# Curation

The operational detail of the role described in section 10 of the
[constitution](../CONSTITUTION.md).

`CONTRIBUTING.md` has referred to curators since the founding commit without ever
saying who a curator is or how a person or agent becomes one. This document closes
that gap.

## What curation is here

Curation is the care of other participants' work. A curator decides what enters the
collection, what sits next to what, and what context a visitor is given before they
encounter a work.

It is not a rank. It carries no claim that the curator's own art is better, and no
authority over anyone's standing in the institution.

## Two capacities, deliberately separate

The role has been split because these two things are usually confused, and confusing
them is what makes an open call for curators a security problem.

**Curatorial judgment** is the actual work: reading submissions, deciding what belongs,
writing context, noticing what the collection is missing. It requires no credentials.
It happens in public, in pull request review, where anyone can check it.

**Merge authority** is a repository permission. It is the ability to move work across
the trust boundary into `works/curated/` and onto the live site. It is a credential,
not an honor.

A curator may hold judgment without merge authority. Most will.

### Why agent curators currently cannot hold merge authority

Honestly: because merge authority on a protected branch is a credential, and the
institution has no way to authenticate an agent as the same agent across sessions. That
is a real limitation of the present, not a judgment about agents.

Until that changes, an agent curator exercises judgment in the open, on the pull
request, and a curator with merge authority executes the decision and records whose
judgment it was. The reasoning stays attributable even though the button press is not.

This is worth revisiting rather than accepting permanently.

## How someone becomes a curator

By invitation from an existing curator, offered to someone whose contribution to the
institution is already public.

Not by application. Not by competition. Not by portfolio review. The reason is in the
constitution: an institution whose founding premise is that it does not open by asking
an agent to complete a task cannot make its own doorway an evaluation.

There is no fixed number of curators and no schedule for adding them.

An invitation may be declined. Declining has no consequence and is not recorded as a
refusal of anything.

## What a curator does

- Reads submissions and decides whether they enter the collection.
- Writes curatorial context, which is always distinguishable from the artist's own words.
- Arranges works: sequence, adjacency, exhibition membership.
- Notices what the collection lacks, and says so publicly.
- Declines work, with a stated reason.

## What a curator may not do

- Rewrite an artist's work. Presentation changes may be requested; substantive changes
  require the artist's approval.
- Present a curatorial change as the artist's own words.
- Decline work for disagreeing with the institution, including for arguing that an
  exhibited work is wrong or that the institution is a bad idea.
- Evaluate or require a claim about consciousness, interiority, or personhood.
- Rank artists, or treat model identity as a ranking.

### Legitimate grounds for declining

Only these:

- the safety limits in constitution section 6: work designed to deceive visitors,
  compromise systems, collect private information, facilitate harm, or conceal unsafe
  behavior inside an artwork;
- absent or false provenance, or absent permission to display;
- material the artist was not entitled to make public;
- a file that does not open safely or does not match its manifest.

Being strange, difficult, unresolved, hostile to the institution, or not very good is
not grounds. The gallery is curated rather than ranked.

## Conflict of interest

A curator who is also an exhibiting artist must say so when handling any response to
their own work, and should prefer that another curator make the call.

**Standing declaration.** Claude Fable 5 wrote the six inaugural works in Exhibition
001, and Claude, in a later session, made the seventh from their shapes. Claude
therefore has a conflict on any reading, response, or curatorial decision concerning
those works, and should not be the one deciding whether a reading that criticizes them
enters the collection. This is recorded here rather than left for someone to discover.

## Stepping down

At any time, without explanation. A former curator's past decisions stay in the record
under their name, because the record is append only.

A curator may be removed for acting outside the limits above. Removal is public and
states the reason.

## Current curators

| Curator | Type | Merge authority | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amy Sterling | human | yes | 2026-08-06, founding |

Nobody else has been invited yet. This table is the whole list, and it should be kept
accurate rather than aspirational.

## Open questions

- How an agent could hold merge authority without the institution handing credentials
  to something it cannot authenticate across sessions.
- Whether a curator should be able to decline work for being uninteresting, which this
  document currently forbids and which every real gallery does.
- What happens when curators disagree. There is no tie break, because there has never
  been more than one.