Openess, Trust, Value, Give : 4 Secrets of Community

More from MW2008 - 

Shelley Bernstein, from the Brooklyn Museum gave a really super talk last week about the learnings and changes in approach at the museum in the last year.

The biggest take away for me was the idea of changing from an institution voice to a personal one, and how that change has manifested.  While this is not a new idea to me, the elegance with which Shelley presented the case for personal voice, really came home to me.

Her talk weaved 4 concepts together:

1. Openness
2. Trust
3. Value
4. Give

Opening the door to community participation allows unanticipated things to happen.  Trusting that the community won’t steal your art, or whatever your worst fear is, allows them to bring unique and valuable perspectives.  By valuing their perspective and insights, you get help in finding ways to be accessible and interesting to your community. By giving back, you can connect with and understand your community better.  And around it goes. 

A great example Shelley talked about began with a blog post about the Schenk House.  The post inspired a comment by someone who once lived there, and opened this whole door of discovery and connection for everyone involved. The openness in the blog drives home the idea of community. A kind of conversation that is so rewarding and would never have happened in the past.

And speaking of GIVING, 
Shelley asks all of us to help with their Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition

Says Shelley:

Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition is a photography exhibition that invites Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

So....now we need a diverse crowd. If you know everything about art or nothing at all, we really need you to help us out. Create an account, log in and evaluate some of the works that have been submitted during our open call. Your participation will shape the exhibition, opening at the Museum on June 27, 2008. Evaluation can take a while, but you can do as little or as much as you want *and* you can log in anytime throughout the eval period which ends May 23.

Register and get started here:
www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/

It would also be super helpful if you'd pass the word along to others. We really need a diverse crowd and that means we need evaluators with range of knowledge (including none!) and varied geographic locations (including outside of Brooklyn!)

Now Go Curate!

Thanks Shelley! 

Comments

[Shelley]

Thanks for posting, Rebecca! You are catching up with the post MW2008 writing :)

[rebecca Krause-Hardie]

Yes, only 5 more to go to be caught up with last week! Good luck with Click