Curation

In Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture , Eilean Hooper-Greenhill documents how museum work “has involved the establishment of a canon” through which order is created “by giving authority to certain texts, figures, ideas, problems, discursive strategies and historical narratives” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000b, 20). This process of “boundary... See more

Music

Disorganized information is just noise .

Organized info, contextualized for a specific audience / need is music .

It feels right. (By def it matches an audience's specific interests/problems.)

It has a cool sound. (Brings non-obvious insights (new melodies).)

It’s infinite. (Helps me discover and appreciate more music and artists.)

Over the past year, working on a book on curation, I have interviewed more than 30 curators—art and conference curators, creative directors, Instagram influencers, radio hosts, coders, and genetic engineers—and all agreed that saying no is at the core of the curatorial ethos . Saying no defines what matters.

This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted... See more

you have never had an original thought.

and you never will.

but this is not an insult. it’s a gift.

the mind is a collector, a curator, a weaver of threads that existed before you.

your originality is not in what you think, but in how you combine, twist, and breathe life into what has already been known.

you are an instrument, not a source .

play... See more

To understand the role of a curator today, think of a sieve in a gold rush: the AI provides the massive pile of silt and sand (the data), but the curator's "taste" is the mesh that allows the worthless dirt to fall through while catching the rare, valuable nuggets of gold. Without the sieve, you just have a pile of dirt; with it, you have a... See more

When I say “I don’t know where everyone went,” I know everyone’s out there surfing the web , of course, but it feels like it’s a different place now. When the algorithms are determining everything we should be seeing, it’s a much less personal internet. The “For You” pages of the world are right, I am interested in that content, but I’m not seeing... See more

We are hungry for experts, sense makers and curators. The problem, now so drastically different from a decade ago, is not what to read/buy/eat/watch/etc but what is the best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc.

As content multiplies, the challenge isn’t access; it’s orientation. We don’t need more input; we need better filters. That’s where the curator comes in: not just as a tastemaker, but as a trusted lens in a world of endless noise.