NANCY PROCTOR
35
36 FROM THE EDITORIAL STAFF
site and its functionality. Moreover, people Cameron, as well as postcards, family
may publish their photos of the museum albums, and propaganda. Tate Britain
in their own online Flickr photo-albums, invited the general public to post their
called photostreams, without any edito- own shots through the photo-sharing
rial control by the museum itself. capabilities of Flickr.2
In other words, the museums digital At the Brooklyn Museum, Click!: A
presence is no longer confined to its web- Crowd-Curated Exhibition gave the public
site. In consequence, it controls increas- the job of ranking photographs for an
ingly less of the digital media published in-gallery display in 2008. The exhibi-
about its collections. In fact, many muse- tions website gave the rationale: Taking
ums now receive the majority of their visi- [the exhibitions] inspiration from the
tors online.1 What, then, is the museums critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of
responsibility to those who may never be Crowds, in which New Yorker business
able to visit the physical museum in and financial columnist James Sur-
person? How can the real world owiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is
museum-encounter with the artifact be often wiser at making decisions than
communicated to remote audiences? expert individuals, Click! explores
As museums expand globally across a whether Surowieckis premise can be
range of platforms, they are undergoing a applied to the visual artsis a diverse
transformation. Steven Zucker, principal crowd just as wise at evaluating art as
of Smarthistory.org and dean of the the trained experts?3 The project began
School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion with an open call to artists for photo-
Institute of Technology (FIT), has graphs on the theme of Changing Faces
described it as a transition from Acropo- of Brooklyn. Next came an online
listhat inaccessible treasury on the forti- forum asking for audience evaluation of
fied hillto Agora, a marketplace of ideas the works submitted; each citizen-curator
offering space for conversation, a forum answered a series of questions about
for civic engagement and debate, and his her knowledge of art and perceived
opportunity for a variety of encounters expertise and was invited to rank the
among audiences and the museum. works, which were then installed in the
I would argue that this transformation exhibition according to the results from
is happening whether or not the museum the juried process.4
chooses to be part of the conversation. But The Torrance Art Museum in California
some museums have embraced the trend, plans to give citizen curators the key to the
even sourcing citizen curators and user- galleries: Its July 23, 2009 Call for Propos-
generated content. In 2007, for instance, als: On Gonzo Curating invited artists
Tate Britain used Flickr to crowdsource and curators (or anyone else for that
photographs as an online accompaniment matter) to present project proposals to the
for How We Are: Photographing Britain, the Torrance Art Museum. (The project will
gallerys first major photographic exhibi- display the results throughand perhaps
tion. A conventionally curated show, How beyondthe 2011 2012 exhibiting sea-
We Are included images by famed British son.) The aim is to leverage the small
photographers such as William Henry Fox museums ability to react to moments in
Talbot, Lewis Carroll, and Julia Margaret art, quickly (for a museum) and efficiently,
CURATOR 53/1 JANUARY 2010 37
within a limited budget, and to use information available may date back as far
crowdsourcing. The term crowdsourcing as 125 years. Other information may exist
was coined by Wired contributing editor in a non-digital form.7
Jeff Howe in 2006 to name the new prac- Sharon Rutledge contacted Nick Lomb,
tice of engaging a specific group, commu- the museums curator of astronomy, and
nity, or the general public to perform tasks helped identify the object and its prove-
as a group that previously were under- nance: the Gambey Dip Circle is a mag-
taken by staff or contractors.5 Writing in a netic instrument from the historic
very personal voice, the Torrance Art Parramatta Observatory in Australia. As a
Museum outsourced its exhibition pro- result, a week later the record included
gramming to the crowd: three high-resolution (Zoomify) images
and 746 words of text explaining its his-
To engage others, to become more col-
tory, significance, and the story of its redis-
laborative and interactive with outside
covery in the Powerhouse collection.8
curators and professionals worldwide, to
The Powerhouse Museums use of
see our programming develop more
online tools to crowdsource enhanced
hand-in-hand with a global enquiry and
information and understanding of the
with curators in different contexts with
museums collection. This happy result
different aims and agendas, alongside
points to new ways that curators and sub-
fulfilling our obligation to visually and
ject experts can collaborate in using social
intellectually engage a myriad of differ-
media.
ent types of visitor . . . .6
The Copenhagen Doctoral School of
TAMs call for participantswhich has Cultural Studies, in conjunction with the
no deadline, since the museum sees this Arken Museum of Modern Art and Louisi-
as an ongoing process of engage- ana Museum of Modern Art, organized
mentconcludes by stating that the the conference, Event Culture: The
museum should be an artists museum, a Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary
curators museum and our audiences Art, in November 2009, in order to exam-
museum for active engagementso if this ine the changing role of contemporary art
strikes a chord with you then feel free to curators. The conference website describes
send proposals to us. the evolutionary pressures on the contem-
Crowdsourcing is not confined to art porary art museum. I will sum up its three
museums or any museums physical points here:
building. For instance, Powerhouse
1. A shift from substance and solidity
Museum in Australia has published much
towards activity and performance,
of its collection online, but not all of the
and from history to the contempo-
records are complete. In April 2009, a citi-
rary.
zen scientist was looking on the Power-
house website and found a record 2. A privileging of the temporary exhibi-
concerning an Object described as an tion over the permanent collection.
H7507 Inclinometer, (also called dipping
3. Exhibitions that focus on creating
compass or dip needle), made by Gam-
events and sensations rather than
bey, Paris. The notice said that the object
generating knowledge.9
record was currently incomplete. The
38 FROM THE EDITORIAL STAFF
Looking through the lens of contempo- design magazines, and scholarly blogs
rary art museum practice, the conference dedicated to furniture studies.
organizers posit the role of curator as American Furniture Googled lays bare
increasingly one of storytelling or gener- the research process and resources used
ating narratives rather than producing clas- by curators in developing their own exper-
sical art historical knowledge. If this trend tise. Buchanan acknowledged in my inter-
continues under the impetus of social view with her that the role of the curator
media and other twenty-first-century influ- as subject expert is changing and becom-
ences, the changing functions of the ing more creative and educational. Like
museum and the role of the curator educators, curators are having to think of
might indeed change the very role of art how to expose more of the collection and
in society as well. share their knowledge of it in new ways.
American Furniture Googled, an exhibi- Recognizing that it is impossible for any
tion of nineteenth-century furniture in the individual to know it all in the age of
Decorative Arts Gallery at the Milwaukee the Internet (if it ever was), the curator
Art Museum, took up the challenge to today can have an even greater impact by
rethink curatorial praxis.10 In a telephone becoming a curator of information in the
interview, Melissa Buchanan, Mae E. public domain, and an expert communi-
Demmer Assistant Curator of Twentieth- cator and interpreter, stimulating interest
century Design, explained to me how the and helping audiences navigate to the
in-gallery interpretation of nineteenth- information sources that satisfy their curi-
century furniture drew on innovative new osity. Like a node at the center of the dis-
approaches, developed by the Chipstone tributed network11 that the museum has
Foundation, sponsors of the exhibition, become, the curator is the moderator and
for presenting collections to the public. facilitator of the conversation about
In this experimental installation, tradi- objects and topics proposed by the
tional object labels were replaced by digi- museum, even across platforms not
tal screens displaying Google search directly controlled by the museum.
results for each object. Two terminals in Nicholas Poole is CEO of Collections
the gallery, with open Internet access and Trust, an independent U.K.-based charity
minimal restrictions as to what kinds of that campaigns for the public right to
websites visitors could not access, were access and engage with collections. He
also available so that visitors could follow spoke to the Social History Curators
those links and do further research in the Group, which advocates for improving
galleries. Buchanan and her colleagues the representation of social history in
curated information from the Internet by museums, in a July 2009 meeting in
selecting links to sites that they felt could Leeds, England. He asked: Given that
significantly enhance the visitors experi- everyones experience and creative out-
ence of the exhibition, both in the gallery put is now spread across an extraordi-
and online. In this case, the wisdom of nary range of channels and platforms,
the crowd (in interpreting art works) how can we hope to curate digital Social
came not from an anonymous array of History?12
amateurs but rather from the websites of He observes that this kind of challenge
other museums, auction houses, interior is not new to the social historiannor, I
CURATOR 53/1 JANUARY 2010 39
The curators universe: MVSEVM (2006), mixed media construction by David Beck.
Photo courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of Thelma and Melvin Lenkin.
would add, to any subject expertwho cal and, arguably, more feasible in the
has been impacted by the accelerated museum context. She listed four:
pace of social change ever since the inven-
tion of the printing press and the incep- 1. Theyre our collections.
tion of the Industrial Revolution. But 2. Many voices are critical to the inter-
looking at the exponential increase in pretation of culture.
data, publications, and knowledge on all
fronts, Poole argues, the only way we 3. We [the museum] will attempt to go
could hope to curate it is by enabling users where participation takes us.
to become their own curators. Hence a 4. We will provide the platform for
new phrase citizen curators joins the citi- culture, the training and advocacy to
zen digitization refrain . . . . Web 2.0 is support it, and we would like to
rewriting the social contract, according work together [with our audiences]
to Poole. Its new precepts form the basis to construct the content.13
of a kind of New Deal for museums as
public service broadcasters and service In this formulation, the role of the cura-
providers. tor is assembler of many voices, as Eric
In the online discussion of Pooles pre- Johnson wrote in response to my Tweeted
sentation, Angelina Russo revised a set of question, What is curatorial voice in the
precepts Poole had written in order to sug- age of social media? Johnson is New
gest a version that was both more recipro- Media Specialist at the Jefferson Library at
40 FROM THE EDITORIAL STAFF
quantity. Though many will fail, some will enjoy the printed exhibition catalogue
take root, flourish, and advance our even though I read more and more on the
missions. mobile, digital screen. I would hate to lose
Clay Shirky, analyzing the future of the pleasures of browsing museum collec-
newspapers and journalism in his blog tions and their archives, however old-fash-
post, Newspapers and Thinking the ioned and dusty in their presentation. But
Unthinkable, similarly identifies a poten- rather than fetishizing the medium, we
tially crucial role for the passionate subject should focus, as does Clay Shirky, on the
specialist. Like Anderson, he urges that value of the underlying service: Society
Now is the time for experiments, lots and doesnt need newspapers, he writes.
lots of experiments, each of which will What we need is journalism.
seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, We also need passionate, creative, gen-
as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did, erous champions to curate the expanding
but any of which could prove to be the fields of knowledge now on offer, thanks
lynchpin for the new cultural economy. largely to the social media and other digi-
tal tools that make knowledge generation
For the next few decades, journalism will
and publication faster and easier for every-
be made up of overlapping special cases.
one, experts and enthusiastic amateurs
Many of these models will rely on ama-
alike. As has ever been the case, curators
teurs as researchers and writers. Many of
can best serve and preserve the artifacts
these models will rely on sponsorship or
they love by ensuring that audiences
grants or endowments instead of reve-
understand objects pertinence and value
nues. Many of these models will rely on
to our lives. In the new cultural economy,
excitable 14-year-olds distributing the
the curators expertise will be judged not
results. Many of these models will fail.
just by the depth of his or her subject-
No one experiment is going to replace
knowledge, but also by the extent, diver-
what we are now losing with the demise
sity, and richness of the network that is
of news on paper, but over time, the col-
engaged in active conversation with the
lection of new experiments that do work
curator, thereby ensuring the ongoing
might give us the journalism we need.15
quality, relevance, and future of the dis-
Bran Ferranartist, innovator, princi- course.
pal of Applied Minds, Inc. and former
president of Disney Imagineeringsug- Nancy Proctor is Head of New Media
gested at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference Initiatives at the Smithsonian American
that perhaps museums are a fad.16 Like CB Art Museum and is Digital Editor of
radio or newspapers, they will have pro- Curator: The Museum Journal
ven to be irrelevant or unsustainable as a (digital@curatorjournal.org)
business model in 10 years. Perhaps the
curator will go the same way, or turn into
Acknowledgment
a hobbyist or blogger, paying for his or her
research through unrelated professional The author would like to thank Leonard
activities. I may just be showing that Im a Steinbach, technology strategist for muse-
digital immigrant, too old to be a digital ums and dear friend, for inspiring my
native, when I say that I hope not. I still choice of topic for this article.
42 FROM THE EDITORIAL STAFF
com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/04/
Notes
27/another-opac-discovery-the-
1. A study by Jose-Marie Griffiths, dean gambey-dip-circle-and-the-value-of-
and professor, and Donald W. King, minimal-tombstone-data/.
distinguished research professor, 9. The University of Copenhagen,
School of Information and Library Event Culture: The Museum and Its
Science, University of North Carolina Staging of Contemporary Art,
at Chapel Hill, revealed that 45 per- November 6-7, 2009, accessed Aug.
cent of museum visits are by online 30, 2009 at http://eventcul-
visitors. The study, Interconnections: ture.ikk.ku.dk/.
The IMLS National Study on the Use of 10. Milwaukee Art Museum, American
Libraries, Museums and the Internet, Furniture Googled, July 9-Oct. 11,
was published as a series of reports 2009, accessed Aug. 30, 2009 at
(over several years, beginning in http://www.mam.org/exhibitions/
2006) on the Web. See http:// details/americanFurniture.php.
www.interconnectionsreport.org. 11. A computer network is said to be dis-
2. See http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/ tributed when the computer pro-
exhibitions/howweare/, accessed Aug. gramming and the data to be worked
30, 2009. on are spread out over more than one
3. See http://www.brooklynmuseum. computer. See Wikipedia, Distrib-
org/exhibitions/click/, accessed Aug. uted Networking, accessed August
30, 2009. 30, 2009 at http://en.wikipedia.org/
4. The Luce Foundation Center of the wiki/Distributed_Networking. In this
Smithsonian American Art Museum sense, the museum, which distributes
also uses Flickr to solicit citizen cura- its content and encounters its public
tors who help select artworks for on a wide range of analog and digital
display in its open storage area. platforms, is a networked presence.
5. Jeff Howe, The Rise of Crowdsourc- 12. Nicholas Poole, Social Media and
ing, Wired, Issue 14.06 - June 2006, Social History, posted on his blog on
accessed Sept. 13, 2009 at http:// Monday, July 13, 2009. Accessed
www.wired.com/wired/archive/ Aug. 29, 2009 at http://openculture.
14.06/crowds.html. collectionstrustblogs.org.uk/2009/07/
6. See http://www.torranceartmuse- 13/social-media-social-history/. For
um.com/gonzocurating.php, accessed the Social History Group, see http://
Aug. 30, 2009. www.shcg.org.uk/.
7. You can download this image from 13. The comment is on Pooles blogpost.
http://www.powerhousemuseum. 14. Chris Anderson, The Smithsonians
com/dmsblog/wp-content/gambey- Long Tail, accessed Sept. 9, 2009 at
h7507.png. http://smithsonian20.si.edu/
8. The newly revised object record can be schedule_webcast2.html.
found at http://www.powerhouse- 15. Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Think-
museum.com/collection/database/ ing the Unthinkable, posted March
?irn=248651. For more of the story, 13, 2009. Accessed Sept. 9, 2009 at
see http://www.powerhousemuseum. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/
CURATOR 53/1 JANUARY 2010 43