INLS 490-121: Collaborative Writing Exercise/Curating vs Crowdsourcing

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(This falls a bit afield of libraryland but it's relevant nonetheless, seeing as museums and libraries are linked, at the very least, as “collectors of stuff”.)

When we think about visual arts curatorship in the traditional sense, the image of the art historian operating within the marble walls of The Museum may come first to mind: “tweedy, esoteric, averse to direct sunlight”. Withered clichés aside, those who select work for inclusion in modern institutions continue to do so (theoretically) from a place in which history, cultural context, and visual theory inform decision-making. The sculpture on the pedestal (or digital video / interactive sound-scape/ conceptual performance) before you is more than just an object; the context lends it credibility and the academic back-work taken to choose it for its moment under the spotlight is implicit.

At the same time, space for the visual, inspiring and creative is not limited to the confines of the museum. Art can maintain its validity and brush up against/ integrate with everyday life in unexpected and serendipitous ways, and need not conform to the Canon. The Web is a powerful space for this kind of interaction to happen.

Democratized curating

Is there room for “curation” to accommodate the crowd? This term is occasionally applied to instances in which selection is made in aggregate, or more likely by your everyday tastemaker with a blog. Visual bookmarking applications such as FFFFOUND come to mind as a first example. Participation on FFFFound is invite-only, and there are plenty of other avenues to sign up for a free account and contribute to the collective internet image pool. (also known as Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Site(s), or RCOPIWS). There are no criteria to meet as a participant, and no limits or constraints (such as theme or provenance) for the work you submit.

Such sites been hailed as avenues for democratized curating:

"The pace is faster, you don't need a physical gallery or museum, and you don't need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like "is this person an artist or an outsider artist?" If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes."

A sharp response points out that crowd-sourced art tends toward "mediocrity", and cites two pieces from FFFFound which "exemplify images that have had the title art applied to them willie nillie."

This represents the widest part of the divide, and I don’t make claims that anyone checking their RSS reader for FFFFound feeds expects an experience on par with a visit to the MoMA. Allowing non-experts to have a say in what is placed in public and what is not does create an interesting tension, though. “Yes, but is it Art?” questions aside, such participation opens up avenues for a larger dialogue and greatly increases the audience for works that might otherwise stay under wraps. By virtue of its visibility, it’s likely that such works will come to have greater enduring value – a panelist from “Curating the Crowd Sourced World” at SXSWi, describes participatory selection as a way to see which artist is “most archiveable”, citing a recent crowd project to map Richard Serra sculptures on Google Earth / Google maps (some of which went previously unnoticed).

Other examples fall in-between the DIY, on-the-fly collecting of FFFFound and the venerated brick-and-mortar institution. In last summer’s “Click” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, submissions of photographs (based on the theme “The changing faces of Brooklyn”) were placed in an online forum. A general audience could vote on what made the final cut and what didn’t, and the selections were ranked according to relevance in the final show. An interesting remark by one of the Museum’s curators notes that when the crowd participates, the show is no longer simply about “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn”; “the exhibition itself is about the notion of selection, and, specifically, selection by the crowd”. I tend to agree with this assessment, the curation no longer takes place behind the scenes- the curation becomes part of the concept (an interesting one at that). --Hrkoopmans 21:46, 29 April 2009 (UTC)