Curation Culture
Jon-Kyle Mohr posted a really thoughtful critique of the online curation culture called A Complimentary Rant on the State of Convenience. (Is curation culture a term? Can I coin that?) Anyway, Jon-Kyle’s central question:
Why is it that with the ease of publishing available today people so often choose to re-post content as opposed to create it?
Yesterday I saw the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at MoMA (along with the Bauhaus thang, more on that/Alma Mahler to come), and though I loved all the witty bike/car objects and enfant terrible yogurt lids and body-clay sculptures (is it just me or is he totally riffing on Louise Bourgeois with those babies?), I think my favorite was his Working Tables (2000-2005):
From MoMA: “The tables display prototypes for finished works, the beginnings of projects never realized, and found objects the artist kept for one reason or another—all things on their way to becoming sculpture.”
I think I found the tables fascinating because they presented these objects, some of which weren’t even Orozco’s works, with such care and intent. Crafted, selected, arranged, fetishized, the pieces tell me something about the way Orozco functions as an artist, but also something about the act of creating an artistic world to inhabit, of making a universe in miniature, of picking out the shiniest stones to keep in your hot little hand and then showing them to your friends in the yard.
I worry about the echo chamber of tumblrs and their ilk and the meaningless repetition and amplification of digital objects. I’m obsessed with the way that people collect, hoard, and re-broadcast photos and music and words without also creating their own. I’m not saying every tumblr reblogging pictures of hot girls in kitten earmuffs or grainy photos of Parisian cafes is as intentional and special as Orozco’s working tables, but the impulse, I think, is similar. We are overwhelmed, and if we can pick and chose a few objects that we like, put them in a place where we can keep them, it helps us to exercise some kind of control over the flood, even if it leads to visual/aural/literary ADD and a tawdry kind of exhibitionism: look at all these things I found. But while I’d rather not bother with some peoples’ online collections, I think some are interesting as works in progress, and some seem like ready-made archives, perfect and complete.
