The gatekeeper’s crisis

1 Leadbeater argues that the Web has altered what audiences expect from cultural

experiences. He describes three overlapping categories of cultural activity: Enjoy (being

entertained), Talk (socialising/interacting) and Do (creating your own work). In the past,

Leadbeater argues, audiences expected cultural institutions to provide them with a

majority of Enjoy experiences, such as traditional art exhibitions. Today, in contrast,

audiences increasingly expect their cultural experiences to emphasise interaction and

creation. In the age of the Web, Talk and Do are becoming more important than Enjoy.

2

If true, this shift in audience expectations has profound implications for curators and

cultural gatekeepers. Leadbeater describes the new role of the arts institution:

3

Yet there is still a critical role for skill and expertise to devise and curate

engaging experiences. If connection and combination, collaboration and

conversation are the watchwords of the new mass culture of the web, then

arts institutions must find critical, imaginative, challenging ways to be open

and collaborative and ways that produce good art.

4

It would help to have an example here, but the examples that Leadbeater offers are

all participatory artworks, not institutional models: Janet Frere’s Return of the

Soul, Antony Gormley’s One & Another, Martin Creed’s Work No. 850, Jeremy

Deller’s Battle of Orgreave and Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project. To varying

extents, these projects suggest a shift in the role of the artist, but they do not reflect

a similar shift in the institution’s role as gatekeeper. The institution is still

responsible for selecting the artist and creating value around the work of art – even

if it is an open and participatory work rather than an art object.1

5

Yet the same forces that are prompting artists to rethink the production process should be

causing institutions to rethink their roles as gatekeeper. Audiences today – particularly

young audiences – are used to curating their own cultural activities from a seemingly

endless supply of content. In a world where everyone is a curator, what good is a curator?

Beheading the gatekeeper

1 Unsurprisingly, this is not the first time in history that curators have been faced with the

prospect of their own obsolescence. One of the most notable attempts to do away with the

1 In Real Time Systems Jack Burnham described art institution as a part of a system that creates value

around works of art regardless of whether the work is an object or not. He wrote, “A major illusion of the

art system is that art resides in specific objects. Such artifacts are the material basis for the concept of the

“work of art.” But in essence, all institutions which process art data … are components of the work of art.

Without the support system, the object ceases to have definition; but without the object, the support system

can still sustain the notion of art.”

role of the gatekeeper took place long before the Information Age or the Age of Mass

Production. In the early years of the French Revolution, the Assemblée Nationale in Paris

passed a decree to make the all-important annual Louvre Salons open to all artists. The

annual Salons, founded under Louis XIV as a way of glorifying the French state, had

previously only admitted members of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. If

you weren’t a member? You were given the opportunity to exhibit your work once a year

– outdoors, and for a period of two hours.

2

This changed with the 1791 decree, which was based on the French Revolution ideal of

égalité.2 The right to express oneself artistically was seen as a natural extension of the

right to express one’s ideas. It followed that the Salon should be open to all comers

(provided their work was in line with public morals). Given this new commitment to

openness, there was hardly a need for a proper jury. Nevertheless, a committee was

formed to award prizes and determine the positioning of the works in the gallery.3 There

were twice as many works submitted than had shown in the previous Salon; just one was

deemed unsuitable by the committee.

3

Yet the open Salons did not last long, as William Hauptman details in his essay Juries,

Protests and Counter-Exhibitions before 1850. By 1795, Hauptman argues, “the

commission had begun to act as a de facto jury.» That year, twenty-seven artists were

rejected.

4

Within four years, the jury system had re-emerged, seemingly in direct opposition to

French Revolution ideals. Hauptman suggests two central reasons for its reappearance.

First, the desire for political and moral censorship.4 Second, the desire for quality control

– a desire that increased as the number of works submitted rose.5,6 The cultural gatekeeper

was re-instated in order to enforce society’s morals and aesthetic standards.

5

Not everyone was persuaded by these arguments. Controversy over the need for a jury

system continued to divide the French press and found many opponents among artists,

successful and otherwise. In 1799, opponents to the jury system successfully convinced

2 “L’égalité des droits. . .a permis à tout citoyen d’exposer sa pensée; cette égalité légale doit permettre à

tout artiste d’exposer son ouvrage; son tableau, c’est sa pensé; son exposition publique, c’es la permission

d’imprimer. Le salon du Louvre est la presse pour les tableaux, pourvu qu’on respecte le moeurs et l’ordre

du public.” – quoted in William Hauptman, Juries, Protests, and Counter-Exhibitions Before 1850, 1985. 3 In the era of salon-style hanging, a work’s placement might determine whether audiences even noticed it

was there. Brian O’Doherty describes the 1833 Salon as follows: “Larger paintings rise to the top (easier to

see from a distance), and are sometimes tilted out from the wall to maintain the viewer’s plane; the “best”

pictures stay in the middle zone; small pictures drop to the bottom. The perfect hanging job is an ingenious

mosaic of frames without a patch of wasted wall showing.” 4 . “Works that appeared even vaguely contrary to public taste were similarly prohibited, in accord with the

decrees of 1791.” Hauptman 97. 5 Les salons de peinture de la Révolution française. Colette Caubisens 202 6 The link between market value and Salon inclusion was very explicit in one case discussed by Hauptman:

in 1863, the artist Jongkind sold a landscape painting to a collector but had to reimburse him when the work

was refused from the Salon.

the government to abolish it entirely, but the entirely open Salon of that year was poorly

received in the press. The jury was re-instated shortly thereafter, continuing to attract

heated criticism until the Salon des Refusés mounted a serious challenge to its singular

authority in 1863.

The crowd as gatekeeper

1

The story of the Salon jury is an early example of the perceived conflict between

openness and quality. This conflict is also at play in contemporary art, and it partly

explains the continued existence of the gatekeeper in the age of the Web. Gatekeepers

make claims of quality on behalf of certain artworks. Audiences buy into or happily rail

against these claims as they see fit. Public arguments about an artwork’s quality are more

interesting when the gatekeeper really lays their reputation on the line, raising the stakes.

2

Can a more open selection process result in a credible designation of quality?

Cornerhouse director Dave Moutrey (who commissioned this text, as well as Leadbeater’s

The Art of With) poses this question in a recent article. Writing in reply to the question

“Why is Cornerhouse interested in We-think?”, Moutrey asks, “Can high quality

exhibitions, film seasons and cross art form events be created using wikis?” His statement

implicitly suggests that high-quality exhibitions are inconsistent with open tools like

wikis.

3

In 2008, the Brooklyn Museum organized a photography exhibition called Click! that was

designed to answer this very question. 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?

4

This question – whether audiences are as effective at selecting work as experts – was put

to the following experiment. An open call was issued for photographs relating to the

theme “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” Nearly 400 entries were published on the Brooklyn

Museum website, where members of the public could rate them on a scale from “least

effective” to “most effective.” Each participating evaluator was also asked to rate their

own level of arts expertise. Instead of attempting to do away with the gatekeeper system,

the experiment aimed to involve audiences in it by asking them to vote in a totally open,

de-centralized selection process.

5

In a review of the show for Slate.com, writer and curator Mia Fineman noted that the

design of the experiment was flawed. There was no way to compare the success of the

crowd’s evaluation as opposed to that of an expert. She wrote:

6

“Instead of asking how many jellybeans are in the jar, “Click!” asked the crowd to

determine which are the best-tasting jellybeans. How do you verify a question of

taste? You could ask an even bigger crowd, but that could only confirm that the

popular taste in jellybeans is, indeed, popular. “

7

In Fineman’s view, the decisions that gatekeepers make are largely subjective: an

aesthetic decision reflects as much on the individual gatekeeper as it does on the artwork.7

In this case, the aggregation of a lot of aesthetic judgments – as in the case of Click! –

does not result in a more correct assessment of aesthetic quality. It does give us a sense of

the shared aesthetic interpretations of a wide range of people, but these interpretations can

not be said to be more wise than that of a single expert.

8

Moreover, they lack the element of risk. If aesthetic judgments tell us something about

the judge’s subjectivity, then any exhibition is a kind of public performance on the part of

the gatekeeper. A crowd-curated show will always lack this sense of personal risk.

The polyphonic crowd

1

By adding together many disparate opinions, Click! found points of mutual aesthetic

interest among its contributors. Through this process of aggregation, Click! worked

against the most compelling attribute of the crowd. The crowd’s ability to reach

consensus is not as interesting as its diversity of opinion; the strange variety of knowledge

and abilities that it harbors.

2

Few projects demonstrate the polyphonic potential of the crowd better than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is often cast as a beautiful and utopian effort that has linked people across the

globe and shown the incredible potential of collaboration. In the dawning years of this

millenium, a thousands-strong volunteer army came together to pool knowledge, creating

an encyclopedia that, if printed, would take up more than 1250 volumes.

3

Its founder Jimmy Wales takes a slightly less rosy view of the project. In a recent talk he

stated that most of Wikipedia has been written by a smallish group of a few hundred avid

authors. He has statistics to back this up: “It turns out over 50% of all the edits are done

by just 7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400

people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.”8 In Wales’ view, Wikipedia is the work of a

small community of experts, not a result of the collective wisdom of the masses.

7 This supposition has been borne out by research. In one 1962 study, art-educated judges were asked to

rate artworks as “good” or “bad”. Gloria D. Bernheim drew the following conclusions from its results:

“…when global criteria are used, the judge must define for himself what is a good art product; his definition

will be fuzzy, subjective, and personal and may not have anything to do with another judge’s evaluation of

the product or with the “true” evaluation, if it were possible to obtain. What one might be evaluating. . . is

simply the unstable and subjective choices of the judge.” Aesthetic judgments are indeed linked to

individual subjectivity, and they tell us more about the judge than about the work itself.

8 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia Accessed 31 August 2009.

4

These claims are meant to reassure us, perhaps to show that Wikipedia is the product of

‘experts’ rather than of ‘the masses.’ But Jimbo’s research may not hold up under

scrutiny. Blogger Aron Swartz looked more closely at the statistics, and it seems that the

elite, avid editors are making minor tweaks: correcting typos and un-dangling participles.

The most significant contributions to Wikipedia seem to be made by people who might

only contribute a single article.

5

Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are… (vandalizing or

contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual

bulk of the article. But that’s not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a

substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of

the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually

on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.9

6

In other words, Swartz takes the view that Wikipedia is not the work of a few very well-

informed experts. Instead, it is a testament to the vast treasures of latent knowledge that

reside in ‘the crowds.’ This diversity and immensity of knowledge and opinion is

mirrored, on a smaller scale, in any group of humans who might constitute an arts

audience. And yet (to use Leadbeater’s phrase) arts institutions continue to treat

audiences as ‘bundles of needs, rather than … bundles of capabilities and potential.’

7

This is the real source of the gatekeeper’s current crisis: a curator’s authority pales in

comparison to the audience’s vast collective stores of knowledge and passion. How can

gatekeepers re-define their role in ways that harness the power of the audience without

losing the sense of subjectivity and personal risk that lie behind aesthetic decisions?

Summary

As passionate advocates of niche causes, most of us gatekeepers have some affinity with

the Archimboldi scholars, but progressional pressures put us at permanent risk of

becoming organisers of rallies rather than organise of conversations. To embrace a more

participatory paradigm, we need to programme from the pebble to the boulder,

recognising that our audiences harbor wildly diverse aesthetic passions that are no less

intense or valid than our own. We need to identify these polyphonic passions through

low-cost programmes, make connections among like-minded audience members, and

build networks of interest that can support larger programme investments. In this way,

cultural organisations can stop organizing «rallies» or trying to broadcast content to a

mass audience. Instead, they can facilitate a multiplicity of conversations with «everyone

listening to everyone else and taking time to think and not shouting.» These conversations

form the foundation for a truly participatory cultural programme.

9 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia Accessed 31 August 2009.