To Curate or Not to Curate

When I conjure up the image of a curator, it’s someone who analyzes a variety of French Impressionist paintings and then selects the most compelling and important ones to captivate an audience at the art museum. Someone who spent years toiling away in graduate school to earn this distinguished title.

The all-knowing and infallible Wikipedia defines curator this way: “Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist charged with an institution’s collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material.”

By that traditional definition, I am anything but a curator. Sure, I am a content specialist of sorts,
but everything else about the definition screams antonym.

Apparently, I wasn’t giving myself enough credit.

Today, everyone is a curator. For example:

·        Travel no longer is planned - it is curated

·        Menus aren’t selected - they are curated.

·        Experiences aren’t researched – they are curated

What about choosing music? Building a network? Designing a wardrobe?

Curated, curated, curated.

The curator movement has even infested my former field of journalism.

For example, it’s become increasingly popular for publications – especially online – to select a number of articles they recommend and write brief descriptions of each article with a link to the full story.

How is the work attributed? You guessed it. Reporters now proudly curate lists instead of editing, selecting or compiling them.

Curate has been on my mind because I’m excited to start a weeklyish feature with a working title of, “The Five.” Essentially, five things that I’m thinking about, reading, watching or listening to. Look for that to debut soon.

But how should this work be attributed? Should these blog posts be compiled or crafted, or should I bow to the pressure, take the same liberties that so many others enjoy, engage in blatant curator inflation, and bestow upon myself the sophisticated, somewhat pretentious and wholly undeserved title of curator?

Stay tuned.