Curating has become a buzzword, but what does it really mean? It seems like everyone is curating now. People are curating great websites. They are curating stories. They are curating articles and now curating tweets.
In my mind, curating goes beyond a collection of great things. Curating is picking the best of the best after well thought-out deliberation. It isn’t just letting anything acceptable climb the imaginary wall of greatness.
Curating is separating the art from the noise: cherry-picking the stuff that really matters out of an endless stream of blah. And that art can be anything. A website. A tweet. Anything a human is responsible for making can be art, but it isn’t considered art by default.
Tags: buzzword, definition
I personally avoid referring to all of it as ‘curating’, some of it can be mindless hoarding of imagery in a non-cohesive, non-discriminatory fashion.
I mean, its great that some folks on flickr have galleries of their favorite 1970’s cereal boxes, but is that really what curation is about?
I’m impressed with some of the unique tumblr ideas, unique blog & gallery sites that have come out, and yes curation is something more of us view as a way to express and communicate our visual tastes.
in my humble opinion, we’ve always been curating. we just haven’t had the online tools to store mass quantities of things we find visually compelling in one location, nevermind all the choices we have now in terms of finding ways to present them to others.