Click! - Brooklyn Museum's Crowd Curated Exhibit

Inspired by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, the Brooklyn Museum decided to test this wisdom in exhibit curation last summer. Click! developed, a photography exhibition that invited Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. According to the museum, Click! meant to address this question; "Is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?"

Click! consisted of three consecutive parts:

1. The Open Call - Artists were asked to electronically submit a work of photography and artist statement that responded to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.”
2. The Online Forum - The submitted works were displayed online for an open audience evaluation. As part of the evaluation, each visitor had to answer questions about his/her knowledge of/perceived expertise in art.
3. Click! The Exhibition - The artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from the online forum jury process.
   

389 images (one per person allowed) were submitted and displayed on the museum's website anonymously. 3,344 visitors to the site cast judgments as part of the online forum. The top 20% (78 images) were selected for display in the museum; the size of the print determined by the ranking received through the online forum.

In addressing the museum's question, "Is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?", Ken Johnson's review in the NY Times responds with his own:

"What if you favor exhibitions designed to appeal not to crowds but mainly to discerning, well-informed individuals? What if you go to museums to learn from experts who have devoted long, deep and careful study to certain subjects? What if one of the things you value most in contemporary art is its resistance to mainstream taste, its willingness to forgo popularity in pursuit of ideas and experiences that few have already had?"

And with art, how can you tell? How do you judge the success of an exhibit? How do you set boundaries for what 'wisdom in the evaluation of art' is? As Ken also writes, "How people arrive at consensus in the art world is worth studying. So is the tension between experts and nonexperts, which can extend to the highest reaches of the culture industry... The best you can say for “Click!” is that it’s a good conversation starter."

View the exhibition gallery online here:
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/gallery.php

Read the review in the NY Times here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/arts/design/04clic.html?ref=design

What are your thoughts on crowdsourcing for the curation of an exhibit?