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.

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.

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.