The Curator is Dead. Long Live Democracy

Considering visitors’ voices and choices in the curatorial decision-making is something cultural institutions have been considering as a way to engage their audiences with the institution. Museums like the TATE with How We Are Now exhibition and Street & Studio, and the Brooklyn Museum with Click! A crowd-curated exhibition have been exploring and successfully implemented online tools that allow their audiences to participate into the choice of works - usually photography electronically submitted – that will be presented in the exhibition space.

In the experiences that have been conducted so far, public’s contribution ended with the opening of the exhibition. The selection of works displayed in the gallery was either made by independent curators and/or professionals or by the online community, in both cases their contribution ended before the exhibition was set up.

Democracy is the online crowd-curated counterpart of Design Event 09, the North East’s design festival taking place in Newcastle upon Tyne in October. Produced by SUMO, a design company specialized in the arts and cultural sector, Democracy is a new graphic design exhibition democratically curated by the online community. This project goes a step further than previous experiences by allowing the public to vote for their favourite work even during the exhibition period. Public’s contribution will be observable in the exhibition space, the more votes an artwork receives the bigger it will appear in the gallery.



How does it work?

Designer and illustrators are asked to submit their visual interpretation of the theme of Democracy directly to http://www.createdemocracy.com/. Then, the public has access to all submitted artworks and can vote for their favourite, leave comments or interact with designers.

As Click! there will be no curators for this exhibition; only the works with the most votes will be displayed in the exhibition space. Visitors are encouraged to continue voting even after the exhibition opens. Jim Richardson, managing director of SUMO, “when the exhibition opens in October, visitors will be able to continue to vote for the artworks they like and their votes will instantly be reflected in the exhibition space, where all the artworks will be digitally displayed. When an artwork receives more votes, it grows in size compared to the pieces displayed around it, so the exhibition will be constantly changing hour by hour, day by day.”

Providing the public the opportunity to take part to the exhibition process challenges the well-establish role of museums. Traditionally, museums have been considered as the place where objects are collected, classified, restored and conserved, and displayed. With the advent of so-called Web 2.0 social tools, this traditional perspective has since then been enriched, embracing public’s contribution and opening the doors to amateurs.