It is one of those commonly held opinions that language is constantly evolving and that we shouldn’t therefore be too preoccupied with long-held definitions.
But when it was announced that Robert Smith of the Cure would be curating this year’s Meltdown festival, the use of “curating” brought me up short yet again. I know that it has been used in this context for some time, but it still seems to have moved a long way from the dictionary definition of a curator as a superintendent, especially one of a museum. Quite how there is an equivalence between running the Ashmolean and putting on a series of gigs featuring Nine Inch Nails, Mogwai, My Bloody Valentine and the Libertines escapes me.
I can’t bring myself to believe that the organisers of Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and Monterey were doing anything other than putting on top-notch festivals with great line-ups, with no overarching notions of artsy-fartsy “conservation”.
On the subject of the arts, I noticed mention in another paper of a “gallerist”. I take this to be a gallery owner, but my dictionary offers no helpful info. The closest it comes is the delightful “galleryite”, one who frequents the gallery in the theatre. Onwards, I suppose, but not always upwards.
Meanwhile, the spirit of military theorist Carl von Clausewitz is everywhere. Sarah Lee, of the Countryside Alliance, lamenting that billions are being lost in rural areas because of slow broadband, talks of the need for a “rural digital strategy”; an advertisement commands that you should “build your bitcoin trading strategy”; while Capita has appointed a new bloke “to manage the company’s resourcing strategy”.
Blimey, I knew that the City was a cut-throat world, but I hadn’t realised quite what a martial environment it truly was.
Mind you, when you read of “lower conversions of the pipeline” you can understand the need to be on a war footing and ready to retaliate against such infelicities at the earliest possibly opportunity.
