Curator’s Voice: Kristen Lubben

ARTINFO asked some industry insiders — photography curators and dealers from around New York — to share their thoughts about the Brooklyn Museum's "crowd-curated" show “Click!” Below is the interview with Kristen Lubben, associate curator at the International Center of Photography. To see the other interviews, click on the links to the left.

Kristen, what did you think of the show?

It’s an interesting experiment that was definitely worth doing and worth seeing. It was something to see less for the work itself than for the concept, which was both interesting and well done. The museum seemed to put a lot of care into thinking about how to do this in a way that makes sense — for example, when people went on the site to judge images, they were randomized, so it wasn’t just that everybody saw the same 20 images first.

As a curator, how do you feel about the idea of “crowd-curating”?

There’s something unique about photography that lends itself to that, because photography has so many uses beyond the formal or aesthetic. It’s something that everybody has in their own lives and has a relationship to, unlike other media. I don’t think this concept is something that would make much sense applied to another medium. And “Click!” contains amateur work, too, so it’s not just about crowd-curating but crowd-producing.

It’s like they’ve outsourced all the work: the curating and the photography.

They have, and they haven’t. I would say there’s still a curator of this exhibition, whoever came up with the idea and structured it. I think the crowd functioned less as curators and more as participants.

Do you see this exhibition as a gimmick to draw people to the museum?

Maybe, but it fits with the Brooklyn Museum — which isn’t to say that they’re gimmicky, but they’ve tried over the past few years to reach out to the local community and draw people in. I’m not sure it would make sense in every museum; it’s not a show you would be likely to come across at the New Museum, for instance.

The Brooklyn Museum underwent a controversial reorganization of its curatorial department a few years ago, in which curators were assigned to one of two departments: exhibitions and collections. Do you think this exhibition relates to the museum’s new curatorial philosophy?

I’d be hesitant to make too much of what this exhibition signals. It’s such a physically small experiment that I wouldn’t take it as too much of a harbinger of where they’re going.

But there are other signs, like while I was there I wandered around the Egyptian gallery, and they have quotes from people from other fields, or even just the general public, next to works. Next to a bas-relief of Nefertiti, they had a quote from the designer Karim Rashid, and they had another quote from an eight-year-old schoolgirl who’d seen the show. That was pretty wild, to think about what that means the people who are coming to see the show want to know. It’s not, ‘Where does this object come from?’ or ‘Who made it?’ or ‘What is it used for?’ but ‘What does some contemporary person have to say about it?’ That practice is not un-related to “Click!” It’s clearly an impulse toward democratizing museum display. But I think it works much better with photography than antiquities — there it’s a little more incongruous.