Power to the People?

Kristen Lubben

Yancey Richardson

Sarah Hasted

Laurel Ptak

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Jennifer, what did you think of the show?

It’s very modest. I admire the initiative to find different ways of engaging the public. Visually the show is not terribly interesting to look at, which has to do somewhat with selection and somewhat with installation — it’s not intended to be an art exhibit, per se, and yet it has some problematic overlap with one. I was reading the title, “A Crowd-Curated Exhibition,” and I kept thinking, “A Mob-Curated Exhibition.” That’s my fear.

So you’re not too excited about the idea of “crowd-curating”?

I really feel that a museum’s mission is primarily educational and that we should be asking experts to show us their vision, or help us understand something, or pose questions. When I say expert, that might be a curator, an artist, or someone else who’s thought deeply about visual culture. With the “crowd” — unless you somehow can tap into that group that I was suggesting — I don’t know what you learn, ultimately.

The first precedent I can think of for this show is the “Here Is New York” project. It was a great project that collected photographs people took of 9/11 and the aftermath; you had every kind of subject and photos taken by both amateurs and professionals. People submitted them, and the organizers printed them on laser printers and hung them up on a clothesline. (They had a gallery space donated in SoHo.) The exhibition ended up touring all over the world, and an iteration of it appeared at MoMA.

The idea was similar to “Click!” in that it engaged amateur photographers as well as professionals, and people were given the opportunity to participate. At MoMA, though, none of the photographs were attributed to anyone — it was about the images and the collective expression of the images. I think it’s somewhat problematic to put up the names of the people who made the photographs, and title and date them as if they were artworks acquired by the institution or selected for special exhibition, as they did at the Brooklyn Museum.

The concept for “Click!” is obviously very medium-specific; photography tends to be viewed in popular culture as an art form that everyone can do. Do you think an exhibition like this, where a major art museum is showing amateur work chosen by random people, helps or hurts the medium?

I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it is hard to really help people develop visual literacy — to help people understand the art in photography — and you could say it confuses things by having amateurs in the space. On the other hand, as a learning tool, this exhibition works very well if you really start looking at those photographs and thinking about which ones are successful, which ones are not, and why.

The fact that the show raises a lot of questions and even criticism means it’s doing a job. That we’re even taking it seriously means that we’re thinking about important issues.