Co-opting Curation: Why everything is curated, and nothing is at stake
I don’t know about you, but the word ‘curated’ seems to be everywhere.
Last week, I walked past a Prosecco bar that boasted ‘Curated Bubbles’. Online, I’m seeing ‘curated photo dumps’, ‘curated cafe spaces’, and ‘curated lifestyles’. At this point, almost any vaguely intentional choice seems to qualify. The term has lost its teeth.
On one hand, this gripe of mine seems trivial; just another buzzword stretched to the point of uselessness. But something deeper is happening. The overuse of ‘curated’ mirrors a broader flattening occurring in curating itself. As the word becomes a lifestyle adjective, curating as a political, ethical, and context-producing practice is quietly drained of its force.
And yes, this is where I risk sounding like an arts snob. But I don’t think that you curated that coffee shop. I think you might have just bought some nice chairs, chosen a colour palette and called it a day. Likewise, a ‘curated’ Instagram post often means selecting some hot pics of yourself and slipping in some sponsored content to appease the META overlords.
So what do we actually mean when we say ‘curating’? Or, more honestly: what do I mean when I use the word?
This question has shaped my own curatorial practice since I began investigating the field in 2024. Early on, I realised how much of what I took for granted came from institutional habit rather than intention. Over time, I’ve come to believe that we urgently need a distinction between ‘curating’ as a professional practice, and the ‘curatorial’ as a site of political possibility and refusal, and a responsive, context-driven practice.
1Curating [as I define it]:
a political and ethical practice that involves the shaping of knowledge and visibility through the construction of context.2 This process of selecting, organising, and displaying objects can function as a technology of governance, operating within larger systems of surveillance, exclusion, and control.
Curatorial [as I define it]:
a way of thinking that structures cultural work as a potential site of resistance - a lens for understanding how institutions shape meaning and manage life. Drawing on curator and critic Maria Lind’s framework, the curatorial exists to create tension, twists, and friction, refusing the status quo while testing and pushing boundaries rather than simply creating aesthetically pleasing displays.
This distinction matters because capitalism is remarkably good at absorbing critique. American activists and researchers Stefano Harney and Fred Moten capture this process in their concept of extraction: capitalism’s violent appropriation of social life and collective knowledge, extending beyond economic exploitation to encompass how institutions capture and commodify forms of social cooperation.3 Extraction doesn’t just exploit labour; it seizes cooption, memory and relation, turning them into property.
Museums, universities, and cultural institutions often function as extraction machines. Collective intellectual labour is absorbed, sanitised, and converted into institutional capital. Knowledge is separated from the social relations and communities that produced it - a process Harney and Moten describe as a form of ‘social death.’4 While this echoes Marx’s idea of ‘primitive accumulation’ 5, extraction here is not historical. It is continuous, targeting forms of life that exist outside of capitalist logic.6
Seen this way, the casual use of ‘curated’ starts to look less innocent. The word’s expansion in everyday language mirrors how institutions hollow out the curatorial, reducing it to an aesthetic gesture. ‘Curated’ comes to signal taste rather than responsibility, intention rather than consequence.
This is where my frustration with the contemporary art world sits. While ‘curated’ expands exponentially in widespread use, institutional curatorial practice feels stagnant; risk-averse, over-managed, and strangely timid. We keep the language of experimentation while avoiding the discomfort that experimentation actually demands.
At times, I wonder if I’m part of the problem. Is this theorising what makes the curatorial field feel impenetrable? Or is that impenetrability a convenient excuse - one that allows institutions to avoid pushing the curatorial far enough to be genuinely disruptive?
Either way, I don’t think the answer is to abandon the word ‘curated’. But it does need to be confronted. What does it mean in your community? Who gets to use it, and to what end? Once we take its political and ethical weight seriously, we might have to admit that not every intentional space is curated. Some things are chosen, styled, and sold.
The real issue isn’t that’ curated’ is everywhere—it’s that it’s everywhere without consequence. To curate, in the sense I’m arguing for, is to take responsibility for context, exclusion, and power. If the word is going to survive its mainstreaming, it has to function less as an aesthetic upgrade and more as an ethical demand. Otherwise, ‘curated’ will keep naming spaces that look intentional while remaining politically inert: tasteful enclosures that ask nothing of us at all.
Natasha Hoare, ‘Maria Lind’, in The New Curator, ed Colin Miliard and others [London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016] pp.183-144 [p140].
Maria Lind, ‘Contemporary Art and its Institutional Dilemmas’, On Curating, 8[2011], 25-31 <https://www.on-curating.org/issue-8-reader/contemporary-art-and-its-institutional-dilemmas.html> [accessed 16 November 2024]; Maria Lind, ‘Situating the Curatorial’ e-flux journal, 116 [2021], 70 – 81, <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/378689/situating-the-curatorial/> [accessed 16 November 2024]; Maria Lind, ‘The Curatorial’, Artforum, 48:2 [2009]<https://www.artforum.com/columns/the-curatorial-192127/> [accessed 16 November 2024.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,[New York: Minor Compositions, 2013], pp.26 – 32.
Ibid., pp.41-5.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. By Ben Fowkes [London: Penguin Classics, 1990].
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, pp.51-8.
