Does Anyone Actually Like Crowd-Sourced Shows?

Still from “Super Mario Bros 3” (image from theartofvideogames.org)

When I heard about the Smithsonian’s upcoming video game exhibition, I was filled with a sense of dread upon reading the press release’s bolded title: “Smithsonian American Art Museum Invites Public to Vote on Games to be Featured in “The Art of Video Games” Exhibition”. They tout the voting like it’s something to be proud of, but honestly, I am totally sick of crowd-sourced shows. For how historically unsuccessful they have been, crowd-sourced shows seem to be written up as critical novelties, and then recycled throughout the art and museum world. The novelty is way past over.

Social media has democratized the cultural landscape, turning everyone into the tastemakers of their own mutual fan clubs. We can leverage our Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr accounts to have a greater impact on the prevailing aesthetics of our time, as images and videos and voices go from nothing to viral in a matter of hours. But the value of museums and exhibition space is that they have the resources to take a longer view of cultural development: shows shouldn’t be made around the ethos of being most acceptable to most people, or reaching as many eyeballs possible in the least amount of time. We don’t need a popularity contest!

Leandro Artigala, “Friends” (2006) (image from brooklynartmuseum.org)

The crowd-sourced exhibition was a publicity stunt, an effort to drag backwards-looking institutions into the world of social media and the internet. Now, it’s a cliche. Brooklyn Museum’s Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition let the public vote on photos procured in an open call. The resulting exhibition was a critically anemic mess of Flickr-quality lowest common denominator work: saturated colors, HDR exposure and smiling faces. The Walker museum took a slightly different approach in 2010′s 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection. Audiences voted on a selection of works from the Walker’s works on paper collection, and then pitted that selection against a group chosen by Darsie Alexander, the Walker’s chief curator. The latter is closer to the Smithsonian’s gimmick tactic.

The website for The Art of Video Games separates the history of the medium into four rather strange divisions: “Start,” “8-Bit,” “Bit Wars!” “Transition” and “Next Generation”. Each category is divided into games by console, and then by genre (the questionable nature of these decisions is material for another post). Viewers can then vote on which games they think best represent the genre on the console of their choice. To be honest, I don’t really care what people vote for, nor do I think it’s important.

What the historical arc of video games needs is not another cacophony of voices deciding on some acceptable, populist path of development. Video games desperately need more established critical voices that are willing to put their foot down and start to argue over a history shaped not by mass popular consensus but by artistic and innovative significance. The Smithsonian show will fail without that, and no amount of voting will help to find it.

Even if voting on video games seems like a nice, shiny concept, it’s actually bad for the quality of the show and the quality of discourse around video games in general. The problem with these crowd-sourced shows is that they fall into the same trap as Twitter and Tumblr and every social medium: there’s no way to separate the signal from the noise of everyone trying to shout over each other. Art is not democratic, and no art will ever be canonized by popular vote, so museums and curators should stop pretending. They’re not doing the work any favors.

Tagged as: Brooklyn Art Museum, Smithsonian, Social Media, The Art of Video Games, video games, Walker Art Center