Crowdsourcing can replace every job, including museum curation! The new “exile a piece of art” admission ticket adds interactivity to the art appreciation process!

Background:

Art museums often display a wide variety of pieces.

Some art pieces may be considered to be pretentious or otherwise without merit.

Unfortunately, currently there is no way to express that displeasure in an actionable form.

Proposal:

Art museums should sell two categories of ticket: a regular-priced general admission ticket (Figure 1), and a special “curator” ticket (Figure 2).

This “curator” ticket would cost 10 times as much as a normal ticket, but would have a special feature: it would allow the admitted individual to select any one piece of artwork in the museum to be “exiled” back to the archives and removed from display.

(It would be replaced by a randomly-chosen other piece from the museum’s not-on-display archives.)

The exiled artwork would not be eligible to be displayed again until a certain amount of time had passed (or perhaps until all the other artworks in the museum had been rotated back on display).

This has two important properties:

  • It removes the need for curation, since every gallery will become a constantly-churning disaster zone of works being semi-randomly removed from display and returned from the museum archives.
  • It allows museum visitors to actively participate in the art-appreciation process, rather than only being passive observers.

 

 

1-regular-ticket.png
Fig. 1: This standard museum admission ticket is utterly uninspiring. Let’s improve things (see Figure 2).

 

2-exile-ticket-used.png
Fig. 2: The “curator” ticket has a tear-off ticket stub (shown at far right) that can be put in a pocket next to any artwork that the museum-goer wishes to remove from display. Once a day, museum employees will go through the museum and remove any artwork with an “exile” ticket associated with it. That “exiled” artwork will be replaced by a randomly-chosen piece of similar dimensions from the archives.

Conclusion:

This new “crowdsourced” approach to curation can be applied to museums of all types—not just art museums.

PROS: Adds interactivity to art museums and helps museums raise funds. Leverages the “wisdom of the crowds.”

CONS: Some jerk with extra money to spend might just go to the museum every day and exile their favorite art pieces to prevent others from enjoying them.