Curation and the creation of canons requires enough people to have a shared context and be able to build community among themselves. This has been undermined by the shift from early-internet arts websites to social-media platform's algorithmic feeds where people are easily atomized into personal silos. And once atomized, they don't know there are alternatives to slop.

For-profit taste-making websites either got acquired and extinguished, or are in dire straits now, and in any event their influence over core audiences (especially young people with time for discovery) has waned to almost nothing. The non-profit blogosphere blogging about arts and literature largely grayed out and was never replaced; you can still set up a blog today, but you'll be talking to the void, you won't attract any real slice of your topic's fandom community like you once could. A putative scene hangs on at Substack, but if you look closely it's largely hustling and grifting.

All in all, curation just isn't there any more at a societal level in the same way it was in the twentieth or early twenty-first centuries.

I maintain that the AI era is forcing us to finally build good filters.

Part of the outrage is so called high literary critics have been fooled at book prizes.

Maybe a revolution like the blind taste testing of fine wines needs to happen in literature.