Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition
thru August 10th
Brooklyn Museum

Ken Johnson presents an excellent review of this exhibit in today's New York Times. This is a show of 78 photographs that were selected (voted) from a total submission pool of 389 images representing the theme Changing Faces of Brooklyn. 3,344 people voted online and the top picks are in the show. Reminds me of JPG Magazine, and in fact, JPG founder Derek Powazek was a consultant to the show.



This type of Curatus Populatus raises all types of questions and issues, and probably tends to get under the skin of art experts and professional curators. Do the three thousand-plus voters really have the ability to select the best art among the group of submissions? Johnson likens it to a jelly bean counting contest, in which only a few guesses per hundred will be close to the correct amount, but the average of all guesses will be very accurate.

I think this represents an interesting and welcome trend in art exhibits. We still need, and will always (i hope) have, museum and gallery shows curated by experts. But the internets has also given us the ability to allow exhibits based on the choices and correct guesses of large numbers of people. JPG Magazine manages to present a high level of art photography, and it's images are mostly based on the votes of it's readers.

Susan Sontag, wrote in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)...

Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced...

She was referring to photographers. And the truth of those words is evident on the pages of JPG Magazine, the multiple millions of art worthy images on such sites as Flickr, and recent success of We Are All Photographers Now, exhibited at Switzerland's Musee de l'Elysee.

Emerging from this trend is the new concept to be reckoned with.... We Are All Curators Now

Click! details

Click! review in New York Times