Who Decides What Matters? On the Responsibility of Choosing

With information everywhere, moving at an overwhelming pace, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what is truly important. A bit like with the news, actually. No longer really sure how to prioritise it all. Perhaps no longer really understand it either. And when everything seems equally important, there is this feeling that nothing really is. As though abundance has begun to blur distinctions rather than reveal them.

Perhaps that is why, at least in the short term, it has become easier not to choose than to commit to a choice. As though it were more comfortable to trust whatever happens to be circulating than to say: I think this deserves our attention.

It often feels as though we have to reach the edge of the precipice before realising that a choice could have made a difference. That is certainly the feeling these past few times have given me. Between political upheaval and the growing concern, even resignation, surrounding environmental issues, it often seems that we only wake up when our options begin to disappear. That we only realise the importance of a decision when it is already almost too late to change the outcome. 

Because choosing is demanding. It means comparing. Looking at different possibilities. Informing ourselves. Remaining curious. Accepting that not everything carries the same weight. It also means taking a risk and accepting that we might be wrong, and that we may have to change our minds. But above all, choosing almost always means being able to explain why. Or, at the very least, being willing to ask ourselves the question.

From that moment on, a choice is no longer purely intuitive. It becomes a line of reasoning. And where there is reasoning, there is discussion, sometimes disagreement. Perhaps that is precisely why it has become so tempting to delegate our choices.


Dénes Farkas. Installation: Evident in advance, 2013. 


Increasingly guided by algorithms, recommendation systems and trends, choices are now influenced by countless factors that often spare us from having to defend a position. Almost without noticing, we end up delegating the responsibility that comes with choosing as well.

Yet optimisation is not judgment. Recommendation is not interpretation. And making something visible is not the same as producing meaning. When no one takes responsibility for making choices, a certain form of care also disappears. Taking the time to look. To compare. To connect. To defend a hypothesis. Without that attention, it becomes difficult to build a meaningful narrative.


Dénes Farkas. Installation: Evident in advance, 2013. 


For a long time, the field of contemporary jewellery was built around relatively well-defined roles. There was an ecosystem, a niche one, of critics, curators, gallerists, collectors and institutions who, each in their own way, championed particular works, artists or ideas. Of course, those choices were also shaped by relationships, affinities and interests. But there were people willing to publicly defend a particular reading of the field. A reading that could be shared, debated, criticised or rejected, but one that at least had the merit of being clearly assumed.

Today, those boundaries have become far more porous. The proliferation of digital platforms, social media and new editorial spaces has profoundly transformed the way works are encountered and shared. What once felt like a relatively legible landscape has become far more difficult to navigate.

And that is why we need to be really attentive. The more works circulate across different contexts, the greater the need to connect them. The more images there are, the more necessary it becomes to create context. Not in order to decide what is good or bad, but to understand why one work speaks to another, why one exhibition tells one story rather than another.


Dénes Farkas. Installation: Evident in advance, 2013. 


This is what a curator does when building an exhibition. It is what a gallerist does when shaping the gallery's programme. What a collector does when bringing together works that, collectively, show/tell something. What a critic or writer does when deciding which projects deserve to be written about. Even an editorial platform does it when deciding what to publish.

Ultimately, perhaps the question is no longer who is a curator. It seems to be about recognising that curatorial responsibility extends far beyond the profession itself. The moment we choose to exhibit, support, write about, publish, collect or simply place works in relation to one another, we are already proposing a reading.

And if each of those gestures contributes to shaping a narrative, what story are we writing about contemporary jewellery?

 

About the author

Cécile Maes has been Content Editor at Klimt02 since 2023. Her interest in jewellery stems from the human relationships it reflects and the ways in which historical references and everyday experiences can be connected to explore why we wear jewellery and the meanings we attach to it.

Mail: cecile@klimt02.net
Instagram: cilce_maes