Is Obsessive "Curation" Ruining Brooklyn?

[Dave Monroe]

"The new cultural landscape," writes curator and critic Nicolas
Bourriaud, "is marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the
programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects
and inserting them into new contexts." If one looks at contemporary
art (or fashion or literature or cocktails?) there's no lack of
appropriation, repurposing, re-tooling. The success of such gestures
relies on the creation of new contexts that force us to view objects
in previously unconsidered ways, opening up new avenues for
interpretation, making available new meanings. But what happens when
the new context for something is actually no context at all?

Just as contemporary culture has made us all "artists"—our artwork is,
after all, the self, and our material is consumerism—it's also made us
all curators, now more than ever, with the ubiquity of social
networking sites on which we're asked to list and list and list.
Opinions are everywhere, but discourse is shrinking. Lists have become
our way of announcing ourselves through what we know, but of course
they require little actual knowledge....

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http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/is-obsessive-curation-ruining-brooklyn/Content?oid=1926987