I was reading this article in the New York Times, My Dream Is for Sale; Buy It for Me, an article about the Collectors Committee weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

The concept is simple: after curators argue for their proposed acquisitions, collectors, who have ponied up money to participate in the event, vote on what to buy with the pooled funds.

Remember my Death of the Curator article? I was taken by the idea of  ”crowdsourcing the curatorial decisions of an exhibition”. What I saw was the potential for pure populism of a large community to supersede an art historians curatorial expertise, amongst other things.

I saw the word “vote”. Maybe it’s not the Death of the Curator, but of the Museum Trustee.

Look at MyFootballClub. A load of people paid membership fees to go into a fund to buy a football (soccer in Yanqui) club. They ended buy acquiring Ebbsfleet United, a small Kent club in the fifth tier and turned it into the first web-community owned football club. As this Guardian article from 2007 states, the plan was to have the new community of owners pick the team and vote on all major decisions like a big crowdsourced game of Football Manager.

As I understand it, that hasn’t panned out exactly to plan. Liam Daish, the manager, still had final say on things like tactics and training. The “Board” was mainly dealing with, wait for it… voting on signing new players.

I think you see where I’m going with this. A web-community run museum? The director performing whatever the Board decided through majority vote. The curator’s job is safe (ish).

I’m just kicking this idea out there for discussion. Being a trustee of a museum is maybe not as glamourous as running a football club. Trustees tend to be wealthy and well-connected fundraisers, so many museums wouldn’t be supported by a web community. I imagine there would have to be something to make it less… boring? I do quite like the idea of registering my vote to influence an acquisition. Hell, maybe even a deaccessioning. What shape would a collection take if several thousand people were deciding what direction to go into? So much is said about museums being in “the public’s trust”. Well, what would happen if the public were actually trusted?

For the public, by the public?