CANNES – An editor from the New Yorker, the CEO of Flipboard, and the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art walk into a bar…
…actually, it was onto a Cannes stage, to talk about content curation, algorithms and why humans ultimately have the final say. Editor Ken Auletta moderated Flipboard’s Mike McCue and the Whitney’s Adam Weinberg, in a discussion which unearthed more similarities between the analog and digital spheres.
In the ongoing debate of curating vs aggregating, of quality vs quantity, Weinberg pointed out that no matter how much any museum acquires stuff, it will still undergo a process in which they will be assessed on their quality, rated for being interesting, relevant or telling. Curation, for him, is an open-ended and ongoing process of working closely with an artist or collector, to create a meaningful way of showing to viewers a group of objects or artworks–the choices raising awareness, creating inclusion, bringing people up. And popularity or sentiment have nothing to do with it. “If we curated based on ‘likes’ we would not have Edward Hopper,” Weinberg states. Curation also requires an amount of risk taking when presenting these works, and the courage to make those decisions.
Auletta and McCue then added their own views: that with so much information out on the internet,, curation is necessary to override algorithms which may otherwise dictate that Kim Kardashian should be the headline of a hard-hitting news portal instead of Katie Couric’s scoop.
“Great stories will move people forward,” says McCue. “Create an environment where stories can thrive.”
Weinberg’s interpretation: engage with objects, engage with ideas, and find the best way to do that–the unexpected interaction may result in something that moves the dialog further up the ladder.
