Are we all curators now? From the hotel chef offering an artfully curated cheeseboard to the fashion world’s curated capsule collections, the sound curators (DJs) and the luxury tour operators flogging seamlessly curated travel experiences – and don’t forget the curated (actually, algorithm-generated) lists from Substack – nowhere is safe from the scourge of the contemporary curator.

The actor Idris Elba sees himself less as a conventional musician, ‘more of a curator of music’. In 2023, he curated the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti’s Box Set 6, in case you’re not up to speed on your Afrobeat vibes. The American rapper and songwriter Kanye West identifies as an ‘inventor or maybe curator’, possibly not clocking they’re quite different things. He’s also into conceptual curation, whatever that is. Over at London’s ‘cultural hub’ Kings Place, the artist Michael Mwenso has been curating Soul Assembly, ‘where music meets conversation, and community comes alive’.

Partly borrowed from the French curatour, partly from the Latin curator (derived from curare, to care for), the English word has been with us, mostly innocuously, for several hundred years. The Oxford English Dictionary reckons the earliest evidence for ‘curator’ comes from around 1390, in the writing of the poet William Langland. By the mid-17th century, the word had acquired its more cultural and academic sense, meaning ‘the officer in charge of a museum, library or other collection’. And from ‘curator’ came ‘curate’, initially meaning ‘to provide a record of curation’, then, from the late 19th........

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