Robin Good

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent... See more

Curiosity creates the inquiry.

Knowledge populates the options.

Curation filters the right ones through.

Judgment makes the final call.

When knowledge becomes abundant, value migrates to the functions that exist upstream and downstream from it: framing the inquiry and acting on the output.

In this new architecture, curiosity, curation, and judgment... See more

In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell published his piece The Coolhunt, investigating the process of looking for new fashion trends at street level.

According to Gladwell, the coolhunter plays a major social role in spreading trends. Coolhunters were “the first to realize... that social status didn’t lay where Madison Avenue had said it lay in the 1950s and... See more

All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires 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

Kim Kardashian doesn’t wear archival Galliano because it’s expensive; she wears it because it’s impossible to obtain.

In luxury, scarcity drives desire, but contemporary scarcity is manufactured. Limited drops, seasonal exclusives, and numbered editions are ultimately all accessible to anyone with enough money. True archives are different. They’re... See more

The curator relationship operates at a fundamentally different psychological level than advertising. An algorithm might know you like blue Oxford shirts, but a tastemaker knows why a particular blue Oxford matters in a lineage of blue Oxfords. This contextual knowing, placing objects in historical and cultural frameworks rather than recommendation... See more

But taste requires subtraction. It means not participating in every viral moment. It means not resharing something just because it’s getting attention. It means opting out of the churn.

That doesn’t mean being contrarian for the sake of it. It means noticing when the culture’s default setting no longer reflects what’s true for you—and walking away.