Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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 Rothfield Family Collection in memory of Harriet Weil Rothfield, 2008.17.2. Center: Untitled #698 (Trying to Fly, Houdini’s Chandelier), 1991. Mixed media. Gift of Rothfield Family Collection in memory of Harriet Weil Rothfield, 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.

We’ve just launched our collection online and now we need some help tagging, so visitors can better find objects within it. Of course, we were thinking, why does tagging have to be such work? Why not try and do something fun with it? So, Tag! You’re it!

We’ve all seen Google’s Image Labeler and it’s a really fun tagging game. Google pairs you with someone live via the web and you both tag the same image independent of each other. At the end of the timed session on that image, the “matches” are revealed and you gain points if your tagging terms match your partner’s. Google gets two things here: tags and relevance. If two people independent of each other tag the same image with the same terms, Google can establish that term with that image as more relevant when searching. Pretty cool. Alas, Google has traffic we all wish we had and it’s easy for them to match partners up on the spot. Chances are there will always be at least two people in Google’s universe who will play Image Labeler at the same time. We don’t have that kind of circumstance, so we had to re-envision our game to work in a slightly different way.

We may not have Google-like traffic, but we do have a Posse (now sortable by most recent, most active, top taggers), so why not design the game so the Posse can play against each other, but perhaps not in real time? Zing!

When Posse members login to play the game (yup, we are requiring an account for this) they tag away at objects that appear on screen. When a Posse peep tags he/she can’t see what other taggers have termed an object. [Think The Wisdom of Crowds where we know independence and minimizing influence is key.] As a Posse member tags, they move up the ‘tag-o-meter’ scale and pass other posse members in the standings. The ‘tag-o-meter’ has few surprises in store as you move up the scale—no way am I giving anything up, so you’ll have to go play for yourself to find out what I’m talking about. If you get to the top tagger position, there’s an even bigger surprise and you get the option to get an email notification if someone out-tags you from the top spot. When you’re tired of playing and want to end, we’ll show you your term matches with other Posse members (matched terms then become more relevant when visitors search our collection) and you’ll also see your standings (both for that session and overall, from the start of your Posse account).

That’s it: A simple and fun activity for the Posse which, in turn, establishes better relevance for the visitor trying to search our collection. Sweet!

Why no screenshots in this post? Go play Tag! You’re it! and see for yourself.