My research for this book began quickly and fortuitously. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was in town; I snagged an interview. Christov-Bakargiev was the artistic director of Documenta 13, the 2012 version of the contemporary-art event that takes place in the small town of Kassel, Germany, every five years. For decades, Documenta has set the pace for what is current in contemporary art. Christov-Bakargiev was of particular interest, for Documenta 13 was free-floating and amorphous, and she had refused to call her team of curators curators, instead using the term agents. Surely she would have something to say about the increasing use of the noun curator and the verb to curate outside the art world, where playlists, outfits, even hors d’oeuvres are now curated.

      ‘That is a sociological question, not an art question,’ she told me, irritated. The generalizations we were making were obvious, verging on meaningless. She pointed to Italian philosopher Paolo Virno’s 2004 essay A Grammar of the Multitude, which, she claimed, ‘says it all.’

      Still, she furnished me with an exegesis. ‘We now live in a society where everyone [fears] they’re the same, so they want to specify and differentiate,’ she said. ‘My playlist is different from your playlist; my Facebook page is different from your Facebook page. It’s a sense of anxiety, where you think you don’t exist if you’re not different from everybody else. You can’t be part of the multitude. Whereas at the time of [Thomas] Hobbes, it was the opposite. You can’t be part of the country, the community, the society, unless you become the same, because you are born different, specific, unique.

      ‘Now we’re all fucking the same. We have the same iPods, the same airports. And in order for the political system to work, everybody has to be driven by that drive [to be different]. If they don’t do that, their energy will explode into a Third World War.

      ‘I’m being polemic,’ Christov-Bakargiev joked, finally. And she was, but she had lit a fire. I determined I did not want this book to focus on the popular understanding of curating as an expression of taste, sensibility and connoisseurship. This is not to say that I don’t deal with these things, but rather that this book takes for granted a reader’s understanding of the current Oxford English Dictionary definition of to curate, as an extension of museum and gallery practice, an act of selecting, organizing and presenting items in the vein of an arbiter-editor. (It should be noted that genetic labs also employ curators, who essentially do the same thing, with scientific data.) Instead of writing about taste, then, which would risk fetishizing the curator, I wanted to write clearly about how we got to this point. How did the curator ascend? How did the curator’s practice bleed into popular – especially popular-consumerist – culture? The connection was, in my view, intimate and ­essential.

      Hence curationism – a play on creationism, with its cultish fervour and its adherence to divine authorship and grand narratives. Curationism is also, of course, a poke at the contemporary art world and its pretentious, strained relationship with language (which Alix Rule and David Levine of the magazine Triple Canopy recently dubbed ‘International Art English’). We now not only use curate as a verb, but also the adjective curatorial and the noun curation. Curationism also speaks to our general fixation, since the early-twentieth century, with isms, with camps and paradigms – our internet-age affiliations with them an extension of personal branding. (One of my heroes, Erykah Badu, called her first album Baduizm, suggesting the only ism to which she subscribes is her own complex, constantly evolving one.)

      Curationism is, then, the acceleration of the curatorial impulse to become a dominant way of thinking and being. I contend that, since about the mid-1990s, we have been living in the curationist moment, in which institutions and businesses rely on others, often variously credentialed experts, to cultivate and organize things in an expression-cum-assurance of value and an attempt to make affiliations with, and to court, various audiences and consumers. As these audiences and consumers, we are engaged as well, cultivating and organizing our identities