Curatorial Governance: An Interview with Tony Lashley

You can have a corporate brand, even, and still stand for something. I think there's going to be a mixing of expert opinion and the voice of the crowd in the curation of an ideal festival. And if you can state a set of values that comes from experts and then use the voice of the crowd to find the examples of things that align with those values, I t... See more

synthesis is going to continue to be the name of the game. In the grand arc of history, compared to the past, the crowd will continue to get more power. But in the recent arc of internet history, I actually think experts are going to get more power, but it's just going to be a different type of expert. It’s going to be an expert through the proving... See more

in an era of media overabundance people are searching for a way to distill the overabundance, and it tends to be through voices that they trust. So yeah, there's filtering, but that can also happen through systems. I don't think it's any one group of people, whether that's critics or people just relying on their networks or just on their own intuit... See more

curation, for a really long time, has been top-down. The idea of a very small pool of people deciding a lot of what people consume is never really a good idea. Injecting the voice of the people, and allowing for individuals who maybe would be talented curators on their own, to have the opportunity to pull new artists that we never would have otherw... See more

I don't think we're going to enter a world where any one way wins the day. But I think we are starting to wake up to the contemporary over-indexing towards the voice of the crowd, when it comes to the distillation of that being an algorithmic culture and understanding.

Any one single source of truth to define expertise is not going to work — you're going to need to pull it in from multiple places to really capture what it means to be an expert. I think Web3 presents a really interesting opportunity because it's decentralized.

shine a light on things that I think are historically, critically, or culturally important that haven't been assigned the proper value… but "proper" is pretty subjective. Hopefully, collectively, you can figure out how to value artists like Sylvester — people who've had more influential roles in music history than most people realize — or also hype... See more

allowing people to be rewarded and capture some of the value that they actually create is really important, and allowing disparate voices to enter the fold through people who otherwise wouldn't be curators… That's a unique opportunity.

It’s going to be an expert through the proving of data — an expert through action, rather than an expert through appointment.