Blogs are curated. So are holiday gift guides. So are cliques, play lists, and restaurant menus. “Curated,” a word that barely existed forty years ago, has somehow come to qualify everything in our lives. When I tried that glib parlor game of typing a word into Google to see how it would autocomplete the search phrase, the first suggestion for “curated” was “content.” In other words, almost nothing escapes curation, or at least the possibility of being curated. How did our world become a venue for curation? And how did curating, a highly specialized line of museum work involving the care, accessioning, and exhibition of artworks, come to mean, as cultural policy scholar Amanda Coles puts it, “just picking stuff?”

One simple explanation is prestige appropriation. This is understandable—“curation” lends the cultural capital and seriousness associated with art institutions to the mundane assemblages of our lives. Curating an Instagram feed or Christmas list sounds more legitimate, somehow, than simply having a social media profile or scribbling on a piece of paper. Back in 2009 The New York Times’s Alex Williams spoke with UC Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg about the tendency for the vernacular of an esteemed or prestigious profession to trickle down into popular parlance. Nunberg cited the term “associate,” which once connoted a colleague with a “shared a position of authority with another,” but today can refer to the person who processes your Frisbee return at Target. Similarly, the word, “executive” has practically become a prefix on professional job titles: “executive assistant,” “executive producer,” “executive vice president.” A few professional curators have become fiercely defensive of the word: “As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in the process of curation,” wrote Choire Sicha at The Awl. Others are impartial: “It really doesn’t bother me,” said Laura Hoptman, a curator then at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, to Williams.

“Curated,” a word that barely existed forty years ago, has somehow come to qualify everything in our lives.

While prestige appropriation is certainly a factor behind the broadening usage of the word “curate,” I don’t think it’s the most important one, nor do I think it accounts for the significance it holds for those who consider themselves to be curators outside of an art institution context. Professional curating is a collaborative endeavour, one in which compromise and working within constraints are as critical as personal vision. But curation in common parlance strongly emphasizes the latter. According to writer and art curator Rebecca Coates, fundamental to the present craze over curation as popularly imagined, is the emphasis it places on “personalization and creativity.” “Curation” has come to validate what would otherwise be simple preferences as not merely unique, but profoundly so.

In bestowing great importance to “just picking stuff,” curation in its contemporary, ecumenical sense reinforces many of the personal values promoted by neoliberalism: atomized individualism, the thrall of personalization, aestheticized control, and, of course, consumption-as-authenticity.

It’s no wonder that the qualifier “curated,” begins to appear with increasing frequency in published books in the early 1970s, precisely during the era of post-war economic liberalization and The ‘Me’ Decade, during which, according to Tom Wolfe, it became acceptable and good to spend time “…polishing one’s very self…and observing, studying, and doting on it.” (Indeed, in this passage, Wolfe describes the self as akin to a museum object.) The appearance of “curated” in print tracks steadily upward during the individualist, body-sculpting, self-improving, “no such thing as society” 1980s. The great value placed on the individual as the only valid social institution naturally elevated the consequence of previously quotidian things generated by the simple act of living, like lists and opinions. These things began to be worthy of the same white-gloved treatment and cultural esteem once reserved for fine art.