39/2025: The Choice of Curation

Image © Jose 2025

I looked up the definition of curation, a word so popular these days. It seems the more generative AI does, the more we believe the human in the loop will be curating. It seems that “curation” as the act of sifting and organizing is increasingly automatable, but curation as the act of deciding what matters and why it matters remains human, at least as long as we want culture, ethics, and collective meaning to be part of the process. If someone builds their mission in life purely around the mechanics of curation, they’re at risk of obsolescence. If they build it around curatorial judgment and authorship of meaning, it’s still a durable and valuable pursuit.

But here’s the trick question: matters and why it matters—to whom? When you apply curatorial judgment, you are basically using your standards, and authorship of meaning implies an agenda. It seems we have to accept that in curating you are always choosing what matters for someone (many times, yourself), and our agenda will shape outcomes (forget neutrality). So yes, curation is authorship with an agenda, and underneath curation, there is a strong undercurrent of censorship. Curation is selective storytelling; censorship is selective silencing.

Now that we got this out of the way, this weekend I was not cleaning the garage space, or clearing it out, or even disposing of things by dumping stuff on a trailer – I was… curating the garage. Seriously, that’s what I was doing. I was going through a space that had things from a life of a person, a family living in this house for over 50 years. This space has been collecting another layer of patina for the last three years, since he passed away. This person believed in collecting everything he thought could be of use to him—as a sculptor but also as a person whose ideology was based on “There is nothing that can’t be fixed” or “I can make a tool for that.” So there was a lot of stuff, and I’m only a third of the way.

On the left side of the garage, I found a lot of garden tools, many with makeshift handles, repaired, hacked, all of them rusty but sturdy and good to go with some maintenance. Then I found some very specific sculptor materials: several cast molds of some of the best work he did that is spread around the Commonwealth. These are like the masters of the recording artists; they’re what allows artists to control replication. I reached out to the family and will try to hand these to the organizations that commissioned the work, can’t really dispose of this.

There were some wood mock-ups of statues that are out there in the world; these are going into the house, they have a beauty and value of their own. Plastic containers of metal parts and pieces that the sculptor used to make tools to work stone. Boxes and boxes of used grinding wheels. Some power tools that are absolute relics, I’m going to make a shelf for these; at least they will die on their feet. There is a large resin sculpture that was in the house; I am going to protect it as best as I can and place it outside, in front of the house, it deserves to be appreciated by passersby. I also found a note about the sculptor’s quarry friends who supplied him with his raw material. I have asked them if they would do a plaque to put somewhere visible, signaling the sculptor’s life and achievements.

There is furniture that is weathered but functional. I cleaned a table and took it to the house, revamped a butcher block that will now be a garden workbench for my wife, other pieces of furniture will go into the studio space when that takes shape.

Yes, I filled up a small trailer with things, we can even call it trash, stuff. And I have a bunch more of stuff that didn’t fit in the trailer and also needs to go. I found things like a box of huge nails, all (no exception) had some sort of bend. While it’s true that a nail can be straightened and used, unless you used the large nails for sculpting stone, it didn’t make sense keeping them. But I hesitated. A lot of rotten wood, a lot of small pieces of this and that, a lot of things that I know he has boxes full of the same stuff in the studio area. I have seen these old metal frames full of heavy-duty drawers filled to the brim with stuff, gleaming, rusted, each unique, each with a story of where it came from, and a story of why it was kept, what opportunity it favored, what project it became a part of in the sculptor’s head. You can see how much fun I am having, right?

In the end, if you go back to the beginning, I curated the garage this weekend. Not because I wanted to (just) clear it out, but because every decision – what to keep, what to let go, what to pass on – was its own judgment of what matters, to me, to his family, maybe even to strangers walking by. That’s the hidden weight of curation: it’s never just about order, it’s about meaning. And meaning, like rust on those tools, always leaves a trace. I believe in that.