Brooklyn Museum Exhibits Click!

Click! began in March with an open call inviting artists to submit a work of photography in response to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” Three hundred eighty-nine photographers responded by electronically submitting one image, accompanied by a 100-word artist statement, via the Brooklyn Museum Web site. At the conclusion of the open call, the general public was asked to evaluate the submissions during a six-week period using the Web site.

The inspiration for the exhibition comes 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! explores Surowiecki’s central idea in the context of visual art.

In accordance with Surowiecki’s theories, the evaluation tool was designed to promote objectivity and minimize peer influence: each of the 389 photographs was displayed without artist attribution and at random for each evaluator, and artists were unable to forward links of individual submissions to friends and family. A diverse crowd of international evaluators—not only from Brooklyn, but across the U.S. and beyond—submitted more than 400,000 individual responses to the photographs and left more than 3,000 comments during the process. Click! will culminate in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, where the photographs will be installed according to their relative ranking by the crowd of curators.

Brooklyn Museum clicks with the crowd at FIGMENT 2008, a celebration of participatory art creative culture held on Governors Island. A panel discussion about the process and outcome of Click! will be held on Saturday, June 28, at 11 a.m. Panelists include James Surowiecki, New Yorker financial columnist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds; Jeff Howe, contributing editor of Wired magazine, who coined the term “crowdsourcing”; Eugenie Tsai,

Brooklyn Museum’s John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art; and Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum’s Manager of Information Systems and the organizer of Click! The panel will be moderated by Nicole Caruth, Brooklyn Museum’s Manager of Interpretive Materials and a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn. -- www.brooklynmuseum.org