Robin Good

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.

A recommendation from Emily Sundberg's Feed Me isn't an endorsement; it's an anointing. The mechanism isn't mysterious: curators build trust not by being right but by being wrong in interesting ways. They earn the right to be occasionally mystifying because they've proven they're making actual choices rather than optimising for metrics. This... See more

We have lost our ability to navigate by the stars, to identify edible plants in the wild, or to craft tools from raw materials. Yet among all these diminished aptitudes, one stands out as uniquely disastrous in its disappearance: our capacity for deep, sustained attention. This cognitive faculty, once the cornerstone of human achievement and... See more

Why are we futuring to find solutions to the problems created by extrapolative, exponential, and extractive systems, when we should be futuring to imagine emerging novelty and construct transformative realities that would allow us to elevate our human, planetary, and universal experience above and beyond those systems?

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

Eventually, large parts of the internet will be an irradiated area where bots create for bots, while we will be building shelters of trustworthiness, where genuine human connection will be the currency.

Think about walking into a small gallery with a specific curatorial vision. Immediately there’s a shift, the light, the spacing, how each work converses with the others. There’s no selling happening. Just an invitation to experience a perspective. That is exactly how successful brand feeds feel. An invitation to a world, intentionally built.

What it produces is something like hypomania: a state where your productive capacity genuinely increases. You’re not imagining that you’re getting more done, you actually are, but your evaluative faculty is unaccustomed to this mode of creation. You lose the ability to distinguish between “this is good” and “I feel good making this.” Everything... See more

Suggested reads for curators:

(I’ll list good art history books in another post, soon)

• The Curator's Handbook: Museums, Commercial Galleries, Independent Spaces


• Curating with Care


• Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating


• Ways of Seeing


• Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception


• Thinking Contemporary Curating