Remember this? Crowdsourcing, the darling of business 2.0, being able to replace the work of a curator trying to create a coherent set of displays. Even more worrying if the crowdsourcing if based upon the low-brow model of reality TV.
Thinking of algorithms for recommendation systems, I instantly think about last.fm. Music recommended to me based upon the listening habits of thousands of other people who have similar tastes as I do, offering to “fill in the gaps” to my listening collection.
Brooklyn Museum pull another rabbit out of the hat with BrklynMuse, a mobile-friendly recommendation system. A “Gallery Guide powered by people”. It takes the data of other people’s likes (and their moods) and offers you things you may like. I asked Shelley Burnstein (in a rather vague way, I admit. I wasn’t sure how to frame the question) if they were tracking stats that could be used to passively crowdsource curatorial decisions, like a Brooklyn Museum Top Ten. I’m kinda glad Shelley said they weren’t. But you see how such a system could be used as a market research/performace rating system for objects. I believe Brooklyn Museum are focusing this as a guide than anything else.
I mean, you’d want to use this to get people to walk all over your museum, not narrowing their attention.
Five months after I said it, and a year after Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition, TEC-CH Blog talks about a design exhibition called Democracy. Tagline: The Curator is Dead. Long Live Democracy, which irks me because it suggest that curators are not part of a democratic process. If anything, curators within museums are providing (often free) access to education, historical information, art and culture. I would say they are fundamental to a democratic society as a free press.
Powerhouse Museum are doing (organising? Particopating in?) a community curated event, Common Ground. A projection of each institution’s top 25 images in the Commons as voted by the community.
I antagonised a lot of people when I said the curator was dead. Perhaps intentionally. I didn’t want to say “The Change of the Curator” because that happening all the time. This change is sudden and quick and could be a real shift in methodology. Not that I think curators would vanish. To me, I would consider Shelley and her team to be the curators behind Click!, creating systems rather than completed products. Or tell that to people like the BoingBoing crew. Xeni Jardin calls herself a “Curator of Internet Esoterica, Anomalies, and Curiosities” on her twitter account. I think she’s doing alright for herself.
That may be the little death that brings total oblivion for curators: Fear of having to become famous.
The Centre for the Future of Museum did an article about museum crowdsourcing. They suggested three other things for crowdsouring: Institutional Planning, New building/expansion design and Collections planning.
I already spoken about this kind of thing before. Microvolunteering (Or Voluntwittering), Web Community Museum Trustees and this article where I unpicked these ideas further (and came up with microtrustees).
If it not going to cause the death/paradigm shift in curators directly, crowdsourcing can very likely affect it indirectly and cause a shift anyway.
Or curators could all be working for banks anyway.
I am normally a fan of crowdsourcing, but have to agree in this case that curators are important most of the time. On the other hand, I’m curating The Thousands in November (http://thethousands.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/the-thousands/) and I have little art history experience. I would LOVE it if somebody who studies from 10 years and has a phd in art history would curate the sort of exhibition I am putting together, but they haven’t. So maybe while crowdsourcing isn’t the answer to increasing attendance at museums and the quality of exhibition, business as usual isn’t the best strategy either.
Pete,
I said this on the CFM site (which I am a big fan of). Crowdsourcing for new museum planning is, in my experience almost how they come about- but I’d rephrase it to say “Community Sourcing”, and is not an undertaking for the lightly committed or informed.
Out of your list: “Institutional Planning, New building/expansion design and Collections planning” I’d say that the thing that holds the most promise for a crowdsourced input model to work is Collections Planning.
In terms of expansion/new buildings, it is a big and nuanced undertaking to find a way to engage the right people in the community on an entire museum. Are you asking them if they like the building? What exhibits should you have an who should they appeal to? What materials should we use? Who is our audience and what are the priorities? Not to mention how do you visualize, write, communicate, share, iterate all this information with the key stakeholders so they can make informed choices. Wait, who ARE the key stakeholders? Do you want them to decide?
While it’s obviously essential to involve the community in the planning and development, it’s far from the model of “crowdsourcing” for new building expansion. It’s taken much more than a singular vision to create a new museum or expand an existing one on the projects I have worked on.
In terms of Institutional Planning, you *could* do a community focus group to be inclusive of their voice. I would hope that would be key to any museum’s mission!
In this age of free choice fantasmagoria, having informed choice at the *exhibit-level* (such as Click!) is great, as well as the singular curatorial voice. They are all just tools at the ready. It’s different when you are talking about an entire institution. That’s already a crowd, and it takes very special care to be sure you do right by their input.
Hi
Democracy is my exhibition and I think i should clarify that ‘the curator is dead, long live Democracy’ isn’t the tagline of the exhibition, this is taken from a one off advert which is appearing in the Museum Journal. This advert is deliberately provocative, as it’s a small advert struggling for attention in a big publication.
The exhibition is part of Design Event 09 the annual design festival in North East England, and the exhibition was proposed as a response to the theme of this years festival ‘Politics and Play’.
I think it is very important that Democracy is seen in this context, this isn’t crowd sourcing for the sake of crowd sourcing, but an exhibition which has been curated to fit with the theme of the festival.
The the work for the exhibition is created by the public (over 150 entries in the past two weeks) and voted for by visitors to the website, but this doesn’t mean that the exhibition isn’t curated, the concept, the systems and a viable way to translate this in the gallery space have not be crowd sourced.
Maybe as you suggest this means a shift in what a curator does, but I feel that this is a widening of the role of a curator, rather then the death of the curator.
Hi Jim, thanks for the comment.
I thought that a sentence that’s put on an advert/poster was a tagline…
I’m still going to argue the slight misuse of the word Democracy, but the exhibition looks good. Keep me posted.