The television food personality and chef Angela Hartnett, formerly best remembered as the Rod Hull to Gordon Ramsay’s Emu, is curating something called Kitchen Tales at the Chipping Norton Set’s cheese and music festival, Wilderness. But I can’t work out from the blurb if it is an exhibition, an event, a shop, or just some ingredients lying on the floor that you can look at. Nonetheless, it is reassuring to know that it has been curated, whatever it is.My grandad was a sales rep for Colman’s Mustard. I expect today he would have to say he was a mustard plant compound retail opportunity curator! And he wouldn’t be able to say what colour the mustard was, in case it offended people with jaundice!! It’s political correctness gone mad!!! It’s worse than that!!!! It’s political correctness gone sanity challenged!!!!! And they’ve banned Christmas!!!!!! The cattery wouldn’t take Robin’s cat because they said it looked like Hitler!!!!!!!

This morning I heard a radio interview with the British Dental Association’s curator of dental history, Dr Margaret Wilson, her suspicious job title alone suggesting a whitewash is in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that teeth never occur naturally in humans, and are inserted at birth to generate dentistry revenue.

And yet I recognise Curator Wilson as part of the International Curatorship of Curators, of which I am the acting curator. For, in my capacity as an E-list celebrity comedian, writer, and broadcaster, I have curated over six things, from a weekend at the Southbank Centre to the order of all the pens on my desk, and if I get it wrong, all the women in the world will die. Most imminently, I am the curator of the boutique music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, at Prestatyn Pontins, on the weekend of 15 April.

Ian Hislop’s satirical news magazine Private Eye ran a sympathetic piece on the problems of staging such ambitious events without sponsorship or funding, but in describing me, the word curator was placed in inverted commas, ie “curator”, as if there were some doubt that I had “curated” the festival at all; or as if the very idea of a “curator” was so ridiculous it was suspect in some way. Let me assure you, I am a “curator”, and I have personally “curated” the living fuck out of this event until I am blue in the face.

But what is a “curator”? Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “curator” of the Serpentine gallery, wrote the book on “curating”, literally. It is called Ways of Curating and is, in my professional “curatorial” opinion, naive at best. Indeed, Angela Hartnett, Dr Margaret Wilson and I were all laughing on www.curator.net the other day about what a tool Obrist is when it comes to “curating”. Margaret Wilson said Obrist “couldn’t curate his way out of an elephant’s ballsack”, which seemed unnecessary.

All Tomorrow’s Parties weekend events inevitably exploit the dramatic contrast of the familiar British holiday camp and the unpredictable artists they showcase. Should my “curatorship” embody the radical history of the British holiday camp as an abstract ideal? J Fletcher Dodd’s Socialist Holiday Camp in Great Yarmouth was the interwar pioneer of the holiday-as-political-statement model. The booking of bands like Dutch anarcho-punks the Ex, and Nottingham ranters Sleaford Mods, might reflect this self-improving strain, just as the inclusion of a Saturday small hours set by Charlotte Church echoes Fred Pontin’s and Billy Butlin’s subsequent re-pointing of the instructive blueprint towards utilitarian notions of entertainment.

Obrist’s book told me nothing, as usual. I rang Hartnett, but she was busy stuffing a platypus’s egg with marinated quail’s feet. Dr Wilson was lying about teeth, through her teeth, as usual. And so, in preparing the Prestatyn Pontins ATP “curation”, I undressed, lay on the floor, went into a kind of trance and attempted to visualise the whole history of human sound, while twisting my hips to a rhythm only I could hear, which was embarrassing, as I was waiting to pick up my daughter in her school playground at the time. Luckily, she is 28 years old. And so are all her classmates. And everyone who exists.

“Curating” myself into a visionary state, I saw the Prestatyn event as a pyramid-shaped sonic universe with new acts like Shopping, Trash Kit and Ex-Easter Island Head orbiting its tip, unfamiliar free jazz and folk artists floating in random gyratories, and the whole thing balanced on the back of a huge four-legged turtle, the legs representing musicians whose works are supporting pillars of postwar contemporary music; John Cale; the 13 Floor Elevators; Sun Ra Arkestra; and Giant Sand, wellspring of alt-country. A mysterious fifth vestigial leg is in the form of the proto-alternative comedian Ted Chippington, though its exact function is uncertain. This, my friends, is what “curating” means.

Illustration by David Foldvari

On a related note, I am currently “curating” a radio show called Global Globules on Resonance 104.4FM in the character of the disfigured 80s Canadian comedian and “curator” Baconface, who wears a mask of bacon, and plays lengthy selections from his late brother’s collection of obscure 60s and 70s experimental music, in an attempt to deal with his sibling’s death in a bacon-aggravated bear mauling for which Baconface feels responsible. I record the shows alone in a very small room near London Bridge, wearing Baconface’s stinking bacon-covered clothes and wrestling mask. I receive no payment for this work.

The next logical step of course is to “curate” a festival as Baconface, and indeed the simplicity of his backstory makes it obvious to me who he would book, while my own “curatorial” parameters remain blurred. Has Hans-Ulrich Obrist thought of “curating” something while pretending to be someone else and wearing a mask of cured meat, even while alone? No. Who is the best “curator”? It is me.

Baconface’s Festival of Forgotten Sound would ideally include the Irish minimalist Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh, two Sardinian 70s acts in the shape of Urthona and Vesuvio, Italian horror soundtrack maestros Hymenoptera, Swindon psychedelic 60s band the Dukes of the Stratosphear, and Martin Zeichnete, who was forced by the Stasi in the early 80s to compose inspiring electronica for the East German Olympic team. All these artists are fictional historical constructs that allow the real musicians behind them creative freedom.

Fictional bands “curated” by a fictional “curator” who doesn’t exist! It’s time to take “curating” to the next level, where the act of “curating” becomes a comment on the very idea of “curating”. We haven’t even begun to explore what “curating” could mean. “Curating” will eat itself! Then, and only then, you may use your inverted commas.

Stewart Lee’s All Tomorrow’s Parties weekend is at Prestatyn Pontins, 15–17 April. Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is currently on BBC2 at 10pm on Thursdays. Baconface’s Global Globules is available at 11pm on Wednesdays on Resonance 104.4FM, or on the website anytime at mixcloud.com/resonance