Those of us who actively communicate across the digital arena are assembling and reassembling data all the time. We cut and paste links, quotes, and pictures. We produce and distribute our writing, notes and thoughts. We aim to repackage what we see and learn into newly configured pods of interest that we hope will be enjoyed by, and offer “value” to, our friends and audiences.
We are Artists, not Curators.
Maybe we’re not “fine artists,” however you want to try to define that frame (that debate is eternal), but our actions are more akin to drawing, painting, sculpting, and film-making; we cut and paste. We create images and text assemblages more similar in gist to the works of Joseph Cornell, Jenny Holzer, Robert Rauchenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Ann Hamilton, and more. We’re collagists! We’re paper-mâché-ing our way across the digital plane!
Curators, in general, are more administrative than creative. They are aligned to steady themes and projects. Their goal is to gather, in the past tense, things that are completed and package-able, to reframe a collection within a historical fence.
Artists are future-makers, listeners, filters of the now, who translate the themes, ramblings and disparate elements all about us into nuggets of definition and expression. Artists are prisms, filter, guides, and trailblazers. They’re also mentors, teachers, gurus, and seers.
One day, maybe one hundred years from now, a good Curator will look back on all this data, at all these texts and images we’re sharing and announce that collectively we were part of a new renaissance of communication, an avant-garde of art-making. That in our group actions we were creating one of the largest installation sculptures ever devised and it was in real-time, flowing, un-static, and magnetic to thousands and thousands of people who all could partake in the effort.
We cannot see this clearly now, we’re in the making of it, it’s part of us and we’re part of it.
We’re not Curators, we’re the Artists, and we’re making art.
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