I have always found the terms Homo Faber and Homo Ludens arresting because these connote the capacity of man to control his destiny and his ability to indulge productively with amusements, yet this Weltanschauung fits times of finite information.Today, the shape of a person’s life depends upon her ability to make intelligent choices.
Simplistically thinking, artistic expression is born when imagination and thought are used consciously with some aesthetic intent, but in reality, this journey of art making demands too many choices to be made on the way. Choices of understanding the reality(ies) from one point of view or another, choices of acknowledging elements of Self (or not), choices of modelling a position for yourself, and choices of speaking less or more.
Today's artist has so many vantage points extracted from her own experience and from other thinkers at her disposal that selection remains the only way to move forward, and a popular term for making such choices is ‘curation’.
Quite a few books have recently been published explaining why and how data, information, styles, trends, images, moving images, words, sounds, music, point-of-views, friends, fashion, politics, elections, representation, education and geographies must be ‘curated’ for gains, prosperity and/or welfare. Just leaf through “Insta Style: Creating Stunning Photos” by Tessa Barton, "The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-than-Human World" by Fiona R Cameron,"Data Engineering with Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Lakehouse:Create scalable pipelines that ingest, curate, and aggregate complex data in a timely and secure way" by Manoj Kukreja ,"Curation: The Power Of Selection In The World Of Access” by Michael Bhaskar, “Non-Obvious: How To Think Different, Create Ideas, And Predict Future” by Rohit Bhargava, ”Curation Nation: Why The Future Of Content Is Context. How To Win In A World Where Consumers Are Creators” by Steven Rosenbaum,” Curate This: The Hands-On, How-To Guide To Content Curation” by Steven Rosenbaum.
This popular tendency to design whole concepts is beautifully summed up by Hans Ulrich Obrist in his book “Ways Of Curating” in following para.
“A clothing retailer sells a brightly colored style of trousers called the ‘curator pant’, while a brand called ‘CURATED’ promises ‘a new experience in retail design’. A museum brochure invites members to ‘curate your own membership’; musicians and DJs are asked to curate music festivals, radio shows and playlists; hotels’ decor schemes and book collections are listed as curated by stylists; a celebrity chef is described as the curator of the food trucks in New York’s High Line park.
Social media strategists talk of ‘curated and aggregated content’. A panel discussion comparing the merits of humans and computer algorithms describes how ‘the war of humans versus machines has hit the battlefield of online video curation’.
A blog post entitled ‘How to Build Your Community with Content Curation’ advises business owners on ‘curating content for your business’ blog and social media channels’.
The sociologist Mike Davis criticized Barack Obama by describing him as ‘the chief curator of the Bush legacy’.
The president of a chain of housewares says ‘we act as a curator, scouring the world for what we refer to as “the best-on-planet products”’.
Writing about his poker travails, the author Colson Whitehead reports, ‘I wasn’t depressed, I was curating despair.’
It’s fairly obvious that ‘curating’ is being used in a greater variety of contexts than ever before, in reference to everything from an exhibition of prints by Old Masters to the contents of a boutique wine shop. Even the verb form so commonly used today, to curate, and its variants (curating, curated) are coinages of the twentieth century.
This records a shift in understanding from a person (a curator) to an enterprise (curating) which is now understood as an activity unto itself. “There is, currently, a certain resonance between the idea of curating and the contemporary idea of the creative self, floating freely through the world making aesthetic choices of where to go and what to eat, wear and do.
The exponential increase in the amount of data created by human societies is a basic fact of our time. There is no type of information – documents, books, images, video – that is declining. But in addition, we also create more material goods each year than the previous one. Today we are awash in cheaply produced objects to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine a century ago.”
When common man is required to make educated choices from the content that already exists in the world, imagine how chastening it would be to “curate” an artist’s life whose content comes from often abstract dreams, imagination as well as from lived experience? How arduous it is to make abstract things and images, not words, yet hope to engage a viewer in a public art gallery?
The group show “curating the curators” invites viewer to participate in the debate by
A. viewing works from three diverse fields of art, the painted image, the photographed image, and the small object so that an intelligent comparison may be made
B. offering an engaging entry point into the way artists ‘curate’ their art practice and thought process in form of artist conversations.