Our consumer-driven society has vulgarized the terms “curator” and “curating.” It seems as if almost anyone with an Instagram account can be a curator and that just about anything can be curated. As Jason Farago has pointed out in The New York Review of Books, restaurants today sell “curated salads,” home goods stores peddle “carefully curated sheets,” and daycare centres offer “curated care.” There are legions of curated wines, curated dating apps, curated newsletters, curated books, curated audiences. And before the pandemic forced Heathrow’s Terminal 3 to close, well-heeled passengers could enjoy curated hamburgers at the Curator.
It wasn’t always so. In Roman times, curators were bureaucrats or priests who managed regions or parishes. According to experts such as David Balzer, who published Curationism: How Curating Took over the Art World and Everything Else in 2014, the term “curating” entered the art world in the eighteenth century, usually to...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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