Being selected still matters

ART FRIED® Contemporary culture, served hot. Read in one shot. Digest later. The internet did something remarkable: it removed an enormous number of doors. An artist can post a work at 10:03 and have it seen on the other side of the world at 10:04. That is genuine progress. But once everything can be visible, visibility alone starts losing some of its value. This is where a word we spent years treating with suspicion becomes interesting again: selection. Not because anyone should possess some mystical authority to decide what counts as art, but because choosing carries responsibility. A curator, jury, gallery, foundation or exhibition programme that selects a work is making a simple statement: out of many possibilities, this one belongs here. In an image-saturated culture, that gesture is not automatically elitist. Sometimes it is orientation. Selection, of course, does not make a work good by magic, and art history is full of brilliant people rejected by the wrong people at the wrong time. But pretending selection has no value would be equally naive. Careers are also built through a sequence of contexts willing to take the risk of saying yes. The answer, then, is not to abolish gatekeepers altogether. It is to multiply them, make them more transparent, more diverse, more accessible and less dependent on inherited networks. Because the opposite of a closed system is not a system with no selection. It is a system in which far more people have a genuine chance of being selected. Art. Culture. No cold takes.