“Curated” used to be quite a reserved and genteel adjective, largely found only in the hushed confines of museums and art galleries, with an occasional flirty foray into the film-festival world.
But in recent years, curated has become a word gone wild. Cut loose from the high-culture crowd, it now keeps some strange company.
Techno guru Cory Doctorow has written a column in The Guardian on the limits of “curated computing,” which he describes as “computing experiences where software and wallpaper and attendant foofaraw for your device are hand-picked for your pleasure.”
Meanwhile, a newly hired newspaper editor tells me over drinks that his dream is to create “a carefully curated book-review section” in which each essay would move the literary conversation forward. Why did he say curated rather than edited? Because in the current cultural vernacular, curated is the term of praise everyone aspires to.
The website Static Photography described Ecofashion Week as one of Vancouver's “most successfully curated fashion weeks ever.” The website Wantlist advertises itself on Twitter as “a curated collection of gift ideas.” The restaurant Touchstone on Lake Muskoka sells itself as offering “a well-curated menu that melds the fresh flavours of Muskoka with European flair.”
You can also find curated movie reviews, curated albums and curated comic-book collections, among other wonders. In its broad sense, curated connotes carefully crafted, well-selected, value-added, discerning, contemporary and aware.
To understand the efflorescence of the word, it helps to examine the career of the late philosopher Denis Dutton, best known for creating the popular Web portal Arts and Letters Daily.
Prof. Dutton, who died of cancer at the age of 66 at the tail end of 2010, was a man of many distinctions – an academic philosopher who taught for nearly three decades at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; a crusading editor who campaigned against jargon in academic writing; a polymath who tried to fuse aesthetics and neo-Darwinian biology.
But to the wider public, Prof. Dutton was invariably associated with his most celebrated brain-child, AL Daily, which started as a private electronic-mailing list (remember those?), but became an Internet sensation after hitting the Web in 1998.
‘Leonardo da Vinci was in our terms a consultant …’
The concept of AL Daily was strikingly simple: Each day, Prof. Dutton (later assisted by other editors) selected three articles of note about culture and politics from a wide variety of sources, ranging from The New Yorker to more obscure venues such as spiked-online.com.
Each link would come with a Twitter-like blurb to arouse curiosity, such as these from 2004: “Leonardo da Vinci was in our terms a consultant: a bit of David Hockney, some Stephen Hawking, and a civil engineer … ”; “The litany of death, turmoil, and pain visited on Armenia leaves you surprised that the country still stands at all …”; “Michael Oakeshott called Isaiah Berlin a ‘Paganini of ideas,' which is better than what Berlin called Oakeshott …”
Though the site provided no original content apart from these blurbs and almost always linked to resolutely intellectual and challenging articles, AL Daily was a huge popular success.
By 2005, it had attracted more than 100 million hits. Throughout the past decade, virtually any writer in the English-speaking world would count a link there as a notch on his or her belt.
And you could justly say AL Daily was one of the first expertly curated websites. Prof. Dutton had an alert eye for articles that were quirky, fresh, off the beaten track and energetically written.
The site was a product of the early days of Web logging, later known as blogging: Just as the authority of scholarship is built on footnotes, the credibility of blogs is based on links to other websites. The idea of curated content is implicit in the form.
