habits. To start learning them, let me share a story of the most famous art collector most people had never heard of—until he passed away a few years ago.
The World’s Most Unknown Art Collector
By the time eighty-nine-year-old Herbert Vogel passed away in 2012, the retired New York City postal worker had quietly amassed one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world.
Vogel and his wife, Dorothy, were already local legends in the world of art when Herbert passed away. News stories soon after his death told the story of five large moving vans showing up at the Vogel’s rent-controlled, one-bedroom Manhattan apartment to pick up more than five thousand pieces of art. The Vogel Collection, built over decades, was offered a permanent home as part of the archives and collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
The Vogels had always said the only thing they did was buy and collect art they loved.3
This passion often led them to find new young artists to support before the rest of the world discovered them. The Vogels ultimately became more than collectors. They were tastemakers, and their fabled collection featuring art from hundreds of artists, including pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and post-minimalist Richard Tuttle, was the envy of museums and other private collectors around the world.
The same qualities that drive art patrons like the Vogels to follow their instincts and collect beautiful things are the ones that make great curators of any kind. Museums and the art world are a fitting place to start when learning how to be a curator.
The Rise of “Curationism”
Museum curators organize collections into themes that tell stories. Whether they’re quirky like those told in the Mini Bottle Gallery, or an expansive exhibit covering eighteenth-century pastel portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the goal of curation is always to take individual items and examples and weave them together into a narrative.
Curators add meaning to isolated beautiful things.
I’m inspired by curators—and I’m clearly not alone. The business world has turned toward the longtime practice of curation with such growing frequency that even artists and art critics have noticed.
In 2014, art critic and writer David Balzer published a book with the brilliant title Curationism (a play on “creationism”) to examine how “curating took over the art world and everything else.” His book explores the evolution of the curator as the imparter of value and what the future of curation looks like in a world where so many from outside the art world or without the usual training start to use the principles of the field for their own purposes.
Though the book is an academic read intended mainly for the curatorial circles within which he works, he shares the valuable caution that this rise in curationism can sometimes inspire a “constant cycle of grasping and display,” where we never take the time to understand what the individual pieces mean.
In other words, curation is only valuable if you follow the act of collecting with enough moments of quiet contemplation to truly understand what all of it means.
This combination of collection and contemplation is central to being able to effectively curate ideas and learn to predict the future.
The 5 Habits of Trend Curators
I realize that calling yourself a “curator” of anything can seem like a stretch.
Curator is often a job title applied to someone who has years of expertise in historical studies or the evolution of an industry, but curators today can come from all different types of backgrounds.
Some focus on art and design while others may look at history or anthropology. Some have professional training and degrees while others are driven by passion alone, like Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. No matter their background, every one of them exhibits the same types of habits that help them to become masters at adding meaning to collected items.
Curation doesn’t require you to be an expert or a researcher or an academic. Learning these five habits will help you put the power of curation to work to help you discover better ideas and use them to develop your own observations about the rapidly accelerating present.
The 5 Habits of Trend Curators
Be Curious – always asking why, investing in learning, and improving your knowledge by investigating and asking questions.
Be Observant – learning to notice the small details in stories and life that others may ignore or fail to recognize as significant.
Be Fickle – moving from one idea to the next without becoming fixated or overanalyzing each idea in the moment.
Be Thoughtful – taking time to develop a meaningful point of view and considering alternative viewpoints without bias.
Be Elegant – seeking beautiful ways to describe ideas that bring together disparate concepts in a simple and understandable way.
How to Be Curious
Being more curious means asking questions about why things work the way they do and embracing unfamiliar situations or topics with a sense of wonder.
Bjarni Herjulfsson could have been one of the most famous explorers in the history of the world.
Instead, his life has become a cautionary tale about the historic consequences of lacking curiosity. In the year AD 986, he set off on a voyage from Norway with a crew to find Greenland. Blown off course by a storm, his ship became the first European vessel in recorded history to see North America.
Despite his crew pleading to stop and explore, Herjulfsson refused and guided his ship back on course to eventually find Greenland. Years later, he told this tale to a friend named Leif Erikson, who became inspired, purchased Herjulfsson’s ship, and took the journey for himself. Erikson is now widely remembered as the first European to land in North America—nearly five hundred years before Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas and “discovered” America.4
Herjulfsson, on the other hand, has been mostly forgotten and his story illustrates exactly why curiosity matters: it’s a prerequisite to discovery. Humans are naturally curious. The challenge is to continually find ways to allow yourself to explore your curiosity without it becoming an ongoing distraction.
When noted chef and food pioneer Ferran Adrià was once asked what he likes to have for breakfast, his reply was simple: “I like to eat a different fruit every day of the month.” Imagine if you could do that with ideas. Part of being curious is wanting to consume stories, ideas, and experiences to earn greater knowledge of the world, even if that knowledge doesn’t seem immediately useful.
3 Ways to Be More Curious Today
Consume “Brainful Media.” Sadly, we are surrounded with “brainless media,” including reality shows featuring unlikeable people doing unlikeable things (sometimes on islands, sometimes in our backyards). While they can be addictively entertaining, brainless media encourages vegetation instead of curiosity. Curiosity is fueled by consuming media
