Michelle Kasprzak wrote:
> The term 'curating' has definitely been picked up to describe almost any
> activity that involves choosing one thing over another. I wrote a short
> essay on the subject that might of interest:
> http://www.curating.info/archives/205-For-What-and-For-Whom.html
> Best,
> MK
>
>
>
I think that Michelle puts the question quite well when she says that:
"I would argue that building larger cultural narratives, and
developing clear intentions towards an audience are functions too
important to ignore. Behind each of these very important additional
tasks of the curator is an understanding of intentions and a burden of
responsibility towards the public, artists, and colleagues."
What the NYT article talks about is filtering, at best a form of
selective indexing. There's no doubt that there's a need for this kind
of thing, to take us beyond the indiscriminateness of google. But the
equally indiscriminate use of the word "curate" in the Times article
would lead to the conclusion that anyone putting a set of links on a web
site is a curator.
Is this a problem for curating? I'm old enough to remember how jarring
it was on first hearing 'artist' used for "country western artists",
etc. Well, it doesn't seem to have hurt art--perhaps the opposite,
because the dumbing-down of terms like art forces us to re-think
questions of value.
_____________________
Myron Turner
http://www.room535.org
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