Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 28

Museum curators organize collections into themes that tell stories. Whether they’re quirky like those told in the Mini Bottle Gallery, or an expansive exhibit covering eighteenth-century pastel portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the goal of curation is always to take individual items and examples and weave them together into a narrative.

Curators add meaning to isolated beautiful things.

I’m inspired by curators—and I’m clearly not alone. The business world has turned toward the longtime practice of curation with such growing frequency that even artists and art critics have noticed.

In 2014, art critic and writer David Balzer published a book with the brilliant title Curationism (a play on “creationism”) to examine how “curating took over the art world and everything else.” His book explores the evolution of the curator as the imparter of value and what the future of curation looks like in a world where so many from outside the art world or without the usual training start to use the principles of the field for their own purposes.

Though the book is an academic read intended mainly for the curatorial circles within which he works, he shares the valuable caution that this rise in curationism can sometimes inspire a “constant cycle of grasping and display,” where we never take the time to understand what the individual pieces mean.

In other words, curation is only valuable if you follow the act of collecting with enough moments of quiet contemplation to truly understand what all of it means.

This combination of collection and contemplation is central to being able to effectively curate ideas and learn to predict the future.