Curate This!: Summary & Key Insights

To understand the present fluidity of curatorial practice, we look first to its roots. The word ‘curator’ derives from the Latin *curare*, to care—a guardian of collections, a keeper of knowledge and artifacts. In the early museum tradition, curators were caretakers of objects, stewards of taxonomies that classified the world. Enlightenment collections treated art and natural specimens alike as assemblies of human understanding, and the curator’s authority was closely tied to institutional power.

But as the twentieth century unfolded, cracks appeared in that authority. The rise of independent curators in the 1960s and 70s—figures like Harald Szeemann—redefined the role into one of imagination and authorship. Szeemann’s revolutionary exhibitions transformed the curator into a kind of artist, one who could create meaning through selection itself. This independence liberated the practice from the permanent collection and turned it toward conceptually driven projects, toward relationships rather than accumulation.

By tracing this historical movement, we observed how the curator’s role migrated from safeguarding heritage to provoking discourse. The museum became a site of encounter, then a network of conversation. The curator’s portable imagination mirrored the transformations of globalization and the art world’s expansion. This shift laid the groundwork for our central argument: if the curator’s duty was once material care, it is now increasingly relational care—an ethics of attention to artists, publics, and contexts. The twentieth century’s curatorial revolution was not simply institutional; it was philosophical, setting the stage for the hybrid, fluid forms examined throughout our book.

We now live in a world saturated by curation. The expansion of curatorial practice far beyond art institutions marks one of the most distinctive cultural phenomena of the early twenty-first century. In our interviews and essays, contributors revisit how the verb ‘to curate’ escaped its professional confines and became part of everyday speech—your social feed, your Spotify list, your wardrobe. This diffusion reflects both a democratization and a dilution. On one hand, curation as an accessible act empowers everyone to shape meaning actively rather than passively consuming it. On the other hand, it risks becoming a superficial emblem of taste or self-branding.

As curatorial methods infiltrate social media and commerce, the act of selection takes on new technological mediators: algorithms, analytics, platforms that organize the chaos of cultural production. Our contributors challenge us to see this not simply as loss of professional exclusivity but as a moment of transformation. The curator’s power to contextualize, to weave connections, now faces an immense data landscape—one that demands new literacy in networks and interfaces. Digital curation asks not just what we choose, but what the systems choose for us.

For professional curators, this means extending their sphere of influence beyond static spaces into flows of information. For individuals, it raises questions of agency and care in a world curated by invisible code. The expansion of curatorial practice thus mirrors the broader condition of contemporary culture: permanent selection amidst endless abundance. If we understand curation properly, we begin to reclaim that selective gesture as mindful engagement rather than automated preference.