Crowd-Source ˈkroudˌsôrs/ and Art - ɑːrt

Crowd·source

ˈkroudˌsôrs/

verb

gerund or present participle: crowdsourcing
1. obtain (information or input into a particular task or project) by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.

I learned about crowd-sourcing today, and wasn't surprised by its definition.  We, in the competitive art world, know about this too well.  In fact, we pay to "crowd-source." Let me explain.

Artists are pressured to put together professional vitaes which include exhibitions, lectures, residencies, catalog publications and more so to be competitive for more of the same.  We pay fees to compete with one another, to be chosen to show, talk, work and publish to add to our vitaes.  It's quite an expensive cycle.  We are, indeed, throwing images in a metaphoric hope jar to win recognition so we don't have to pay fees and become well-recognized and legitimate and earn well-justified financial stipends.
Do we ever?  Most of us don't.  Yet, the compulsion to compete becomes a ritualistic lifestyle we all know too well.  It's a kind of dialectic that we engage in our solitary studios.  If we win, we gloat, if we don't, we scrutinize, judge, and emulate those gloaters who boast the gold jar of success.  It's part of the educational process of art-making, and spans a life time.  

Where do we look for crowd-sourcing opportunities?  There's a myriad of outlets through paid sources or arts commissions that post online ads.  We pay fees, upload digital images, and cross our fingers.  Most of the time we lose.  Yet this addictive process is the lifeline of the emerging artist art world, regionally, nationally and internationally. The  exhibition institutions who foster art crowd-sourcing, if you will, post a prospectus, outline their curatorial views, and ask you to submit at least three images by a reasonable deadline.  You pay a fee, and if you are accepted, you pay more to ship the work to the show. * If in fact you are competing for inclusion in a publication and are chosen, you sign an agreement of copyright relinquishment, and you normally collect no fees for monies earned by the institution.

So let us welcome the terminology and internet methodology of crowd-sourcing, to a twentieth century process known to all artists who once snail-mailed their dreams, now efficiently download them.


*http://bluelinearts.org/exhibits/calls.html