What does Media mean in art?

Although I try very hard not to bring work home with me, sometimes (okay, most of the time) I can’t help it. I just love museums, and so I often find myself thinking about them after 5 p.m.

Something I’ve been mulling over for a while is the use of the word “curate”, and how the phrase has become a buzzword around the world wide web. What does the word “curate” mean in popular language–and more importantly, what does it mean for museum professionals that this word is being re-appropriated?

It was because of the social media site Pinterest that I started thinking about how people who aren’t museum professionals or art historians use the word curate. Pinterest is a site where you can “pin” or save images from your internet travels onto boards–kind of like online, public scrap-booking. (I use it personally but not professionally, and I’m still not totally sold on museums’ use of Pinterest–the site is so consumer-driven that there’s a disconnect for me.) Anyway, although Pinterest doesn’t describe itself as a content-curating site, internet chatter, like this article at Fast Company, calls it just that, defining curators as “individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information.”

I noticed more and more people around the internet using the word “curator, ” and I found myself thinking, “wait, what?! By saving photos of cookie recipes I want to try, or dresses I wish I could afford, I’m now a curator? No!”

I worried that my reaction was curmudgeonly, a much-too-traditional museum person gut defensive response. And yet, I also knew a bit about what goes into the curatorial process at an art museum–and it is a LOT more complicated than organizing a bunch of recipes into one place. So I set out to think about how to bridge together my museum-loving self with the part of me that’s interested innovation and challenges.

To do that, I went right to the source and had a chat with Mel Buchanan, the Museum’s Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design, and also my fellow blog maven and trusty source for all things curatorial. Mel had a refreshing and thoughtful take on the re-appropriation of the word: What we mean when we say “curating” on the internet is more like being a really top-notch editor. That is, someone who is good at picking things out of the endless internet ether and organizing them into something else. What we mean when we say “curating” in an art museum is a lot more than just being a top-notch editor. But both meanings can exist and live happily together.

As a curator, Mel was flattered that the word was being used widely, as it brings more “coolness” to what was once viewed as a stodgy profession. I’m all for that!