Come together
Why be a humble collector when you can be curator instead?
YOU MAY have noticed a tragic new buzzword has caught on among the terminally vacuous. That word is ‘‘curate’’. No one merely organises or displays things any more. It’s no longer enough to simply gather some stuff and whack it together in an interesting way. You must ‘‘curate’’ it.
Now, I have the utmost respect for genuine curators. I have friends who are gallery curators, having spent many years acquiring the necessary skills to research, interpret and contextualise artworks for the rest of us.
But now it seems that anyone who collects, edits or arranges anything, no matter how trivial, feels compelled to call themselves a curator, presumably in order to convince the rest of us that they have a high degree of discernment and taste. It has become the pretentious term du jour for any plonker desperate to give added cultural weight to their job or hobby.
Someone who chooses a bunch of bands to play at a rock festival is now called a curator. There are wine curators, beer curators, curators of heirloom vegetable seed, salt and pepper shakers and 1960s knitted ties. People curate plates of teensy sandwiches at afternoon tea shindigs. Upscale delicatessens curate impressive collections of cheeses and cold meats. There are shoe shops claiming to curate collections of shoes.
There are DJs, baristas, travel agents, wedding planners, bloggers, window dressers and gardeners calling themselves curators. Am I a curator when I go to my wardrobe and select a few items to cover my naked form for the day? I suppose I am, in a way, but only if you are a visitor from Planet Mental.
A quick trawl around the internet reveals a veritable orgy of curation going on. There’s a stylishly dishevelled guy who curates background music for hotel lobbies, and an intenselooking fellow who curates ‘‘community-building experiences’’ for underprivileged young people. A few more mouse clicks uncover a New York horticultural curator who endlessly tutus about with a collection of pot plants on his apartment balcony, and someone else whose curatorial specialty is op-shop scarves, with a particular interest in vintage paisleys.
A guy who rents out the tucker stalls at a Brooklyn flea market claims he ‘‘curates food opportunities’’. There’s a woman who curates hairstyles, offering photos of herself magically evolving from topknot to bangs to Shirley Temple ringlets to a 60s bouffant. And, of course, there are endless people curating websites, by which they mean reposting content swiped from elsewhere.
Perhaps the nadir of such foolishness is a website called Amazine which invites readers to ‘‘Curate Your Amazing Magazine’’ by compiling their favourite recipes, fashion pictorials, blog articles and Facebook pics into their own personalised online vanity mag.
Speaking of vanity mags, a few weeks ago I was alarmed to find myself reading a glossy interiors magazine. In my defence, I was in a friend’s dunny at the time, and the headline ‘‘The Curated Home’’ caught my eye. I flipped to the story and was introduced to a young couple who rapidly revealed themselves to be insufferable nobs. Their home was, they believed, a monument to superior taste – though in reality, it was a mausoleum of bland modernist knick-knacks inhabited by two smug poseurs who are so uptight, I’m sure they squeak when they walk.
The couple were Italian and