Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

West Indian American Day Parade, 2006. Photo courtesy Sam Liu. All rights reserved.

I always know that Labor Day weekend is coming when the the stage for the events and concerts for the West Indian American Day Carnival Festival is assembled in the Museum’s back parking lot. These events add excitement to the still late summer air and culminate in the renowned on Monday with the Labor Day Carnival Parade on Eastern Parkway. For more information about all of the event’s you can visit WIADCA’s website and we hope to see you there!

There is no Target First Saturday in September because of all the festivities. However, my colleagues in the Education Division and I have been very busy getting ready to kick off our 10th anniversary season of Target First Saturdays on October 4th with “Brooklyn’s Biggest Birthday Bash.” I’m excited about all that will take place that evening to celebrate our 10 years and thank our visitors for all of their support, including: a showcase of emerging Brooklyn musicians Mark Yodice, Opsvik and Jennings, Christy and Emily, and Brazz Tree; ten curator talks in the Museum’s permanent collection; a performance by trailblazing artist Kate Bornstein; dance performances by Brian Brooks and Creative Outlet; a dance party hosted by creative-duo Andrew Andrew; and a special salsa dance party with Willie Alvarez and Trombori. There will also be cake. What birthday party is complete without cake? I hope you can join us in October with your party hat on!

A little background, in 2006 I was finishing a Masters in Online Learning in Sydney Australia, researching how cultural institutions were participating in online social networks. One fateful day I found the Graffiti in Brooklyn photographs on Flickr. Set up by the Brooklyn Museum around their Graffiti exhibition, community members were invited to upload their own photos of graffiti around Brooklyn. Intrigued, I sent off a FlickrMail to the Brooklyn Museum and actually got a reply!!! I was hooked. Fast forward to 2007 and after some serious paperwork and air travel I’m in the Information Systems department of that same Museum I found on Flickr as part of Shelley Bernstein’s team and ready to learn how they do all their web 2.0 magic. My internship was specifically about working on whatever needed doing 2.0 style and on my first weekend I was at the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturday gently persuading visitors to Say It Loud for the camera. Way back in my shadowy past I’d spent some time as a film editor so the next week involved cutting the footage that Bob Nardi, the BM’s very cool multimedia guy, had captured on that night and at the previous First Saturday.

During my year with the Brooklyn Museum I changed hats daily, digital video editor one day, MySpace administrator, sound recordist, iPod loader, photographer, project manager the next. Click! was the largest of the projects I worked on, it provided some incredibly rich, if sometimes painful, learning experiences. I worked in a support role to get the word out during the artist’s call and evaluation stages. I walked the cold streets of a frozen Brooklyn delivering cards to cafes, bars, art galleries and even a dog shelter (barc). At the time I thought I might die of exposure but looking back I appreciate that I got to see the many different Brooklyn nabes and the people who make them so lively in a way I would otherwise have missed.

I captured the Castle - Lost in Brooklyn doing card distro for Click!

I also participated in Click! as an artist. I’m not a photographer, but it seemed like a unique opportunity to explore some of the online learning possibilities I’d been researching as part of my studies and beyond. This however did mean that I couldn’t view any of the other artist’s submissions as they came in. Shelley and developers Mike and Paul were the only ones to see the photographs as they were submitted and so committed to the idea of minimizing influence that they didn’t think it fair for them to participate in the evaluation stage. I, however, did have that privilege and spent many many hours with that slider bar. It was fascinating to play curator for a while, I had to consciously change my way of seeing online, giving time and thought to each image in a way I wouldn’t have if I’d been browsing the photos on Flickr. Also interesting was the story in pictures told by the Brooklyn community about what was important to them in those early months of 2008. Most striking for me was how many images there were of new condo developments and disappearing industrial landscapes. I recognized these anxieties about development, they weren’t dissimilar to those I felt about changes happening in my own hometown of Sydney.

Sadly my photograph didn’t rate, all theme and no aesthetics I’m afraid. I was inspired by a closed firehouse around the corner from where I lived off 4^th Avenue, I did a little research and found a NYT article about the closure of a number of Brooklyn Firehouses 2003 and assumed that was the fate of the one I photographed for Click! My artist statement explained that the image captured my concerns about changing community structures. Embarrassingly, for me, but happily for the local community it turned out I was wrong and the firehouse was not going to disappear for another dreary condo development. I might have been oblivious to this fact had I not been sternly corrected by one of the community who commented that the firehouse was in fact being refurbished not torn down, ouch. Click! effectively mashed up the roles of artist, curator and audience, the equal importance given to all those points of view allowed me the opportunity to have a 360 degree learning experience around the exhibition process. I also had to relearn that simple lesson that things are not always what they seem.

Sunset over the Williamsburg Bridge. Goodbye Brooklyn.

I found the Brooklyn Museum and their wonderful collection through web 2.0, one FlickrMail led me to pack up the family and travel 1000’s of miles to visit them and the community they take very seriously both on and off line. The wonderful result of their commitment to community is that people go to the Brooklyn Museum to engage in conversation with their friends, one of whom happens to be the museum itself. I’m back in Sydney and optimistically looking toward the Art Gallery of NSW, my local art museum, to afford the same opportunities for connection, conversation and learning. I’ll miss being in Brooklyn, it was so hard to leave and I hope I’ll be back one day. The withdrawal is made little easier by the fact that I can still connect with Brooklyn and engage with the Museum and their collection 2.0 style.

Taking a little bit of Brooklyn back to Sydney – My son Jude in front of the Art Gallery of NSW

Kehinde Wiley (American, b. 1977). Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas. Collection of Suzi and Andrew B. Cohen, L2005.6. Photo taken in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum courtesy rubykhan via Flickr.

If the large equestrian portrait in the Brooklyn Museum lobby didn’t catch your eye, you need to look again. It’s a portrait by Kehinde Wiley imitating the posture of Napoleon Bonaparte in Jacques-Louis David’s painting “Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard.” Wiley substitutes powerful figures drawn from seventeen century Western art with anonymous young Black man dressed in contemporary clothing.

In the last few years, Wiley has lived and worked in different countries around the world appropriating local influences. This is evident in his current show entitled The World Stage: Africa, Lagos - Dakar now on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem (July 17th – October 26th, 2008). It definitely a must see for this summer.

Don’t miss out on seeing more work by Wiley in our upcoming Fall exhibition entitled 21: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum.

Also,

Much of the critical reception of Click! has focused, understandably, on the artistic quality of the photographs that the crowd liked best, with a number of critics making predictably dismissive comments about the mainstream nature of the favored pictures (and of the show as a whole). This take on Click! fits squarely into a long tradition of art-historical arguments around mass vs. elite taste, connoisseurship, and so on. And these kinds of arguments are inevitable—you can’t (nor would you want to) look at an art show and not make judgments about the quality of the work in it. But I do think that some of the critical reactions to the show have been inflected by a pre-existing assumption that group judgments would necessarily be ordinary. And that assumption has perhaps made it harder to see a couple of the most interesting things about the show.

The first thing that I think makes Click! so intriguing for the future is the way the voting system worked. One of the reasons why group judgments are often so mediocre (or so volatile) is that they often rely on very crude evaluation processes, processes that foster bandwagon effects—when things get more popular simply because they’re already popular—and that are often easily gamed. A classic example would be American Idol, where members of the voting crowd generally register their opinion on only one contestant —the one they vote for—and where people can vote as many times as they want for the same person.

Click!’s system, by contrast, was designed to get around these problems. Because people could only rate each picture once, and because they couldn’t go directly to a given photo, the system was hard (if not impossible) to game. Even more important, because people didn’t know how others had voted, each person’s rating reflected his or her own judgment, uninfluenced by the opinion of others. That independence of judgment is key to the wisdom of crowds. And since the contest was run over the Net, it was also able to tap the knowledge of a relatively diverse crowd, both in terms of location and expertise. It’s true that not every person who voted looked at every picture in the contest (in fact, no one outside the museum may have done that). But because the crowd was diverse enough and big enough (so that a sizeable number of people did look at each photo), and because the selection that each person looked at was random, this probably had little or no effect on the final outcome – effectively, the result is similar to what it would have been had everyone looked at every picture. Unlike most attempts to measure popular taste, then, Click! reflects the real collective judgment of the crowd.

But is that collective judgment wise? Well, there’s no real way to answer that, since there’s no objective standard to measure the crowd’s judgment against. (That’s one reason I deliberately avoided writing about art in The Wisdom of Crowds.) But I do think it’s intriguing that there was so much overlap in Click! between the crowd’s judgment and the judgment of the experts. I think if you’d asked most people before the show, they would have said that there would have been a massive difference between the favorite choices of a diverse crowd of people and the favorite choices of people with artistic or art-historical backgrounds. But when you look at the top ten favorites of voters as a whole, and at the favorites of the different subgroups, what you find is that they’re actually not that different. Many photographs show up on all or most of the lists. To me, this is really the most striking result of the show, because it suggests (though it doesn’t prove) that at least in some mediums, the gap between popular and elite taste may be smaller than we think. It also, I think, suggests that the places for tapping the collective intelligence of diverse crowds are wider than we might imagine.

New on view on the 5th floor is an installation of works by Petah Coyne from the collection. These works are individual pieces that have been envisioned as an installation. For this, she created flowers and bows to complement and unify the hanging sculptures. In case you’re wondering where it’s located, you can’t miss it. It’s just outside the 5th floor elevator.

Petah Coyne (American, born 1953). Left: Untitled #750 (Bird Wedding Cake), 1993. Wax and mixed media. Gift of the Rothfeld Family in memory of Harriet Weill Rothfeld, and designated purchase funds, 2008.17.2. Center: Untitled #698 (Trying to Fly, Houdini’s Chandelier), 1991. Mixed media. Gift of the Rothfeld Family in memory of Harriet Weill Rothfeld, 2008.17.1. Right: Untitled 816 (Dr. Zhivago), 1995-96. Formulated wax, steel, antique birdhouse, wire, cable, ribbon, silk flowers, candles. Anonymous gift in honor of Charlotta Kotik, 1997.191. Photo courtesy bachullus via Flickr.

Petah Coyne’s fantastical forms, presenting a beauty that slides into the grotesque, allude to death and decay. Her large, arresting sculptures are neither abstraction nor figuration, but exist somewhere between the two. Using a wide range of nontraditional materials including hay, wire, black sand, specially formulated wax, silk flowers, ribbons, artificial birds, earth, hair, and trees, Coyne often veils or covers objects as though they were artifacts frozen in time. Often hanging from the ceiling, her sculptures project a sense of unease and fragility. Although the materials appear delicate, one senses the weight and density of the works (the gossamer-like Untitled 816 (Dr. Zhivago), for example, weighs three hundred pounds).

Coyne is part of a generation of feminist sculptors who came of age in the late 1980s after Minimalism. Like many of her contemporaries such as Ursula von Rydingsvard, she seeks to integrate themes of nature and the self in her works, which become metaphors for the human experience of the life cycle.

To see more, stay tuned she will be having a solo show at Galerie Lelong later this year.