Opinion
We are all curators.
From art we often advance to the world of tomorrow. Art has already been diluted in life, which has at the same time become an imitation of art; and in the best marketing schools the most genuine cult of personality is stimulated. The same could be said of genre, curations, hybridizations, emerging ideas already announced in artistic practice for decades. We could make the same reading of the office of curator. As David G. Torres warns in his latest —and brilliant— essay The Mirror Eye, today, in the contemporary jungle, everyone more or less acts as a curator. The task of curator is analogous to that of most mortals when we have to think, select, relate and disseminate the adventures of life in the digital sphere. And who doesn't? Someone must have already noticed the rise of the figure of the content curator in the field of digital marketing.
AI has been detecting the creation of this new modus vivendi since 2009, by a digital neomarketing guru, the best-selling author and Wall Street Journal author, Rohit Bhargava, the same one who advertises himself on social media as a trend curator. As if possessed by the spirit of Harald Szeeman, in 2009 Mr. Bhargava published the Manifesto for the content curator, a guidebook for training one of the professions, according to the guru, that has seen the most growth in recent years. Bhargava was inspired by exhibition curators to extrapolate the principles of their work to the digital world. Thus, the content curator is that figure who, faced with the overwhelming amount of training that exists today in relation to a given topic or profile, is capable of researching, filtering, ordering, proposing and communicating selected quality information. Do you hear any bells ringing?
This growing reality contrasts with the life of the exhibition curator. According to the Radiografia del comisariat del CONCA (2024), there are very few who can dedicate themselves exclusively to it; and those who do, get by through derivatives that have appeared in recent years, such as artistic direction or teaching. The art professor, when he teaches his own, non-imposed class, he is curating artistic content: a quality filtration where there is research, discourse and communication. The same in art direction: programming is researching, structuring, relating, in the best cases it is also caring (for artists, audiences, content). But surely what we would all like is to be able to live in exclusivity as curators of free exhibitions and without structural ties to institutions. It is the ideal practice of our profession, which due to its unviability perhaps we should stop calling it as such. While some of us dream or look for substitute curatorial practices, others cannibalize our identity traits to rise in the digital world. But there is an attitude that is left along the way: the critical look from art, that is, towards the world, which we want to celebrate, yes, but also, and mainly, change.
