Brooklyn Museum: Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition

Click! A-Crowd Curated Exhibition is a photography exhibition that invited Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explored whether Surowiecki’s premise could be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as "wise" at evaluating art as the trained experts?

Click! was an exhibition in three consecutive parts. It began with an open call—artists were asked to electronically submit a work of photography that responded to the exhibition’s theme, "Changing Faces of Brooklyn," along with an artist statement.

After the conclusion of the open call, an online forum opened for audience evaluation of all submissions; as in other juried exhibitions, all works were judged anonymously. As part of the evaluation, each visitor answered a series of questions about his/her knowledge of art and perceived expertise.

Click! culminated in a physical exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from the juried process. Online, visitors were also able to see how different groups within the crowd evaluated the same works of art. The results were analyzed and discussed in the Brooklyn Museum Blog and Podcast Series by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience, committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs, and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

Our mission carries forth from our Director, Arnold Lehman, to our exhibitions, programs, and services, and through our Web site. Conscious of this community-oriented mission we aim to further engage our current on-line audiences and simultaneously grow an interactive Web community. The museum is committed community participation (both physical and online) and we aim to offer content that people care about, creating a platform for discussion, listening to what visitors have to say and responding.

Click! works within these goals to give the visitor ownership in the content, the process and the outcome of an exhibition.