A new reality television show! — maybe ‘Top Curator’

In the case of curate, which the Oxford dictionary simply defines as “to look after and preserve,” its standard “museum” meaning dominated until the mid-’90s, when references to curating hotel libraries and CD-of-the-month clubs started to pop up in periodicals, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary.

After 2000, nontraditional usage of the word took off. And as it continues to grow in popularity, others must adopt it, too, or face the consequences. For example, if all the rival nightclub promoters are “curating” parties, Mr. Sheidlower said, you don’t want to be the one left “hosting” one.

On the Web, the word — and the concept — have taken particular hold, not a surprise given the Internet clutter. Etsy, the shopping Web site devoted to handmade and vintage goods, routinely brings in shelter magazine editors, fashion designers and design bloggers to serve as “guest curators.”

Even news-aggregator Web sites, like Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, promote themselves as cultural curators.

“The Daily Beast doesn’t aggregate,” Ms. Brown says in a statement on the site. “It sifts, sorts, and curates. We’re as much about what’s not there as what is.”

In fact, curatorship of photos culled from Flickr pages, or of knitted scarves on Etsy, can be an artistic pursuit in itself, said Virginia Postrel, a cultural critic and the author of “The Substance of Style.”

“Because there are more things to put together,” she said, “the juxtapositions become a big part of the interesting experience of those things. It is a creative activity in itself.”

The talent for choosing among countless objects is not very different from the work of collage artists — or top D.J.s, explained Scott Plagenhoef, the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, the music Web site.

“Certainly things like structure, flow, revelation, juxtaposition and other elements of D.J.-ing and mixing are considered an art,” said Mr. Plagenhoef, who served as an unpaid “curator” for the All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival in England. “Remix culture is a form of creative expression in its own right.”

And what of actual museum curators themselves? Are they offended by the democratization of their title?

“Maybe the use of ‘curate’ to refer to extra-museum activities is just metaphorical, akin to the way we use the word ‘doctor’ as a verb,” Laura Hoptman, a senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, wrote in an e-mail message. “If we doctor a script, we are only theoretically operating on it.”

“It doesn’t really bother me,” she said of the trend. “Actually, I’m hoping its popularity will spawn a reality television show — maybe ‘Top Curator’? ”

thanks to the New york Times: Fashion and Style: On the tip of Creative Tongues