Conversations with Curators_1
July 10, 2011 This post is a follow up to a previous one in which I rant that I think ‘journalism’ is miss-firing when declaring that the future of news is curation.
I’ve recently finished Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation and was going to begin my lit review of it and rant that he conflates tummeling and conversation into curation. Before I did that I figured that I’d better know what I’m talking about, that is, I better make sure I know what is meant by curation and moreover, what is meant when journalists say (collectively) ‘we should be curators.’ If I’m going to rant, I might as well be right, no?
So I’ve decided to interview some curators (and since I am in Berlin, what better place?); I had the first of these chats last the week before last with Perla Montelongo From the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies. What I learned is that what I think curators do, what journalism translates from the notion of ‘curator’ and what curation is traditionally and in modernity are different things. My rant to Rosenbaum isn’t entirely misplaced, but it’s not entirely right either.