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Curating Creativity

Working Paper · March 2013

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4091.2245

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 Curating Creativity
Jalees Rehman

Correspondence to:

Jalees Rehman, M.D.

University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Medicine
Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology
835 South Wolcott Ave, Room E403, Chicago, IL 60612, USA

Email: jalees.rehman[at]gmail[dot]com

Scientific Blog: The Next Regeneration http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/

Personal Blog: Fragments of Truth http://www.fragments-of-truth.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @jalees_rehman

Keywords: Creativity, curating, curators, art, artists, Internet, information, web curating,
librarian, Q-credit, Twitter, social media
 Curating Creativity

Curating Creativity

“For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony,
verbal nonsense, and incoherency.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, Library of Babel (1)

The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9,
2009, in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. His untimely death shocked the Australian art
community, not only because of the gruesome nature of his death – Waterlow was stabbed
alongside his daughter by his mentally ill son (2) – but also because his death represented a
major blow to the burgeoning Australian art community. He was a highly-regarded art
curator (3) who had served as a director of the Sydney Biennale and international art
exhibitions and was also an art ambassador who brought together artists and audiences from
all over the world.

After his untimely death, his partner Juliet Darling discovered some notes that Waterlow had
jotted down shortly before his untimely death to characterize what defines and motivates a
good art curator, and he gave them the eerily prescient title “A Curator’s Last Will and
Testament”:

1. Passion
2. An eye of discernment
3. An empty vessel
4. An ability to be uncertain
5. Belief in the necessity of art and artists
6. A medium — bringing a passionate and informed understanding of
works of art to an audience in ways that will stimulate, inspire, question
7. Making possible the altering of perception

Waterlow’s notes help dismantle the cliché of stuffy old curators walking around in
museums who ensure that their collections remain unblemished and instead portray the
curator as a passionate person who is motivated by a desire to inspire artists and audiences
alike.

The Evolving Roles of Curators

The traditional role of the curator was closely related to the Latin origins of the word,
“curare,” which means “to take care of,” “to nurse,” or “to look after.” Curators of museums
or art collections were primarily in charge of preserving, overseeing, archiving, and
cataloging the artifacts that were placed under their guardianship. As outlined in Thinking
Contemporary Curating (4) by Terry Smith, the latter half of 20th century witnessed the
emergence of new roles for art curators, both private curators and those formally employed
as curators by museum or art collections. Curators not only organized art exhibitions but
were given an increasing degree of freedom in terms of choosing the artists and themes of
the exhibitions and creating innovative opportunities for artists to interact with their

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audiences. The art exhibition itself became a form of art, a collage of art assembled by the
curators in a unique manner.

Curatorial roles can be broadly divided into three domains:

1. Custodial – perhaps most in line with traditional curating in which the curator
primarily maintains or preserves art collections.
2. Navigatory – a role that has traditionally focused on archiving and cataloging pieces
of art so that audiences can readily access art.
3. Discerning – the responsibility of a curator to decide which artists and themes to
include and feature, using the “eye of discernment” described by Nick Waterlow..

Creativity and Curating

The diverse roles of curators are characterized by an inherent tension. Curators are charged
with conserving and maintaining art (and by extension, culture) in their custodial roles, but
they also seek out new forms of art and experiment with novel ways to exhibit art in their
electoral roles. Terry Smith’s Thinking Contemporary Curating (4) shows how the
boundaries between curator and artist are becoming blurry, because exhibiting art itself
requires an artistic and creative effort. Others feel that the curators or exhibition-makers
need to be conscious of their primary role as facilitators and that they should not “compete”
with the artists whose works they are exhibiting. This raises the question of whether the
process of curating art is actually creative.

It is difficult to find a universal and generally accepted definition of what constitutes

creativity because it is such a subjective concept, but the definition provided by Jonathan
Plucker and colleagues in their paper Why Isn’t Creativity More Important to Educational
Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research (5) is an
excellent starting point:

Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by

which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is
both novel and useful as defined within a social context.

Using this definition, assembling an art exhibition is indeed creative – it generates a

“perceptible product” that is both novel and useful to the audiences that attend the exhibition
as well as to the artists who are being provided new opportunities to showcase their work.
The aptitude, process, and environment that go into the assembly and design of an art
exhibition differ among all curators, so that each art exhibition reflects the creative signature
of a unique curator.

Ubiquity of Curators

The formal title “curator” is commonly used for art curators or museum curators, but
curatorial activity – in its custodial, navigatory, and discerning roles – is not limited to these
professions. Librarians, for example, have routinely acted as curators of books. Their

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traditional focus has been directed toward their custodial and navigatory roles, cataloging
and preserving books, and helping readers navigate through the vast jungle of published
books.

Unlike the key role that art curators play in organizing art exhibitions, librarians are not the
primary organizers of author readings, book fairs, or other literary events, which are instead
primarily organized by literary magazines, literary agents, publishers, or independent
bookstores. It remains to be seen whether the literary world will also witness the emergence
of librarians as curators of such literary events, similar to what has occurred in the art world.
Our local public library occasionally organizes a “Big Read” event for which librarians
select a specific book and recommend that the whole community read the book. The
librarians then lead book discussions with members of the community and also offer
additional reading materials that relate to the selected book. Such events do not have the
magnitude of an art exhibition, but they are innovative means by which librarians interact
with and inspire readers.

One of the most significant curatorial contributions in German literary history was the
collection of fairy tales and folk tales by the Brothers Grimm (6) (Brüder
Grimm or Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Readers may not always realize
how much intellectual effort went into assembling the fairy tales, many of which co-existed
in various permutations depending on the region of where the respective tales were being
narrated. I own a copy of the German language edition of the Children’s and Household
Tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen) (7), which contains all their original annotations. These
annotations allow the reader to peek behind the scenes and see the breadth of their curatorial
efforts, especially their “eye of discernment.” For example, the version of Snow White that
the Brothers Grimm chose for their final edition contains the infamous scene in which the
evil Queen asks her mirror, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, Who is the prettiest in all the land?”
She naturally expects the mirror to say that the Queen is the prettiest because she just
finished feasting on what she presumed were Snow White’s liver and lungs and is convinced
that Snow White is dead. According to the notes of the Brothers Grimm, there was a
different version of the Snow White tale in which the Queen does not ask a mirror but
instead asks Snow White’s talking pet dog, which is cowering under a bench after Snow
White’s disappearance and happens to be called “Spiegel” (German for “Mirror”)! I am
eternally grateful for the curatorial efforts of the Brothers Grimm because I love the
symbolism of the Queen speaking to a mirror and because I do not have to agonize over
understanding why Snow White named her pet dog “Mirror” or expect a Disneyesque movie
with the title “Woof Woof” instead of “Mirror Mirror.”

Internet Curators

The Internet is now providing us access to an unprecedented and overwhelming amount of

information. Every year, millions of articles, blog posts, images, and videos are being
published online. Older texts, images, and videos that were previously published in more
traditional formats are also being made available for online consumption. The book The
Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (8) by James Gleick is quite correct in using
expressions such as “information glut” or “deluge” to describe how we are drowning in

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information. Gleick also aptly uses the allegory of the Library of Babel (9), a brilliant short
story written by Jorge Luis Borges about an imaginary library consisting of hexagonal
rooms that is finite in size but contains an unfathomably large number of books, all possible
permutations of sequences of letters. Most of these books are pure gibberish because they
are random sequences of letters, but amidst billions of such books, one is bound to find at
least a handful with some coherent phrases. Borges’ story also mentions a mythical “Book-
Man,” a god-like librarian who has seen the ultimate cipher to the library, a book that is the
compendium of all other books. Borges originally wrote the story in 1941, long before the
Internet era, but the phrase, “For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues
of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency” rings even more true today when
we think of the information available on the web.

This overwhelming and disorienting torrent of digital information has given rise to a new
group of curators, Internet or web curators, who primarily focus on the navigatory and
discerning roles of curatorship. Curatorial websites or blogs such
as 3quarksdaily, Brainpickings, or Longreads comb through mountains of online
information and try to select a handful of links to articles, essays, poems, short stories,
videos, images, or books that they deem to be the most interesting, provocative, or inspiring
for their readers. They disseminate these links to their readers and followers by posting
excerpts or quotes on their respective websites or by using social media networks such as
Twitter. The custodial role of preserving online information is not really the focus of
Internet curators; instead, Internet curators are primarily engaged in navigatory and
discerning roles. In addition to the emergence of professional Internet curatorship through
such websites or blogs, a number of individuals have also begun to function as volunteer
Internet curators and help manage digital information.

Analogous to art curatorship, Internet curatorship also requires a significant creative effort.
Each Internet curator uses individual criteria to create their own collage of information and
themes they focus on. Even when Internet curators have thematic overlaps, they may still
decide to feature or disseminate very different types of information because the individuals
engaged in curatorship have very distinct tastes and subjective curatorial criteria. One
curator’s chaff is another curator’s wheat.

Formal Education and Training in Internet Curation

There are no formal training programs that train people to become Internet curators. Most
popular Internet curators usually have a broad range of interests ranging from the
humanities, arts, and sciences to literature and politics. They use their own experience and
expertise in these areas to help them select the best links that they then pass on to their
readers or followers. Some Internet curators are open to suggestions from their readers, thus
crowd-sourcing their curatorial activity; others routinely browse selected websites or social
media feeds of individuals they deem to be the most interesting; others may plug in their
favorite words to scour the web for intriguing new articles.

Internet curation will become even more important in the next decades as the amount of
information we amass will likely continue to grow exponentially. Not just individuals, but

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even corporations and governments, will need Internet curators who can sift through
information and distill it down to manageable levels without losing critical content. In light
of this anticipated need for Internet curators, one should ask the question whether it is time
to envision formal training programs that help prepare people for future jobs as Internet
curators. Internet curation is both an art and a science – the art of the curatorial process is to
creatively assemble information in a manner that attracts and inspires readers while the
science of Internet curation involves using search algorithms that do not just rely on
subjective and arbitrary criteria but systematically interrogate vast amounts of information
that are now globally available. A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree program in Internet
Curation could conceivably train students in the art and science of Internet curation.

Q-Credit

In scientific manuscripts, it is common for scientists to cite the preceding work of

colleagues. Other colleagues who provide valuable tools, such as plasmids for molecular
biology experiments, are cited in the “Acknowledgements” section of a manuscript.
Colleagues whose input substantially contributed to the manuscript and scientific work are
included as co-authors. Current academic etiquette does not necessarily acknowledge the
curatorial efforts of scientists who may have nudged their colleagues into a certain research
direction by forwarding an important paper that they might have otherwise ignored.

Especially in world in which meaningful information is becoming one of our most valuable
commodities, it might be time to start acknowledging the flux of information that shapes our
thinking and our creativity. We are beginning to recognize the importance of people who are
links in the information chain and help separate out meaningful information from the
“senseless cacophony.” Perhaps we should therefore also acknowledge all the sources of
information, not only those who generated it but also those who manage the information or
guide us towards the information. Such a curatorial credit, or Q-credit, could be added to
the end of an article. It would not only acknowledge the intellectual efforts of the
information curators, but it could also serve as a curation map that would inspire readers to
look at the individual elements in the information chain. The readers would be able to
consult the nodes or elements that were part of the information chain (instead of just relying
on lone cited references) and choose to take alternate curation paths.

I will try to illustrate a Q-credit using the example of Abbas Raza, who pointed me towards
a 3quarksdaily discussion of “Orientalism” and an essay by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami.
Even though I had previously read Edward Said’s book Orientalism, the profound insights
in Bilgrami’s essay made me re-read Edward Said’s book. The Q-credit could be
acknowledged as follows:

Q-Credit: Abbas Raza --> The 2008 3Quarksdaily Forum on Occidentalism (10) -->
Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment (11) by Akeel
Bilgrami published 2008 on 3Quarksdaily.com and 2006 in Critical Inquiry (12) -->
Bilgrami identifies five broad themes in Edward Said’s Orientalism (13)

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 Curating Creativity

The acknowledgement of information flux is already part of the Twitter netiquette. The
German theologian Barbara Mack uses her Twitter handle @faraway67 to curate important
new articles about history, science, music, photography, linguistics, and literature. She sees
the role of web curators similar to that of music conductors, who do not compose original
pieces of music but instead enable the access of an audience to the original creative work.
She says that “web curation is a relatively new field of dealing with information, and good
curation is an act of creativity which requires dedication and a keen sense for content.” She
agrees that curators should indeed be given credit, “not only out of courtesy but to
acknowledge their efforts of taking upon the challenge of bringing the vast information the
web provides into a handy form for their followers to enjoy.”

Twitter curators like Barbara Mack use abbreviations such as h/t (hat-tip) or RT (retweet),
followed by a Twitter handle to acknowledge their sources. Contemporary Twitter netiquette
suggests that if curated links are of use to followers, these should acknowledge the curators’
efforts before tweeting them on.

One challenge that is intrinsic to Twitter (but may in an analogous fashion apply to other
social media networks as well) is that each tweet can only contain 140 characters, which
presently makes it very difficult to acknowledge the comprehensive curatorial information
flux. If I decide to tweet on an interesting article about the philosophy of science, which I
found in the Twitter feed of person X, the space limitations may make it impossible for me
to give credit to all the preceding members of the information chain that had directed X’s
attention to that specific article. The Q-credit system may thus be best suited for
acknowledgements at the end of blog posts or articles but not for social media messaging
with strict space limitations.

The Future of Internet Curation

The area of Internet curation is still in its infancy, and it is very difficult to predict how it
will evolve. Managing online information will become increasingly important. Even though
such managerial roles may not necessarily carry the title “Internet curator,” there is little
doubt that managing online information in a meaningful manner is one of the biggest
challenges that we will face in the 21st century. I am quite optimistic that we will be able to
address this challenge, but the first hurdle is to recognize it.

Acknowledgments:

An earlier version of this article was first published on March 4, 2013, at

3QuarksDaily.com.

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References

1. Borges, J. L. (2000). The Library of Babel. David R. Godine.

2. Son charged with murder of British art curator in Australia. (2009, November 27).
The Guardian. Retrieved from
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/27/nick-waterlow-murder-arrest

3. McKenzie, J. (2009, November 17). Nick Waterlow obituary. The Guardian.

Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/17/nick-
waterlow-obituary

4. Smith, T. (2012). Thinking Contemporary Curating. Independent Curators

International.

5. Plucker, J. A., Beghetto, R. A., & Dow, G. T. (2004). Why isn’t creativity more
important to educational psychologists? Potentials, pitfalls, and future directions
in creativity research. Educational Psychologist, 39(2), 83-96. doi:
10.1207/s15326985ep3902_1

6. Brothers Grimm. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm

7. Grimm, B. (2010). Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Reclam, Phillip, jun. GmbH, Verlag.

8. Gleick, J. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Pantheon

9. The Library of Babel. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

10. Raza, S. A. (2008, September 8). Introduction to the 3 Quarks Daily online seminar
on Akeel Bilgrami’s “Occidentalism, the Very Idea.” Retrieved from
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/introduction-to.html

11. Bilgrami, A. (2008, September 8). Occidentalism, the very idea: An essay on the
enlightenment and enchantment. Retrieved from
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/occidentalism-t.html

12. Bilgrami, A. (2006). Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and
Enchantment. Critical Inquiry, 32(3), 381–411. http://doi.org/10.1086/505373

13. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage.

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Q-Credits

1. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2010) by James C. Kaufman and Robert J.

Sternberg --> Chapter 3 “Assessment of Creativity” by Jonathan A. Plucker and
Matthew C. Makel --> Why Isn’t Creativity More Important to Educational
Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity
Research (2004) by Jonathan A. Plucker et al. in EDUCATIONAL
PSYCHOLOGIST, 39(2), 83–96

2. Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012) by Terry Smith --> Information about Nick
Waterlow and still image from A Curator’s Last Will and Testament

3. Book review of The Information at Brainpickings --> The Information: A History, a

Theory, a Flood (2011) by James Gleick --> Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
as an allegory for the information glut

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