Curationism by David Balzer

Author:David Balzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2014-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

‘Curators are the best vampires.’ So said Germano Celant, with considerable jocularity, at a lecture about When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 at the Reel Artists Film Festival in Toronto in February 2014. Celant’s equation is not his alone. In the 2011 book Curation Nation, a plainspoken business-world guide about, as its subtitle proclaims, How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators, writer Steven Rosenbaum tackles the critics of content aggregation – and its most successful current digital news-media incarnation, the Huffington Post, which, like Reader’s Digest before it, largely culls and organizes content rather than generating it anew. Rosenbaum looks back to his childhood scheme of gathering day-old papers and selling them door-to-door at a discount as an incipient understanding of what it means to, in his understanding, curate. Then he concedes that obstreperous U.S. businessman and sports mogul Mark Cuban, who owns Magnolia Pictures and the Dallas Mavericks, ‘would call me a vampire,’ later quoting Cuban: ‘Don’t let [content aggregators] suck your blood. . . Vampires take but don’t give anything back.’ (Here we might cycle back to Obrist’s cultural voracity and reluctance to keep regular sleeping patterns.)

Director Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive stars Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as centuries-old vampire lovers Adam and Eve. He’s a reclusive musician tucked away in a warehouse apartment in Detroit; she’s a bon vivant in Tangier. When it entered wide release in early 2014, critics echoed Celant’s statement in reverse. Richard Brody, blogging for the New Yorker, called the film ‘the second-most-intensely curated movie of the season’ (the first being, in Brody’s estimation, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, also starring the eminently curatable Swinton). Edwin Turner, on his site Biblioklept, wrote an essay about ‘curation and creation’ in the film, inspired by Mike D’Angelo’s Nashville Scene review calling Adam and Eve ‘much more like curators than monsters.’

The idea of vampire-as-curator serves as an amuse bouche to how curation, in a manner very similar to the art-world chronology we have just seen, has infiltrated popular culture. In Only Lovers Left Alive, Adam and Eve turn their basic instincts – feeding on blood – into an elite expression of taste. Blood oenophiles, they source their food from hospital labs, abhorring feeding on actual people. In one scene, Eve shows Adam her invention, a blood popsicle made of O negative, as if it’s the latest creation of New York–based iced-treats purveyors People’s Pops, self-described popsicle ‘matchmakers’ who ‘couple fruits with herbs and spices and marry them into delicious and dynamic flavors.’ Everything that Adam and Eve do, in fact, and everything that Jarmusch surrounds them with, evinces popular culture’s understanding of curating as fine-tuned selecting and matching. Eve is so adept in her knowledge of the nature and provenance of objects that, as Turner notes, ‘she merely has to touch [something] to know its age.’

Brody suggests Only Lovers Left Alive’s other metaphor is vampire-as-hipster, not far off from the first, but meaningful for implying the roles personage and persona play in imparting value.

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