After I was recently asked to write a blog posting about Click! from my perspective, I spoke with some of my colleagues—Patrick Amsellem, Associate Curator of Photography, and Judy Kim, Curator of Exhibitions–about the exhibition, and we began to discuss the term “curated.” The three of us have all been curators of exhibitions in our careers, but we have also all been on juries for exhibitions, and we think that perhaps what the crowd was asked to do here was to jury the selection—that is, to rank the works that were submitted so that a selection could be made on the basis of that ranking. That is sometimes the first step toward curating an exhibition, but only the first step. Once an initial selection is made, the curator usually begins to refine the idea of the exhibition and to see how the ideas represented by the objects selected best work together, and how placing certain works side by side, or across the room from one another can have an impact on the way we perceive them, and thus help to advance the theme and the learning experience. Further “curating” is done by explaining in written form in the labels some of the ideas the installation conveys visually.
So if the crowd juried the images, how was it curated? And what was the idea curated? The theme of the photographs submitted was “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” but that is not the theme of the installation that is presented in our galleries. Although the changing faces of Brooklyn is an idea that underlies each of the works of art in the exhibition, the exhibition itself is about the notion of selection, and, specifically, selection by the crowd. Both visually, and in terms of its written didactics, the installation supports that primary idea, put forward—that is, curated—by Shelley Bernstein. And that is what makes it such an unusual and thought provoking exhibition. It seems to me that an exhibition that was only about the changing faces of Brooklyn in photography might be interesting, but an exhibition that is also about the nature of selection, and all the questions it raises about taste, background, interpretation—and a myriad of other issues—creates a richer discourse. In Click! the theme of the work and the selection and installation process complement and mutually reinforce one another, forming a compelling snapshot of who we are and how we chose.
I am interested to know what others think about this, and I will be taking questions on the subject this week.
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Hi Kevin, thanks for posting – I figured I’d start the discussion. Your post brings up an interesting point, but I wanted to point to our podcast from the panel discussion. In it, Eugenie Tsai (our John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art), talks about how many different kinds of curation exist. Everything from a collection curator working for museum who would approach curating differently, perhaps, than a curator in a gallery or someone curating for their home. In this case, I wonder if, this was a mechanism for the “crowd” to actually curate? It may resemble a juried process (true enough), but how else would a large group of distributed people perform a task like this and is it valid to call it a curated process if so? Is this actually how a crowd would curate vs. an individual curating for another specific instance?
Though I see what you mean about the show being curated in a way by me and think it is an interesting point, the process of putting together the show was more of a rule-based process rooted in the strictures and theories of the book guiding the container we were building, as opposed to one individual curating the idea of the show.
I’d be curious to get your thoughts on what Click! reveals about the jurying process in general. It’s pretty clear from the results that certain factors like geographic location and arts education play a role in influencing one’s opinion of the work.
Would be curious to get your thoughts on how and to what extent professional arts curators and historians (a specialized category of the “Expert” category used for Click!) can step away from these demographic influences and make truly objective evaluations of artistic merit, with the undestanding, of course, that true objectivity is a bit of an elusive goal. But that also raises the question of whether this is even desirable, i.e., maybe we want curators who are influenced by their backgrounds.
Is it so hard to believe that the show was crowd-sourced, crowd-curated, AND crowd-juried?
For me, like most exhibits, regardless of source, curation, or jury, there are some pieces I love, many I like, and a few “what the **** were they thinking?”
You may disagree with me on every piece, whether you are an expert or casual observer, but remember, experts built and ran the Titanic, while the Ark was built and operated by a novice.
Indeed there is no one way to curate, and there are many different goals for different exhibitions, each of which requires a different approach. But I think it would be very difficult for an absent “crowd” to curate in the sense of directing the shape of the final product, that is the installation of works of art. When you speak about a rule-based process, and guiding the container, establishing those rules and guiding the container are curatorial functions. Deciding how to interpret the rules is also an activity that gives form to the final product, and is therefore a curatorial decision. The selection of objects is one of the most important curatorial functions in creating an exhibition, and that is something that the crowd did in this case. But it is impossible to be entirely neutral in interpreting their selection, so there is another level of curation apparent here, too. I don’t think this division of responsibilities weakens the result in this case–it just makes it more nuanced.
I completely agree with what An Xiao is implying in the above comment–that it is very difficult to step away from demographic influences in the process of jurying a selection. I know that when I was going through the process of making my own evaluations, I found myself responding first to the aesthetics of the works, based on my training and inclination as a curator. I had to keep reminding myself that I needed to balance my aesthetic response with a more intellectual decision about whether the work reflected the changing faces of Brooklyn. I also found that my interest in architecture skewed my judgment to a degree in favor of images of buildings. It may be that professionals are more used to the discipline of being objective in making judgments, but it is impossible to completely erase one’s pre-existing tastes and experiences. And I do agree that sometimes pure objectivity, if it can exist, is a little cold; brilliance can sometimes come from a subjective insight.
Not sure if anyone has already posted this article on the show, but here it is:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/28147/power-to-the-people/
Michele
Mmm… that last sentence really struck me. I’m an artist/photographer these days, but I’ve also been trained as an academic philosopher. In most academic disciplines (and I would consider curatorial work academic, or at least requiring a solid academic background), a strong degree of objectivity is almost a vital necessity. We wouldn’t want mathematicians biased by their preference for, say, prime numbers, or linguists to be biased by their upbringing around, say, tonal languages. And to draw from my philosophy background, we wouldn’t want moral and metaphysical determinations to be drawn from cultural biases.
But curating art seems different somehow. I can’t quite articulate the difference, but it seems like art almost demands a certain subjectivity. As an artist, I can certainly say that subjectivity is vital in the creation. A piece of art can reach technical and conceptual perfection but still fail in that je ne se quois that makes one photograph good and another photograph awe-inspiring. But maybe curation requires a level of subjectivity as well. Maybe the best curators are those who understand that je ne se quois much better than the average person, and can determine to a greater extent if their preference for one work over the other is due simply to a personal bias or something deeper… “Universal” doesn’t strike me as the right word, but something along those lines.
Michele, thanks for posting that article. It has some very interesting thoughts by our colleague curators at other institutions. It is really encouraging that they all find the exhibition thought provoking in one way or another.
An, I agree with you. There is some inescapable difference between the sciences and the humanities, something unquantifiable, that makes subjectivity in our response to works of art sometimes not just acceptable, but liberating and beneficial.
Usually, our exhibitions are on the walls of the museum, and online we have a “feature” or a “preview.” There had been no completely successful example of an “online exhibition” until now.
Click! expanded the notion of the “exhibition”: the “exhibition” was not mainly on the walls of the museum, in this case, but took place on the Internet. Not just on brooklynmuseum.org, but on the blogs of photographers who solicited votes, in the articles posted about the show before it went physical, in the fear of the new expressed in the NYTimes review.
I believe that Shelley was the “curator” of this show. To accept that assertion you’d also have to accept (like I have) a new definition of the term “curator,” which is in some ways more limited than our traditional definition, but in other ways is more liberated and ultimately more empowered.
Hi Matt, thanks for this nice compliment. I couldn’t agree with you more with regard to online exhibitions. This issue is not something anyone has brought up yet (Laurel Ptak touches on it in her Art Info interview), so thanks.
The online exhibition format is something we’ve always struggled with and our Edo is a good example – it’s a great resource, but more of a digital collection presented online, not something that really owns the nature of the web today and engages it. A physical exhibition in a physical space would engage on its own level, but in an online exhibition like Edo you can see it fail because it doesn’t engage even the online space – it’s just there.
With Click, we thought about this idea a lot and we aimed to re-envision both the online and the physical, so it’s nice to see you found we were succeeding on that level.