Curated: carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized or presented

I don’t think I have ever spoken or written the word curate or curator but a handful of times in my entire life. Though I love art–and had once planned to pursue a college art major–truthfully, I am pretty clueless about the role and work of a curator, one who carefully chooses and thoughtfully presents the artistic works that appear in galleries and museums. This world, the world of a genuine curator, is filet mignon to my Hamburger Helper. It floats and lilts, while I trod and plod. This is the world of those chosen few who have devoted their lives to the study of great artists, to the history of artistic styles and trends, to the standards by which we judge what is artistically sublime and what is merely good. In short, this is the world of a chosen few.

Or it was the world of a chosen few. Now, however, anything and everything is curated, which means anyone and everyone can be a curator. The world of curation has left the heavenly realms of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to take its place in countless Facebook photos and posts. Power in hand, we are currently curating the heck out of things.

In a 2009 New York Times article, “The Word ‘Curate’ No Longer Belongs to the Museum Crowd,” Alex Williams writes:

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.” Or more to the point, “I belong.”

Oh to have a discerning eye and great taste! To belong to a group of others who, too, have discerning eyes and great taste! And to stand above, and in judgment of, those who lack such discernment and taste! For many, this is the stuff that great curation is made of now. Consider, for example, a lesson plan entitled Curated Lives for 10th graders from the website commonsense.org. The lesson designers frame the lesson with this statement:

Social media gives us a chance to choose how we present ourselves to the world. We can snap and share a pic in the moment or carefully stage photos and select only the ones we think are best. When students reflect on these choices, they can better understand the self they are presenting and the self they aim to be.

I suppose a lesson like this could go one of two ways: 1) teachers could help their students understand that the curated lives they present on social media are not their real lives OR 2) teachers could help students understand that they can curate their lives more effectively and thus, socially present their very best lives possible. This lesson may prompt some real soul-searching, or, sadly (and most likely), it may prompt more intentional curation of students’ social media selves. And all this in an estimated time of 50 minutes!

There are entire websites and blogs devoted to curating your life. From one such website, we read that The Curated Life is the pursuit of finding what makes living better. From another, we read: Curating your life means carefully choosing what you allow to shape your identity, atmosphere, relationships and sense of well-being. It is about realizing your worth and making choices that uphold your worth. You live full of hope for your future and curate your present life accordingly.

Curating your life is about shaping your identify, about realizing and upholding your worth? Scroll through Facebook or Instagram photos and posts at any moment on any given day, and you can find proof of this in a smorgasbord of faces and bodies, families and lives that are so much better than yours. These photos and posts shine with happiness and health. They dazzle with success and glitter with satisfaction. Such is the intended effect of curated lives: perfect family gatherings, brilliant selfies, achievements of every size and color. The rest of us who forgot the rolls and made the wrong kind of pie for the holiday dinner, whose wrinkles (or zits) have passed the point of any realistic photo editing, and whose greatest achievement is dusting at least once a month–well, we can just look on and weep.

Media scholar, Internet activist, and blogger Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Curators are great, but they’re inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.

Of course, curators are biased. And of course, they make editorial decisions that have really big implications. That’s the real point of curating, isn’t it? Presentation is everything. Whether it’s your home, your family or relationships, your personal or professional self, you can edit what you want others to see and what you do not. You can bias others towards what you want them to think. And the implications of this? Ideally, this all works in your favor. Others will look on in sore amazement at the curated you. They will “like” your photos and posts–or, at least, they will feel compelled to “like” them. For to disregard them would be to disregard what many others have “liked”, which would then make you an outsider, a real pantywaist in the curated world of social media.

The implications of curating our lives on social media and, in general, are often tragic. People claim that they must take mental health breaks from technology, to turn off their phones and to refrain from checking Facebook or Instagram. They claim that in order to keep their sanity and any sense of well-being, they have to stop the barrage of curated success and joy that continuously floods their screens. Cease and desist, they say. Or face the consequences of depression and FOMA (fear of missing out).

In an interview in The Guardian, Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist writes:

It’s worth thinking about the etymology of curating. It comes from the Latin word curare, meaning to take care. In Roman times, it meant to take care of the bath houses. In medieval times, it designated the priest who cared for souls.

I don’t think that curation today has much–if anything–to do with caring for souls. Perhaps it should, though. Perhaps the world would be a better place if curators were ones who cared more for their own and others’ souls than for finding the best angle and light for stunning selfies. Certainly, the implications of this type of curation would yield immeasurable benefits, for who among us couldn’t use some soul-tending? And you would never have to tune out or turn off from this kind of curation. Quite the contrary. You’d want to hang out with these kinds of curators because in their presence, you wouldn’t need a social media presence at all. You could just be present in the moment without feeling as though you needed to photograph or record it.

But there would also be challenges associated with this type of curation. Caring for the soul is the work of introspection, personal–not public work. This is internal work that is often quite messy. And this is work that would take time, quite possibly an entire lifetime.

Curation of the medieval kind would be a hard sell today. As we privately cared for our own and others’ souls, how would we know how many views we received or how many friends liked our work if we had no public platform? Without the validation of social media, how could we possibly continue curating?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I’m just convinced that these are the right questions to ask if we are ever to be the beneficiaries of genuinely and soulfully curated lives.