Despite being absent for Week 6, I was able to catch up on the content I’d missed thanks to our blog, which informed me that this week’s topic of focus was ‘curationism’. After reading the articles that had been linked, I formulated some of my own ideas around what defines a ‘curator’ and what significance criticism holds in the context of curating. The articles were incredibly insightful – in fact, I’d never really thought about the concept of curation, let alone in as philosophical a way as the articles detailed. The shift in curation from its historical roots to a contemporary setting was fascinating, raising questions about whether this was consequentially linked to a loss in its significance. Much like everyone’s a critic, nowadays anyone and everyone can be a curator. To be a curator means to be critical of content, to be a judge of its value and guide other people’s understanding of it. If anyone can be a curator, does this devalue the content that is being curated and does the criticism lose some of its credibility? Through analysing this trend, questions like this and more are raised without much of a definitive answer. The digital space and our increasing involvement with technology has resulted in these kinds of cultural shifts, and with them come both advantages and disadvantages.
Curating, historically, has always been a part of culture and has now become part of popular culture, with the practice becoming increasingly widespread. This got me thinking about what it is exactly that makes curation so popular, particularly in this day and age, and instantly what came to mind was the fact that it’s so easy to do. Curating does not require any credentials or degree of professionalism, hence why anyone can be a curator. Social media sites such as Instagram make it easy for people to engage with collecting and refining content.
To analyse and judge something like the popular trend of curation is a form of ‘cultural criticism’, which raises the other topic that was explored this week. This type of criticism goes beyond simply reviewing an artefact, but criticises something we define as part of our culture. This is something I would like to experiment with at some stage, because I think there are a lot of shifts constantly occurring in our culture that would be interesting to comment on and may be something I include as part of Project Brief 3…
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