Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition

[Dave Monroe]

Brooklyn Museum
Exhibitions: Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition

Open Call (March 1–March 31, 2008)
Evaluation (April 1–May 23, 2008)
Exhibition (June 27–August 10, 2008)

Click! is a photography exhibition that invites Brooklyn Museum's
visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate
in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically
acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and
financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is
often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click!
explores whether Surowiecki's premise can be applied to the visual
arts—is a diverse crowd just as "wise" at evaluating art as the
trained experts?

Click! is an exhibition in three consecutive parts. It begins with an
open call—artists are asked to electronically submit a work of
photography that responds to the exhibition's theme, "Changing Faces
of Brooklyn," along with an artist statement.

After the conclusion of the open call, an online forum opens for
audience evaluation of all submissions; as in other juried
exhibitions, all works will be anonymous. As part of the evaluation,
each visitor answers a series of questions about his/her knowledge of
art and perceived expertise.

Click! culminates in an exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks
are installed according to their relative ranking from the juried
process. Visitors will also be able to see how different groups within
the crowd evaluated the same works of art. The results will be
analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online
communities, and crowd theory.

The exhibition is organized by Shelley Bernstein, Manager of
Information Systems, Brooklyn Museum.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/