creative-sounding language; this is not only linguistic appropriation by market actors but part of the historical development of consumer society (see also Baudrillard, 1998 and Featherstone, 1987). Caught at these crossroads, the ideal of the contemporary art curator assembles an inspirational, sophisticated, and well-traveled persona in contemporary culture: the curator boyfriend as the “hottest accessory”, the sophisticated curator-protagonist of the Square, and Obrist’s nomadic persona are some of the archetypes of this crisscrossing between art and neoliberalism, creativity and business.

44

Homo Curatorius

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

with the narrative around the object impacting the material conditions of its appearance.

7 Of course, Duchamp was not alone in doing this, movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, with which Duchamp was loosely related, and the Soviet avantgarde were all, one way or another suggesting it.

8 The Curator as Producer was also the title of the Manifesta 10 Journal in 2010.

9 Here there is no space to discuss how this shift got institutionally legitimized, especially though the biennial system; for an excellent discussion on the topic, see O’Neill (2016).

10 This can be expressed by curators often switching to other professional titles, such as “art directors”.

References

46

Homo Curatorius

The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating

47

48

Homo Curatorius

3 Curating and Platforms

3.1 Cute Animals

In a video posted on the Facebook page of the animal organization The Dodo, titled “Baby Goat Covered in Tar Gets Baths For Three Days And…”, animal rescuers save a baby goat covered in tar and clean it up for three days in special oil baths.1 After cleaning, the goat becomes happy, playful, and its fur shines: the rescuers transform it from a miserable goat to a carefree goat jumping around in a field. The video has received more than 2 million reactions, 38,000 comments, and nearly 70,000 shares on Facebook, with users overwhelmed by the rescuers’ kindness and compassion. The Dodo is an organization with countless other videos featuring startling numbers and enthusiastic user responses on various social media platforms. The Dodo curates these pages under the overarching concept of “cute animality”: we see a sloth befriending a dog after being rescued by volunteers, a “widowed” goose mourning her deceased partner, a “single” parrot courting another parrot, thirsty armadillos, clumsy donkeys, and scrufy cats displaying their cunning and goofiness. For its founder, Izzie Lezer, countless cute animal videos are circulated daily in all corners of the internet, but no one “really owned the space” (Castillo, 2017). Similar to countless other entities that use platforms to create content by claiming a niche online territory, The Dodo curates a space that recruits content with “the right emotional kernel” (Castillo, 2017).

In this chapter, I read platformized curation via the market imperative to shape a previously shapeless informational space in the “right emotional kernel”, either from platforms themselves or from platform-based entrepreneurs, as curation goes beyond the artworld and can apply to any topic, from high-end fashion to home-based blogging about perfumes. Digital platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Uber, or Airbnb, are typically intermediaries that bring together a large number of users and suppliers in order to profit from their interaction (Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Sadowski, 2020a; Belleflamme and Peitz, 2018). Facebook, for example, benefits from pages like The Dodo because it attracts more users and engagement in the platform, which ofers Facebook more data, attention, and overall positive network efects (Belleflamme and Peitz, 2018; see also Section 3.3). In turn, by curating its page on a platform with massive trafic and an architecture that can commodify communications, The Dodo increases its visibility, followers, subscribers, and therefore revenue. Thus, by platformized curation, I mean the curation of a service, product, entity, brand, or even an individual on a platform whose coding architecture allows for economic or symbolic capitalization. Platformized curation furthermore encompasses the ways that the platforms themselves curate the interactions of the users algorithmically (e.g., recommendation systems, customized advertisements, software options) or enable their own curated services to further monetize user engagement (e.g., Apple News Plus, Spotify playlists). To varying degrees, then, platformized curation involves self-entrepreneurship initiatives, such as being a language teacher on Preply or a flat owner on Airbnb, a life coach on Instagram, or an Uber driver, on platforms that curate user interactions algorithmically as a means to maximize profit. As discussed in the previous chapter, curation in all these endeavors refers at least to both aesthetic decisions, for example, choosing photos, writing attractive descriptions, making self-promotional videos, and mobilizing emotions and afects, and organizational decisions, for example, arranging product placement, calculating profit margins, setting price and timetabling, and finding investors and financial resources.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-4