Feuilleton #7: notes on curation (including a nightmare)
1: CURATORIAL RANDOMNESS
Laraaji’s 1980 album Day of Radiance is a fine example of a kind of middle-of-the-road ambient music which doesn’t really project a mood so much as fill up the sonic space; it is unobtrusive, like birdsong, and doesn’t attempt to make a big statement or be innovative in any way. It is pleasant enough but it certainly is not within the mainstream of musical discourse. I doubt anyone would call it Great Art. Let me tell you about the time I had a nightmare about it. My nightmare was this: after some sort of global disaster, Day of Radiance becomes, somehow, all that survives of the musical heritage of Western Civilization. A CD copy gets found by some future race who figure out how to play it, and they base their entire understanding of Western music from what is heard on that album. It gave me the creeps and I woke up screaming, my heart pounding thum-thum-thum.
An unlikely scenario, you say? Actually it’s not so unlikely, when you consider that there have been other instances of markedly similar accidental “curations” of the art of previous cultures. De Rerum Natura, the only extant work of the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, was only passed down to us via three manuscripts from the ninth century, although it must have existed in more copies than that since it appears to have been reasonably well-known during the early days of the Italian Renaissance. Tacitus’ Annals, our best source of information about the Roman empire in the first century A.D., survives in only one manuscript. Almost the entire corpus of poetry written in Old English is contained in only four codices; and these codices themselves were at times lost to scholarship. The Vercelli codex, for instance, written in the late thirteenth century and containing the only extant copy of The Dream of the Rood, had slipped out of the collective knowledge and was rediscovered in 1822. The Nowell Manuscript, written about the year 1000, contains the only known copy of Beowulf: it languished in the library of Richard Cotton, unknown to scholars, until the late eighteenth century, and was not translated into modern English until 1805. Until then its significance as the first epic poem in English was unknown; Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, for instance, had never heard of it.
It’s hard for me to see the survival and existence of Beowulf as anything more than an accident of history. Anything inspired by or derived from Beowulf (which would include most high fantasy literature, up to and including The Lord of the Rings; J.R.R. Tolkien also made a translation of Beowulf) therefore owes its own existence to an instance of random curation. When we think of the word “curation” we often think of a trained expert making careful choices for the purpose of presenting content in a deliberate manner. But quite often those curatorial choices have much more randomness in them than we might want to admit. Or maybe, in the case of Beowulf, God was the curator who brought it to the attention of the modern age.
In my early twenties I was at a junk store looking through their cassette tapes and found a copy of Bananarama’s eponymous first album. I had never heard of this group before but the album cover looked so delightfully kitschy and goofy, almost like a caricature of the entire eighties, that I had to buy it. I played it in my car for a while and I liked it, and I still do. Most of the time when I listen to new music it’s because someone recommended it to me, but that’s not the case with Bananarama. What kind of curation was that? Not really the random survival kind which gave Beowulf to the modern world—yet there is an aspect of similarity between the two instances If it was God who allowed Beowulf to survive, then it was also God who led me to Bananarama.
2: CURATION AND THE HUMAN SPARK
A moment ago I said that most of the new music I listen to comes my way from a recommendation. For the past few years the majority of these recommendations have come to me via algorithm through either Spotify or YouTube. The Spotify recommendation algorithm usually gives me things that are one degree more well-known and popular than whatever I’m listening to; the YouTube algorithm works the other way, giving me options one level more obscure, experimental, or strange than what I’ve already heard. I’m a big fan of the YouTube algorithm. It knows what I like and what I want to hear, and consistently gives me interesting picks; I admire its taste in music.
Does this wording feel weird, even off-putting? Scott Timberg would probably object to it. In his book Culture Crash he argues that the rise of algorithmic music recommendations has led to the extinction of an important figure in the transmission of culture: the ultra-knowledgeable record store clerk, the one with impeccable taste who knows way more music than you ever will and who is always ready to share his passionately-cultivated knowledge of obscure and unexpected music with anyone who will listen. This clip from High Fidelity aptly sketches the type: Jack Black’s character is the evil inversion of Timberg’s ideal. Timberg argues that this person is a vital part of the music scene. Without this kind of person’s passionate championing of it, new music has a hard time getting noticed; and a trusted critic, who can be expected to deploy good taste and judgment in their criticism, is an extremely valuable source of knowledge about what art is worth noticing. YouTube and Spotify are trying to pick up that slack with their algorithms, but something is lost in the process: the relational aspect, the humanity that comes from recommendations given by a real human being—Spotify won’t give you that thrill of recognition which Dick and Anna share in the above movie clip. But a music recommendation from YouTube tells me nothing about another human’s mind. If I listen to a record store clerk’s recommendation and like it, then there is a little spark of relationship that passes between us, and that will never not be a good thing in this loneliness-epidemic modern world of ours.
Recommendations from friends are always the best kind—they demonstrate a level of trust which is a precious thing. Sharing a beloved work of art with someone is an act of deliberate vulnerability: they know that you might not like what they share with you; will they see you differently because of that? Will your relationship change? Similarly: how does it feel to share a beloved work of art with a friend, only to have them reject it? It hurts, doesn’t it? I know it does when it has happened to me. But if they like the art and feel about it as you do . . . well, romances can be built on that.
3: HOARDER HOUSE
Sometimes it seems the only way that new art can be understood at all is through a process of curation. “What is this contemporary art supposed to mean?”—that question is often answered only within the context of the gallery show or the exhibition catalog, by which we can make sense of the art in front of us. But we can go even farther than that: if the artworks can only be understood through curation, then it follows that curation can be an art form of its own. That is what argues in a recent editorial for Midwest Art Quarterly: “The primary medium for Contemporary Art is curation,” he writes; curators thus have a position of power over the art and artists whose work they are curating—they have the ability to create (or suppress) meanings at will. Sherman advocates for a curatorial practice in service to an agenda of localism. He frames (curates?) the localism question within concepts of geographical place; but I see it as extending to all subcultures. Families have their own curatorial practices; so do larger cultural groups like nations or religions. So do subcultural groups; fashion is a means of curating a specific posture towards the rest of the world, as I’ve discussed before.
When Sherman mentions curation as an artistic medium, I’m immediately reminded of ’s essay “No, Culture is Not Stuck,” in which she discusses the rise of the internet personality as a new art form. Her description of the online persona gives me a (curated?) vibe halfway between that of Timberg’s record store clerk and the way certain museums and galleries are known for showing certain kinds of art and not others. Or to put it another way, the online persona would operate, on an individual scale, as families do: families are machines for curating culture and preserving it for the next generation. Families promote specific styles of living, and reject others. My own family spends a great deal of time talking about art of all kinds, and we have developed an unofficial canon of art which we feel speaks most poignantly to our own familial situation, values, and shared sense of aesthetics; we deepen our relationships with each other by curating each others’ taste, and I’m sure most other families have done the same thing. As curators, families perpetuate and give meaning to the limitless swath of human activity around them, teaching children how to live in the world with as much intentional rigor as a cottagecore influencer staging a shot.
Curation is, at its most basic, the practice of giving meaning and value to cultural products; deciding what should be preserved and what should be discarded—and why—in a culture, whether that culture is as small as one’s own wardrobe or as large as a civilization. And there is a sense in which that curatorial practice has been abandoned in our world these days. The culture of today has taken the route of preserving everything, whatever it might be, in case it might prove valuable at a later date. In this respect the modern world is one big hoarder house: “it might come in handy,” says someone who saves a bit of old paper or wire from off the street—“it might have value,” says global culture, maintaining the Internet Archive. I pity the inheritors of Western culture, who will have to figure out ways to interpret the contents of old server farms; graduate students of the future will need to learn esoteric file formats so they can decipher our tiny little blogs and SMS conversations, and they will wonder if it was worth the trouble in exactly the same way as researchers of today have to decide whether its worth it to learn to read cuneiform so they can read yet another Sumerian tax receipt or inventory list. Of the more than half-a-million cuneiform documents which have been discovered, only a tenth have been read. Would it be easier if we just threw all the rest in the trash? Probably not a good idea—there might be another Epic of Gilgamesh mixed up in all those 450,000+ other clay tablets. But we can’t be sure; meanwhile the number of people who want to devote their academic careers to deciphering these things is vanishingly small. If a new generation of cuneiformists doesn’t rise up and take the baton, the decision will be made by default, and the tablets will be filed away in some archive somewhere, waiting until the day they might become useful—“you never know”—since the hoarder attic that is Western civilization never, ever, ever gets cleaned out.
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