Curation Is the New Creation

Michael Bhaskar's book Curation changed how I think about almost everything. His central argument is deceptively simple: in a world of overwhelming abundance, the act of selecting — of choosing what to include and, crucially, what to exclude — is the most valuable creative act there is. Not making. Selecting.

When I first read it, I was a strategy director in advertising, surrounded by people who valued creation above all else. The creative department made things. The rest of us helped, supported, facilitated. The hierarchy was clear: making was the real work, and everything else was overhead.

Bhaskar's argument turned that hierarchy on its head. And then AI came along and proved him right.

The curator's through-line

Curation is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest creative practices in human culture, and it has always been most valued during periods of abundance.

Think about the DJ. A DJ does not create music. A DJ selects music, sequences it, reads the room, and makes decisions about what comes next. A great DJ playing someone else's records can create an experience that is more powerful, more memorable, and more emotionally resonant than any individual track. The art is not in the making. The art is in the choosing.

Think about the museum curator. The Tate has hundreds of thousands of works in its collection. At any given time, a tiny fraction of them are on display. The curator's job is to decide which fraction, in what order, in what context. That act of selection transforms a warehouse of objects into a narrative, an argument, an experience. The works exist regardless. The meaning comes from the curation.

Think about the editor. A great magazine editor — the kind who shaped publications like The Face, i-D, or Monocle — does not just commission content. They decide what the magazine is about, what belongs and what doesn't, what the reader needs to see and what they can skip. The editor's taste is the publication's identity. Remove the editor and you have a collection of articles. Add the editor and you have a point of view.

Think about the playlist maker. Spotify has over a hundred million tracks. The difference between a playlist that transforms your afternoon and one you skip after three songs is entirely about selection. Same library. Different curation. Radically different experience.

The through-line is consistent across all of these: when supply exceeds the audience's ability to process it, the person who selects becomes more valuable than the person who produces.

AI made everyone a producer

AI tools have done something unprecedented: they have turned everyone into a producer, effectively overnight. You can generate images, write essays, build products, compose music, create videos — all without the years of training that used to be required. The supply of creative output has gone from high to functionally infinite.

This is Bhaskar's abundance problem, turbocharged. And it means that curation — the act of selection, of editing, of choosing what matters — is not just valuable. It is the entire game.

Consider what happens when you use an AI image generator. You type a prompt. The tool generates four options. You pick one, or you refine the prompt and try again. You might go through twenty, fifty, a hundred iterations before you land on the image that feels right. The tool made all of those images. You curated them. The final result is a product of your taste, expressed through the act of selection.

The same is true for building with AI code tools. When I use Claude Code to build a product, I am not writing code. I am making hundreds of editorial decisions. Should the navigation be at the top or the side? Should the colour palette be warm or cool? Should this feature exist at all? Each decision is an act of curation — choosing from the infinite space of possibilities and narrowing it down to something specific, coherent, and intentional.

The collector instinct

Some people have the curation instinct and some people do not. You can usually spot the ones who do. They are the people who are always recommending things — the friend who sends you a link and says "you need to see this." The person whose bookshelf tells a story. The colleague whose desk has three carefully chosen objects on it instead of twelve random ones. The person who, when you ask "what should I read?", gives you one answer instead of ten.

This instinct — the compulsion to collect, filter, and share — is often dismissed as a personality quirk. It is not. It is a skill, and it is becoming the most valuable skill in the creative economy.

I have always been a collector. Links, books, references, ideas. My browser has too many tabs. My bookmarks are extensive. My physical bookshelves are curated — the good ones face out, spines visible, part of the room's design. I built Trove, a personal taste engine, because I wanted a tool that could help me understand my own collection patterns. I built Curio because I wanted to surface what my network was sharing. The collector instinct is the engine underneath every project I have built.

What I have come to understand is that this instinct is not separate from creative ability. It is creative ability, expressed through selection rather than production.

Curation as brand strategy

Here is where this gets practical. Every brand makes a curation decision, whether they realise it or not. What products to sell. What content to publish. What collaborations to pursue. What to say and what to leave unsaid. The brands that do this consciously — the ones that understand their curation as a creative practice — are the ones that build the strongest identities.

Stripe is a payments company that runs a publishing house. Stripe Press publishes beautiful books about technology, economics, and progress. There is no obvious business reason for a payments company to publish books. The reason is curatorial: by choosing what to publish, Stripe signals what it values, what it believes, who it is. The publishing programme is a curation decision that communicates more about the brand than any advertising campaign could.

Apple's product line is another example. At any given time, Apple sells a relatively small number of products compared to its competitors. The discipline of deciding what not to make is as important as the innovation in what they do make. That restraint is curation. It is taste expressed through absence.

The lesson for brands is clear: in a world where everyone can make everything, what you choose to make — and, more importantly, what you choose not to make — is your identity. Your curation is your brand.

The curator's toolkit

If curation is the new creation, then the curator needs tools. Not tools for making — those are abundant. Tools for selecting, organising, filtering, and presenting.

This is why I believe the most interesting products being built right now are not creation tools but curation tools. Tools that help people make sense of abundance. Tools that surface signal from noise. Tools that help you understand your own taste by showing you the patterns in what you collect.

The best curators I know all have systems. They have processes for collecting, for reviewing, for deciding what to keep and what to discard. They have frameworks for evaluating quality. They have habits of attention that keep them connected to what is happening in their domains. The system is what separates casual consumption from intentional curation.

AI can help build these systems, but it cannot replace the judgment at their centre. An algorithm can surface trending content. It cannot tell you which of those trends matters and which is noise. A recommendation engine can suggest things similar to what you already like. It cannot push you toward the unexpected discovery that expands your taste. The curator's judgment — the human capacity to say "this matters, and this does not" — remains irreplaceable.

Curation as identity

There is a deeper point here, beyond professional strategy and brand building. In an age of infinite production, what you choose to pay attention to becomes who you are. Your curation is your identity.

This has always been true to some extent — we have always signalled our tastes through the books on our shelves, the music in our collections, the clothes on our backs. But the stakes are higher now because the volume is higher. When there is more of everything, the act of selection becomes more significant. Every choice to pay attention to one thing is a choice to ignore a thousand others.

The people who will thrive in this environment are the ones who take their curation seriously. Not as consumption, but as practice. Not as passive absorption, but as active selection. The ones who can look at the infinite stream and choose — confidently, consistently, and with clear intent — what deserves their attention and what does not.

Creation was the skill of the twentieth century. Curation is the skill of the twenty-first. And the people who understand this first will have an advantage that lasts for decades.