“Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these
inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an
aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are
not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so. That
might be O.K., but it also means they have a lot more in common with
advertising than they do with curation. After all, advertising trains us
to keep our desire always at the ready, nurturing that feeling that
something is missing, then redirecting it toward a tangible product. In
the end, all that pent-up yearning needs a place to go, and now it has
that place online. But products are no longer the point. The feeling is
the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass
it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have
but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.
- Carina Chocano
descensus Averno facilis est