Matthew Darbyshire @ Manchester Art Gallery

An article in the Independent on Sunday, found in a glass-fronted notice board in the entrance to Matthew Darbyshire’s An Exhibition for Modern Living, states that the artist’s work “surveys the way we live – and curate – our lives.”

For his largest solo show to date, Darbyshire presents ten room-like installations, variably called 'sculptures,' 'environments' and 'curatorial adventures' in the exhibition catalogue, installed in a grid formation across the two gallery floors for browsing efficiency.

In the first of these, Oak Effect, a seemingly arbitrary selection of hand-crafted wooden objects from the gallery's permanent collection – complete with archival tags – are displayed in a unit constructed from contemporary flat-pack furniture.

In others, high-end design items are displayed among high-street commodities, curating and visual merchandising are understood as interchangeable terms and art and non-art are presented as equivalent. How does Darbyshire's approach to filtering and re-framing objects differ from that of the contemporary pop curator?

Firstly, we might say that the latter selects according to subjective criteria – a theme, an 'aesthetic' or an aura. This form of curating is a form of branding, of amassing and repackaging. To curate a collection of objects is to impart value beyond the value each object implicitly holds.

While some of the works in the exhibition have been fabricated with a fictional client in mind (Blades House, for example, is a mock-up apartment for “a 30-something first-time buyer and bachelor working for a news agency in London”), Darbyshire selects objects according to objective values – their material, form, colour.

The objects are presented in their matter-of-factness; the process of collecting and arranging them becomes a kind of visual choreography which in turn strips them of their usefulness or (exchange) value. That the resulting collections might relate to a lifestyle is incidental and reveals the extent to which identity is engrained in the objects we amass.

But perhaps the easiest way of answering the question about Darbyshire's difference from other pop curators is to pass the work off as satire. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine Darbyshire celebrating the array of cheap homewares that make up An Exhibition for Modern Living, but it is also difficult to say that the work amounts to an outright condemnation of them. For what would he be condemning? Poor taste?