Tell us in the comments of this post... do you think community curation has any place on the walls of a museum? Should museums experiment with their models? The New York Times reviews GO.
Crowdsourced Exhibition Looks Kind of Familiar
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Much as “green” became a corporate buzzword in the last few years, connoting an eco-friendly ethos among the business set, “community” is now a favorite of the nonprofit world. But if oil companies could be suspected of not being quite as green as their advertising claims, cultural institutions claiming to act on behalf of the community can raise similar alarms. A cynical thought, perhaps, but appropriate when considering “Go: a community-curated open studio project” at the Brooklyn Museum.
“Go” was inspired, according to the publicity materials, by two precedents: ArtPrize, an art competition based in Grand Rapids, Mich., that bills itself as the world’s largest and that awards money to artists based on votes by “the public” (a separate prize is determined by a jury of “leading art experts”); and the annual open-studios programs, in which artists invite the public into their work spaces, which have sprouted up somewhat organically in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Dumbo, Gowanus, Red Hook and Bushwick.
The Brooklyn Museum took the open-studios model and used it to create a contest in which the award was a spot in “Go,” the group exhibition now on view. More than 1,800 artists working all over the borough registered with the museum in May, and for two days in September visitors went out to their studios and then, if they had visited at least five, were eligible to vote for three online. The 10 artists with the largest number of votes were then whittled down to five by Sharon Matt Atkins and Eugenie Tsai, curators at the Brooklyn Museum.
And the results? Less than stellar, unfortunately. The winners are an unexciting bunch; in most spheres of contemporary art they would be considered student artists because their work relies so heavily on earlier precedents. It is certainly not on par with the contemporary work the Brooklyn Museum generally exhibits.
Yeon Ji-yoo, a young South Korean-born artist, makes collages and sculptures that are very much in the vein of ’90s installation art and that recall the uncanny sculptures of Petah Coyne. Gabrielle Watson’s figurative paintings feature distorted figures in vibrant hues that are reminiscent of Faith Ringgold, Katherine Bernhardt and the German Expressionists.
Adrian Coleman’s small, vaguely edgy scenes of Brooklyn are painted in watercolor and feel very similar to a recent raft of photo-based works by watercolorists like Tim Gardner. Oliver Jeffers makes gimmicky paintings, occasionally borrowing the midcentury Situationist technique of détournement — that is, painting on found paintings in an act of creative disfiguring — but to much less subversive effect than the master of the form, Asger Jorn. Naomi Safran-Hon, born in Israel, combines inkjet prints on canvas with cement pressed through lace in trompe l’oeil works that recall Valerie Hegarty’s haunting painting-sculptures.
Video interviews accompanying the works personalize the experience of the art but also underscore that most artists today are very good (sometimes best) at describing what their work is “about.” The artists all seem to love Brooklyn, but many visitors to this exhibition will know immediately that “Go” has not unearthed any hidden masters of the borough.
So what happened?
Doing a bit of my own crowdsourcing, I asked a number of artists and visitors who had participated in the open studios for their impressions of the project and found that many had conflicting feelings. On the one hand, the open studios offered an avenue for showing artists’ work, and some cases led to visits from members of their communities who hadn’t known there were artists working right across the street or in their buildings. But many felt the voting system was flawed: confined to a demographic adept at using communications technology and weighted in favor of artists who were good at self-promotion and could potentially game the system by soliciting votes.
“Go” is clearly not an accurate representation of the richness of art in Brooklyn and may not reflect the true interests and tastes of the wider community there, either. But it does raise the always interesting question of who should choose what appears in museums and what constitutes “great” art.
Curators generally assume this role, although history shows that the most qualified experts are often artists themselves. One example is the 1913 Armory Show, which was organized by artists to show the public the breadth and excitement of modern art. As the centennial of this historic show is observed in coming months, it will offer another model and precedent to consider.
Source NYT Jan 2, 2013
