Dennis Hollingsworth

After the Museum

Our eyes glaze, the multitude burns.

One thought along the way: There's so much art, so many artists... why can't we create a robot to look at it all and report back with a summary later wile we go to the parties?

Just kidding of course. Scale and it's discontents.

Aaron and I talked about the problems of scale and that the museums are apparently no longer capable of doing their job: telling the story of art. The story has gotten bigger than the instituioinal level can cope with. What to do? Aaron suggested this article linked from Laura Lark:

...I am curious about the art analog to this growing phenomenon of mass volunteer cooperation, or crowdsourcing.

Jeff Howe introduced the term crowdsourcing in his June 2006 Wired Magazine article, ?The Rise of Crowdsourcing? to describe a new form of corporate outsourcing to largely amateur pools of volunteer labor that ?create content, solve problems, and even do corporate R & D.? Examples of online enterprises successfully built on crowdsourcing are abundant: EBay?which enlists users to stock a marketplace, consume from and police it; Amazon?which relies on users? product reviews to sell to like-minded shoppers; and the more recent Threadless?a company that prints and sells user-generated t-shirt designs based on popular vote. In his 2002 book Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold called these consumer-driven ratings ?reputation systems? and indicated that for the moment (barring radical changes to telecommunications law) consumers have the power to create what they consume....

...With the cooperative intention of projects such as these, crowdsourcing as a method of artistic production appears to be heir to the throne of 1960s and 70s happenings and participatory art. These artists are less interested in sole authorship and visibility--they are phantom captains2--and more in distributed creativity, gift economies, and other models that disrupt how we think about and assign value to art. As evidenced by grid computing programs like SETI, even the biggest supercomputers cannot compete with half-a-million networked home machines. And Howard Rheingold predicted in Smart Mobs that ?key breakthroughs [in technology] won?t come from established industry leaders, but from the fringes, from skunkworks and start ups and even associations of amateurs. Especially associations of amateurs.? Perhaps breakthroughs in art will come from the skunkworks, the noodlers, and the untrained crowd, too.

Sounds good to me.