[Commlist] New Book: Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism. The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

/New book announcement:/


  Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism: The Value of Selection,
  Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures


Author: Panos Kompatsiaris

Routledge, 2024 (Series: Routledge Studies in Media and Cultural Industries)

https://www.routledge.com/Curation-in-the-Age-of-Platform-Capitalism-The-Value-of-Selection-Narration/Kompatsiaris/p/book/9781032023007 


This book employs the figure of curation—the selection, arrangement, and 
display of objects, concepts, and things—to explore the cultures of 
platform capitalism. Considering its rise in the global art world as an 
authorial, meaning-making activity and an organizational-entrepreneurial 
endeavour, it looks at curation as the interweaving of innovative 
concepts, elaborate storytelling, and trusted experts leaking out from 
galleries to hashtags.

Its logic encompasses diverse spheres ranging from high-brow art and the 
fashion world to low-brow experience economies and economies of 
authenticity, from confidence cultures and relationship gurus to 
algorithmic spectacles. More than an economy, “curate and be curated” is 
a diffused imperative amidst the disorienting spread of information that 
digital platforms enable: What to post, what to wear, what to eat, what 
friends to have, what music to hear, what films to watch, what places to 
visit, what socks to choose, and what opinion to have about serious 
issues like climate change, military coups, AI, genetics, space 
colonization, and cryonics, or everyday issues like football, fashion, 
and diet. Drawing on critical platform theory, material culture, and 
multi-sited ethnography, the book examines curated worlds of coolness, 
authenticity, and inspiration, including the luxury fashion brands 
Vetements and Balenciaga, Airbnb food experiences, and the figure of the 
life coach. The book argues that the curatorial imperative endorses an 
aspirational class imaginary and the idea that handling self-narratives 
is a strategic means of socialization that can assist upward mobilities 
as well as neoliberal narratives of well-being, promotion, and success.

This book will be of key interest to academics, researchers, and 
advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of cultural 
studies, media studies, communication studies, curating, contemporary 
art theory, critical management studies, and art history, as well as to 
more general readers interested in new media, platforms, and digital 
culture.

*Table of Contents*

PART 1: HOMO CURATORIUS

Chapter 1. Introducing the Curatorial Imperative

Chapter 2. From Galleries to Hashtags: The Aspirational Imaginary of 
Curating

Chapter 3. Curating and Platforms

PART 2: CULTURES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM

Chapter 4. Cool is in the Air: Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital 
Warhol Economies

Chapter 5. The Babushka–Nonna Experience: Curated Authenticities and the 
Aspirational Gastronomical Imaginary

Chapter 6: “A Person Without Vision will Perish”: Curating Mindsets, 
Micro-celebrities, and Intimacies in Life Coaching

Chapter 7. Who to be, How to Appear, and What to Consume: Concluding 
Thoughts



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