Whenever I explain curation to my friends I reference museums. “You know like what museum curators do with art? That’s what I do with short films I find on the Internet.” In my mind museums were the beginning point. I honestly never gave much though about curation pre-museums until Ben sent over this wikipedia page about Cabinets of Curiosities. It turns out that curation’s been around since at least the 1500’s, if not earlier than that.
A cabinet of curiosities was simply a room rich dudes had to hold all the cool things they found on their travels. This gave them a room full of things to brag about and something they could use later as proof for their “science” discoveries.
Of course it makes sense that precursor to museums were the personal collections rich guys kept in their homes. I mean museums are a large-scale version of that, except wealthy people usually fund it rather than find the objects themselves. What was more interesting to me was the fact that Gabriel Kaltemarckt, the guy who seemed to be the “curation expert” of the time, had the following as his top three things monarchs should have in their collections:
1) Art
2) “Curious items from home or abroad”
3) Things from or belonging to animals
These sound familiar to you? They should because this is the backbone of what you find on almost every personal blog today (with the addition of some humor and a lot more personal information than most people care to hear/see). But seriously I can expect the following from most personal blogs I follow:
1) Pretty pictures/videos of art (which now has a much broader definition than it did in the 16th century).
2) Evidence of how unique and exciting things are for them at home and on their vacations. This then leads to immense jealousy when I see all the amazing places people are going to, which is sometimes their goal.
3) Appreciation of nature type posts. Since cities and suburbs took over a picture of a forest that is “oh my god that’s so beautiful” is in my mind the equivalent to their stuffed animals. Cat pictures with ironic captions and videos of cats being cute or funny are included in this as well since new animal discovery isn’t so common anymore.
So yeah, curation has been around for a while but I’m thankful that the Internet’s allowed us to each do it our own way. If curation’s something that interests you come back here every week for some examples of modern day curation we think’s been done exceptionally well.
Managing Editor
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