“There has been a rise in the authority of the curator — the rise of the super-curator, who travels the world and makes exhibitions with some kind of signature that reflects their ideology and their position,” he said.
Over the last decade, Mr. Renton has watched “curating” spread from museums to storefronts and social media with a mixture of disdain and amusement. He was recently struck by a cover line on a British Vogue supplement from September 2016 that promised advice on “curating perfect curls.”
“They use curating as a manifestation of smartness — that something intelligent has happened here,” he said. “It is, most of the time, something very banal. Menus are curated. A cheese selection is curated. There is a strong emphasis on selling it back to you with authority. It doesn’t say who curated it. Is it the brand doing it? You’d hope that they were doing the supposed curating already. What’s an un-curated cheese selection?”
Becoming a Buzzword
The word, and its connotations of editing and refining, has spread as options multiply.
What could be more disturbing, in these times of climate crisis, than the thought of infinite stuff, of worthless mass production and waste? The notion of something “curated” offers reassurance that what we buy is somehow meaningful; not just a dress, but a precious part of a curated selection of party wear.
“Very often you see that the word that goes before it is ‘careful,’” Mr. Renton said. “‘Carefully curated’ — which is, of course, etymologically, a tautology.”
Every era has its buzzwords, which emerge to define the goals and identities of the objects and individuals at the apex of cool. There are the roles — designing, styling, creative directing — and the copywriter clichés; iconic, legendary, chic, edited (the edited wardrobe, the hat edit). The current dominance of “curating” is, like most contemporary oddities, tied to the internet.
By Lou Stoppard
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