Artist Katya Ross, in a talk published by CreativeMornings, the global creative community and lecture series, argues that content abundance has made intentional curation the problem:
We don’t have a content problem. We have a curation problem as a culture, as people in this overloaded culture. We don’t want more content. We want more meaningful content. […] The problem with trying to seek out meaningful content: your brain wants you to stay alive. Your brain curates according to survival, not necessarily meaning. And social media algorithms, which is a lot of where we get all of the content that we view, curate according to ad revenue. They curate according to what you pay attention to, whether you like something or not, whether you agree with it or not. It just wants your ad revenue, and it wants you scrolling.
Ross means something more specific by curation than choosing the best items from a pile. For her, it is the act of constructing relationships that create meaning:
To define curation for the sake of this talk, I would say that curation is constructing and carefully considering the relationships that make meaning possible. Curation is, in other words, the fundamental mechanism through which we can create and communicate meaning. Now, it’s just a mechanism. There’s no guarantee that your curation is going to be any good.
That shifts originality away from producing something with no precedent. The contribution is the relationship a creator sees among inherited ideas, materials, and experiences:
We are in relationship with reality. We are not truly inventing anything. We are working with what’s already there, whether that’s materials or ideas. Every idea has a lineage. Even if it is an original idea, everything that’s gone into your mind has laid the groundwork for this idea. The ideas are related to one another. Every work that you create exists in this messy, beautiful, complicated web of work that has come before, work that sits beside, work that will come after.
That is a more useful standard for originality than novelty. The materials can be familiar and the work can still be original when the relationship it reveals carries the creator’s particular way of seeing.
