In April, I taught a social media workshop for artists and arts nonprofits and did some research on how different arts organizations using social media effectively. The Brooklyn Museum kept coming up as a stellar example, particularly its Click Exhibition, an experiment in crowd-sourced exhibits.
This compelling experiment in the wisdom of the crowds started off with an open call for works through the museum's various Web 2.0 networks. The next phase was crowd-sourced rating process - where anyone could be a curator evaluating the aesthetic quality and relevance to the exhibition theme. And finally, the top 20% of the 389 images are now in a physical exhibition space at the museum and on display until August. (If you click through the exhibition, you'll notice that images are different sizes - the larger the image the higher the rating it got). Here's a summary of the impressive participation stats for each phase.
As Shelly Bernstein, staff member at the museum, writes on the project blog, Click is not a contest, it's a study of crowds. You can click through and see how the 389 images were evaluated by 3,344 evaluators who submitted 410,089 evaluations. (View the Evaluation Statistics.)It will be interesting to read the resulting paper and lessons learned from this experiment. I'm curious about how the final results may have differed or not from what a curator might have selected? I'm curious about how or if Click was gamed.
I'm also interested about how the museum approach the issue of moderating or not. For example, the screen capture represents the top most discussed submissions to the Brooklyn Museum's Click Exhibition.
One of the photos in the top 10 most discussed is
Tubby Lambergini. Full Moon Over the East River. Read the artist statement and then read the discussion. Quite an interesting thread on gentrification, race, and class. The photo isn't in the final exhibition - perhaps because it a wide range of evaluations or divergence of opinion.
One of my favorite photos is Etienne Frossard. 9:15pm, 2005 also making a statement about the changing face in Brooklyn neighborhoods -which is in the exhibition. It's in the top 10%
Nina Simon wrote an analysis of the project when it launched here. I also had a chance to interview Shelly Bernstein, the Museum's staff person responsible for the project. For more about the exhibit, check out this screencast.
Beth, check out this exhibition by the Pierro Gallery in South Orange NJ. It was held this spring and got amazing global response and some incredible images contributed.
http://www.pierrogallery.org/exhibitionArchives.asp?eventID=101
Posted by: Ann Marie Miller | June 26, 2008 at 02:01 PM
@Ann Marie, thanks for stopping by and for sharing that awesome exhibit ... do you think these were similar or different? How so?
Posted by: Beth Kanter | June 26, 2008 at 06:38 PM