The online exhibition format is something we’ve always struggled with and our Edo is a good example – it’s a great resource, but more of a digital collection presented online, not something that really owns the nature of the web today and engages it. A physical exhibition in a physical space would engage on its own level, but in an online exhibition like Edo you can see it fail because it doesn’t engage even the online space – it’s just there.

With Click, we thought about this idea a lot and we aimed to re-envision both the online and the physical, so it’s nice to see you found we were succeeding on that level.

Click! expanded the notion of the “exhibition”: the “exhibition” was not mainly on the walls of the museum, in this case, but took place on the Internet. Not just on brooklynmuseum.org, but on the blogs of photographers who solicited votes, in the articles posted about the show before it went physical, in the fear of the new expressed in the NYTimes review.

I believe that Shelley was the “curator” of this show. To accept that assertion you’d also have to accept (like I have) a new definition of the term “curator,” which is in some ways more limited than our traditional definition, but in other ways is more liberated and ultimately more empowered.

An, I agree with you. There is some inescapable difference between the sciences and the humanities, something unquantifiable, that makes subjectivity in our response to works of art sometimes not just acceptable, but liberating and beneficial.

But curating art seems different somehow. I can’t quite articulate the difference, but it seems like art almost demands a certain subjectivity. As an artist, I can certainly say that subjectivity is vital in the creation. A piece of art can reach technical and conceptual perfection but still fail in that je ne se quois that makes one photograph good and another photograph awe-inspiring. But maybe curation requires a level of subjectivity as well. Maybe the best curators are those who understand that je ne se quois much better than the average person, and can determine to a greater extent if their preference for one work over the other is due simply to a personal bias or something deeper… “Universal” doesn’t strike me as the right word, but something along those lines.

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/28147/power-to-the-people/

Michele

For me, like most exhibits, regardless of source, curation, or jury, there are some pieces I love, many I like, and a few “what the **** were they thinking?”

You may disagree with me on every piece, whether you are an expert or casual observer, but remember, experts built and ran the Titanic, while the Ark was built and operated by a novice.