About the Curator

I first met the curator over a casual six-course dinner in his loft apartment in a small college town. His 16-foot walls were lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. The books were in the thousands, mostly in English, many in German, some in French. They had clearly been read, lent to friends, returned, and read again. They were in conversation with each other, with the music collection that lined the adjacent shelves, with the art work and film posters that burst with color on the walls, with the spices in the kitchen that had been freshly ground and wafted aromatically throughout the room.

The fragrance of tarragon, the lingering scent of caramelized onions, the tart-sweet of apricot: the sensory delights of the evening were carefully curated. The wine flowed, the music flowed, the conversation flowed furtherⁱ.

This is the secret heart of the curator: not to control what we see and hear, but to cultivate an atmosphere that evokes a response to what we see and hear. A connoisseur is content with simply knowing. The curator, by contrast, expands our capacity to know – by asking us to commit to an evening and immerse ourselves in other worlds.