Crowd Sourcing Art Exhibitions

In her article "For What and For Whom?", Michelle Kasprzak discusses two recent art exhibitions which were, in some way, curated by "everyday" people. The Click! Exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum allowed internet users to vote on particular works of art that they would like to see in the exhibition. Likewise, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City allowed museum visitors to choose items to be displayed in an exhibition titled "Putting the U in Curator." While these two exhibitions may not necessarily indicate a general trend toward crowd-sourcing exhibitions, they raise some interesting questions about, to use Kasprzak's language, "for what and for whom" are exhibitions curated.

Kasprzak contends that "collections and curated exhibitions are about creating links, developing narratives, and composing responses to perennial questions and ideas. These collections and groupings are then presented in ways so that they will effectively reach audiences." She goes on to state that "it is the work of curators and all cultural workers to perform extensive research on who is or could be the audience for a particular exhibit or collection." While crowd-sourcing may be a useful and effective way to control a repository of widely-agreed upon facts (e.g., Wikipedia) is crowd-sourcing a useful way to think about curating things that require the creation of something as intricate as a narrative? I honestly don't know. I haven't seen either of the exhibits. I'm tempted to say that I can't imagine the the collections would amount to anything more than bunch of random stuff. Which is not to say that the collection couldn't be interesting in some way, but it probably wouldn't be anything like what a curator would assemble.

This article also made me think about this week's reading and about what happens when "old" notions about authority in the sciences and humanities are broken down because of some sort of technological revolution. In the latter part of the article, Kasprzak quotes Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody "As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society's core institutions...the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s." I would argue that the chaos in Europe created by the printing press lasted much longer. I'm certainly not the first person who would make a link between the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848 with the intellectual freedom that the printing press afforded. These revolutions (or at least the French one) produced great upheavals in our ideas about authority. I would say that the Internet has, while less dramatically, done something similar. Do curators have the right to "subject" museum goers to their ideas about what is "noteworthy, good, and compelling?" The question here, is one of expertise. Museum curators are trained as curators and, one would assume, have a better idea about how to create an exhibit that is "noteworthy, good, and compelling." However, while it's easy to talk about what is "good" in the natural sciences (it either "works" or it doesn't), "good" in the humanities is clearly much more subjective. This is a huge topic, and I'm not going to pretend to make any final statements about it. Suffice it to say, that I think that the digital revolution may ultimately force humanists to rethink their ideas about authority and about what is "good."