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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.

As a visual sociologist looking at the images as to how people define “face,” “change,” and “brooklyn,” I was very impressed with the quality and array of images submitted for the Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition.

I can see that these photographers at least regard externalities as “face” as though it was “skin” surrounding some other content; e.g., there were few photos inside places and spaces. “Change” seemed to be mostly about physical structures as opposed to people and social activities. It also seemed to me that the photographers were showing something of which they didn’t approve. “Brooklyn” was represented geographically in a very limited way with a concentration on some of the most “Brooklyn-branded” of spaces such as Coney Island and Carnival. It might be also that the focus on places like Red Hook, Dumbo, and Williamsburg reflects where artists (photographers in this case) are living or hanging around. An aspect of Brooklyn’s growing “Creative Class” perhaps. Due to the choice of venues, it gave the impression that perhaps “groups” of photographers traveled to the same spots. Some of the images were almost identical—see below for three images submitted to Click! along with one of my own from a similar vantage point.

Left: Douglas Padgett. Redhook Waterfront, 2008. All rights reserved
Right: E.M. Farmer. Red Hook Wrecked, 2007. All rights reserved

Left: Maria Castanos. Red Hook, Brooklyn, 2007. All rights reserved
Right: A similar photograph I took a while back of the same subject matter.

My sociological point is (like crowd theory) that there is something “organized” (structured), predictable, understandable about what people see and how they interpret what it is they are looking at. It is a sort of common visual language which of course varies from culture to culture, education, class, etc…

As an aside, my own orientation is toward people so when evaluating Click! submissions, I gave the highest evaluations to “people images” as well as good evaluations for those not of people but with exceptional (in my estimation) artistic or documentary quality.

The final week on site was spent finishing up various small projects, catching up on treatment notes, and packing up the tools and supplies for next year. It was also satisfying to watch the progress on the west wall of Chapel D, pictured here, where Mohammed Gharib and Khaled did the final filling of losses between the original carved blocks with a mortar that closely matches the color of the stone when it dries.

My three weeks here at Mut have gone by fast and it’s been fascinating dealing with some of the problems conservators face in the field where the challenges range from preserving large scale stone and architectural elements to treating small excavated objects like coins and pottery. I’ve also made a lot of new friends and had the chance to see beautiful vistas everyday, like this one looking up the Avenue of Sphinxes toward the south entrance to the Karnak Temple complex. A special thanks to everyone who made it all possible!

After my second week on site I feel a bit less dazed and confused by the layout, the routine, and the scope and direction of the project, and more able to focus on the conservation issues at hand. A good thing considering I have less than a week remaining to finish out the season! I continued with the projects I described in my last entry including the removal of the cotton gauze facing from the badly deteriorated limestone block with Montuemhat’s name on it now that it’s been moved to a nearby mastaba for permanent display.

I continued to treat and clean coins as well but also had the pleasure of cleaning this small bronze lion, about five centimeters in length, with crossed forepaws. Pictured on the right, I’m cleaning the recently discovered relief fragment with an image of Khonsu on it to help make the incised lines more legible. (more…)

My first day on site was Saturday, February 9th and I’m amazed at how quickly the week flew by. One of the things I did right away was walk around the entire precinct with Mary, who explained the layout and history of the excavation. It was great to actually walk around and locate features that I’ve only read about or seen in pictures. Richard, Bill, Elsie, Jaap and Ben have also been bringing me up to speed on various aspects of the site and sharing stories and anecdotes of seasons past.

In addition, I met my Egyptian colleagues for the first time including Khaled Mohamed Wassel, the Egyptian conservator on site who has been doing an admirable job of consolidating the carved sandstone blocks in the west wall of Chapel D, and supervising the master mason, Mohahamed Gharib and his team in rebuilding the wall. They’ve all been attempting to teach me a few words of Arabic with often humorous results.

I set about surveying my conservation supplies, and examined the small finds from this season, including a group of about forty coins. Pictured above is one of the first coins I cleaned mechanically with brushes and dental tools that shows the head of a Roman emperor yet to be identified. In the other picture I’m cleaning another coin with the pointed end of a wooden skewer after softening the outer layers of corrosion in a chemical solution of 10% EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid) in water made basic with ammonia. Uncovering legible details on heavily corroded coins requires a steady hand and a lot of patience but if successful can aid in dating the area the coins were found in. (more…)