Back in March, Brooklyn Museum put out an open call for photos responding to the theme “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” The 389 photos submitted, each with a 100-word artist’s statement, were presented online anonymously and randomly for public evaluation in a unique experiment in the wisdom of crowds. Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition is the result of the 410,089 evaluations made. It’s a clustered exhibit of the top 20% of the evaluated works. The exhibition opens today and runs until August 10th.

What’s also interesting is how thoroughly documented and transparent the process has been. It’s clear that organizer Shelley Bernstein, the museum’s Manager of Information Systems, and her team saw this as a chance to examine this type of public evaluation. The exhibition exposes some of the data collected and provides some interesting comparative tools that track things like “evaluator knowledge level”, the level of discussion on each image, and the location of the evaluator.

Image: Claudia Sohrens. Schauplatz # 18 (Greenpoint Warehouse), 2006. All rights reserved

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