Museum Life: Shout Out Brooklyn!

The Brooklyn Museum

Today I am thinking about new approaches to visitor input informing museum content and am intrigued by The Brooklyn Museum project launched this month entitled Split Second: Indian Paintings. From now until April 14th you can go to the Museum’s website and choose the paintings you would like to see installed at the gallery this summer.  Per the site, “inspired by the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, this online experiment and resulting installation will explore how our initial reaction to a work of art is affected by what we know, what we’re asked, and what we’re told about the object in question”.

After you self-identify for age, sex and level of subject matter expertise, you are shown pairs of paintings and asked to choose which one you find more “intriguing”.  What makes this challenging is that your decision must be made in four seconds. Next you are asked to write a few words and then you are given unlimited time to choose again with accompanying text. Try it by clicking here. Go ahead… I’ll wait.

So…. what did you think? I found the first part of the process difficult. The site even kicked me out and told me I was too slow in my choices. After 20 some years working in museums it seemed wrong not to analyze and apply something more than my initial visual reaction to a choice. But ultimately it was liberating and exactly what this walkabout project of mine needed. It took me back to the time when I could simply say I liked an image for no reason other than I responded to it. No words or theories ar academic justification required. I ended up enjoying that first section more than the others. Having direct input made me feel invested in the project as I will definitely check  back to see if my selections make it into the show.

This is the second such process designed by Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology.  The first,  Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition debuted in 2008 and gave website visitors the role of curator by reviewing photographs submitted by the public and selecting the pieces that were later exhibited. In addition, the website summarizes the Top 10 photos compared in each category and the 25 that received the most comments. In total 3,344 evaluators cast 410,089 evaluations of 389 photos submitted.

Brooklyn has also had the public help decide museum programming via the website. People were invited last summer to nominate musicians, DJs, films and books to be featured at a Target sponsored First Saturday event.  Making this happen required program and IT staff to collaborate to ensure the website programming could accomplish what was needed to collect votes and get feedback.

Diving deeper into the Museum’s website, you can see that back in 2007 the Museum had a visitor video competition asking people to document  a First Saturday event. The winner was “Mr. Cool”:

The Brooklyn Museum is inviting us as visitors to interact via the web in every way available. They are everywhere in the social online world — Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Flikr, YouTube, My Space, iTunesU and they led the way in establishing institutional blogging.  But the staff at this museum is not just sending content out, they are asking for us to return it, even to assist in creating what is presented in the galleries.  They are blurring previous roles in the field and using technology with more consistent content than I have yet to find anywhere else.  Shout Out Brooklyn!