EAC Week 6

Reviewing the role of the curator

Times are certainly evolving and with it, so is the role of the curator. When Alexia asked what is the first thing that comes to mind when we hear the term “curator”, images of an elderly silver-haired gentleman—ordained in a single glass spectacle with a golden key in hand—was one of the first thoughts that popped into mind.

In due time, however, this portrait of a pompous art custodian would promptly see its removal after I was informed that, in this technologically driven age, anyone is capable of becoming a curator. Regardless of a person’s previous experience or qualifications in the subject matter, the role of a curator is available to just about anyone. And who do we have to thank for this recent job opening? Why, social media of course. Now that online communication is more prolific than ever, anyone with an Instagram, Pinterest or even a food blog has the ability to curate. In other words, anyone who runs any sort of online account, to a relative degree, has the power to articulate and redefine taste.

Public figures like Gwyneth Paltrow, with the launch of her modern lifestyle brand Goop, and Tammy Hembrow, an Instagram lifestyle blogger whose carefully curated posts inadvertently set the standard of what is considered ‘the perfect life’, are a few of the main forces behind what is deemed the pinnacle of culture in today’s era of digital enthusiasts.  

Moving away from the intricate world of the curator, Wednesdays 8:30am class took us down a more practical and creative direction than Mondays 12:30pm tutorial. Putting our creative instincts to the test, each student was instructed to think of a TV show before choosing a one worded prompt at random. Blindly choosing a word would make the task of finding a common thread between our TV show and prompt somewhat more challenging.

Choosing Anne With an E as my TV show and receiving “regret” as my one worded prompt, I found myself initially writing about the different times in which the characters have displayed feelings of regret and granted, whilst regret is a running theme throughout Anne, I gradually began to write about regret in terms of how I felt after watching the series. Stepping further away from the plot-line and its characters, my writing became increasingly more introspective as I began to criticise myself for having judged the show so harshly from the outset. Here, I talked about facing my own regrets for having dismissed a quality television series so quickly.

But what I don’t regret is the lesson I learnt from today’s tutorial, this being that even the tiniest push can create a plethora of wonderful ideas – all you need to do is make a start.