Time for a little Curatus Populatus

I've written about this before. The curating of exhibits or magazine publications via popular vote. Click! was a self described "Crowd-Curated" exhibit that just ended on August 10th at the Brooklyn Museum. 78 Photographs were chosen from a submitted field of 389, and the top online vote getters made it into the show. And the highly popular JPG Magazine works the same way.The more votes and comments your submission gets, the better your chance of being published in the magazine.

I haven't sorted out exactly how I feel about this type of selection process. It might be more prestigious to have your work selected by an elite art world jurist, but how often is really great work overlooked because of the arbitrary taste of one person? On the other hand, curating via the masses might lead to less than art worthy selections (a dumbing down effect?) As I've mentioned before, I think there is plenty of room for both types of selection processes.

That said, I submitted the photo above almost a year ago to JPG Magazine for the Nostalgia Theme. It got some nice comments, but I more or less forgot about it until today when I got an email from JPG saying "Your photo is Hot!". They must be planning to use the Nostalgia Theme in an upcoming issue.

So now it's time to plead and beg before the crowd.... If you like my nostalgic photo of the Cherry Top Drive In taken with my Holga with polaroid film (heck, just the use of Holga and Polaroid film should bring a nostalgic tear to your eye)... then please please please go add a comment or make it a favorite or give it props.....

Cherry Top on JPG Mag