Last night as we were getting ready for bed, I told Steve about the article in the Times about the new hip museum curators. I had to explain to him what curators do. Curators are usually behind-the-scenes sorts of characters – much less flashy than a museum director. They are the ones who handle the artwork. They know what's in the basement of the museum and what will work in upcoming exhibits. They package up the artwork in velvet and foam for exhibits abroad. Since most museums have far more art than they have wall space, it is their job to pick and choose the best pieces for display and keep moving things around so no one gets bored.
One of my favorite memories of working in a museum for that year in Chicago was when the curator took me down to the basement and let me look at a box by Duchamp and a dining room set by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The latest idea about the Internet is that successful bloggers and website owners are curators of information. They pick and choose the best information and display it well.
In his latest book, Tyler Cowen explains that bloggers construct their own personal aesthetic by pasting bits of this and that onto their website.
It's part of our mash-up culture, others have said. In an extremely thorough article for the New York Times, Michiko Kautani discusses the latest books on the Internet and the mash-up culture. Kautani seems to prefer "the Internet is destroying civilization" books, but she isn't very clear.
UPDATE: The Clutter Museum calls bullshit on the idea of bloggers as curators.
Apt. 11d 
So what sort of museum is Apt11D? I love local historical societies myself.
And here I’d thought books and writing had already destroyed civilization. Or have I been reading too much romantic anthropology again?
I want to see some medievalists talk about pre-modern mashup cultures, or at least to use some of the words to link it to the modern trend. Because I’m pretty sure this isn’t new (but I only have Chinese painting and Japanese poetry examples to cite).
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If you get to walk through the back hallways of the Carnegie Museum*, it’s all taxidermy and bones. Apparently, schools can just call-up and borrow the smaller stuffed animals for classes.
*For kiddie camps and the like they use these as a way to move the group without fear of having them scattered in the crowd of the museum.
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I just wrote about this last night on my own blog. While I appreciate the impulse to call blogging curating, curating is so much more than picking, choosing, and displaying.
Blogging is its own thing–doing it well requires a particular skill set–and I think we need to honor that rather than calling it curating.
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