Working definition. Curation is selection with a thesis. It chooses, relates, sequences, and withholds so that a field of things can become an intelligible experience.
Inherited meaning
The curator’s heritage is care: preserving works, building contexts, and making relationships visible across time. Digital culture weakened the term into personal taste or content aggregation. Its deeper practice is neither collecting nor recommending; it is constructing the conditions under which meaning can appear.
Meaning in the imagination economy
Once generation becomes abundant, curation moves from the edge of creation to its centre. The key act is no longer producing one more candidate, but deciding which possibilities belong together, which deserve attention, and which should remain unrealised. Curation is how abundance acquires direction without being reduced to uniformity.
What changes in practice
Begin with the experience or argument the selection should make possible. Include absence as an active choice. Explain why each element is present, how the sequence changes it, and what the collection refuses.