A Companion to Curation: A Milestone of Panoramic Curatorial Studies

This paper is an in-depth analysis of A Companion to Curation , which systematically combs the core content, theoretical innovation and academic value of the book. The book focuses on “curation” to build an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and discusses it from four dimensions: history, politics, globalization and technology. Theoretical innovation embodies the characteristics of materialism, emphasizes curation as a process of material and cultural production, and combines genealogy and other methods to reconstruct the historicity and criticism of curation. Multidisciplinary approach puts forward the concept of “verbalization of curation”, which changes curation from professional identity to the practical process of knowledge production, and breaks a single Western narrative through the global case base. The limitation lies in the abstract theory of some chapters and the imbalance of cases, and the Western cases dominate, whereas the practices in Africa and Latin America are still marginalized. Compared with The Curitorial: A Philosophy of Curating and A Brief History of Curating , this book is good at its global vision and critical tools, but the contradiction between theoretical depth and practical guidance remains to be solved.