In Apartment X

What will it be like when the curators revolt?

There is a critique, which has not escaped our notice, to refer to modern life as excessively curated. What we watch, what we listen to, what we eat, it’s all curated. The implication of this critique is that our choices, which sum to our lives, should not be pre-selected for us in any way. Rather, we should, as the result of regular, careful deliberation, be the architects of our own choices.

We would like to register two objections. 

First, algorithmic curation is not curation. A human curator draws upon years of engagement with media and formal practices to craft an experience. That experience has an audience in mind. Whatever an algorithm outputs deserves a different name. Algorithms, which are increasingly unaware of their own inner workings, reach ignorant conclusions based on thin, transactional understandings of their users.

Second, true curation is a gift. Few people have the time or wherewithal to plumb the depths of Georgian cinema or poetry from the Heian period. A novice attempting to choose some work of art in whose company to spend the evening may as well make their choice at random. 

Curation means something, but not what it has come to mean.

To exemplify our points and to bring out objections into relief, our collective will be kidnapping one Member of Parliament each Saturday evening, beginning 28 October. We will bring the MP to a gallery and treat them to an evening’s entertainment: visual art, literature, film, music.

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Desmond put down the letter — and Open Letter, he said, but to whom? — and asked for my honest opinion. 

“Kidnapping?” I said. “You? And Olly?”

His posture turned defensive. Those coke-bottle glasses trembled. Regardless of what I said, he knew I wanted to break up with him. And he didn’t like that I worked in tech. And worse, while I had some financial skin in the game, I had no moral skin in the game — I had told him so when we got together. For all intents and purposes, I was amoral. Users were users. Things were things. What’s the big deal, etc.

“We are really going to do this,” Desmond added.

But I had no intention of breaking up with him that night. I had a headache, and my apartment was getting renovated by my landlord, against my will. In point of fact, I hadn’t wanted to hear this open letter of the ballyhooed collective, but Desmond had steamrolled my objections. My autonomy had failed to make this Saturday evening’s entertainment. The poem curated for me was “Edward Hopper’s Office at Night.” 

“Kidnapping — sure, I believe you,” I said, after a useless pause. “The letter is perfect. You’ll make quite a splash.”

“Sure, sure.”

With a slight downturn of the eyebrows, a honeying of my voice, I said it again and convinced him. Convincing Desmond of banalities was never difficult. 

“Sweetheart,” I said, “my cousin Marlene just got a new kitten. Want to see pictures? She’s so cute.” Desmond cozied up to me on the couch, and I trotted out photos of an anonymous cat hiding inside a cardboard box. I didn’t have a cousin Marlene, of course, a fact Desmond would have known if he had paid the slightest attention.