I became aware of SFAC Gallery's most recent show, Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution, via email one Thursday morning. My interests piqued by the show's description, I surfed onto their website where I found images of the exhibition, JPGs representing the curator-chosen photos(that were themselves once JPGs) in the gallery and a couple of installation shots with people mulling around the gallery space. My interest was sustained online and I ended up visiting the exhibition a handful of times, this essay being the result of those excursions. However, the events that led up to me landing foot in the gallery have specific gravity given this particular exhibition's inquiry, in that, these days exhibitions are for many at first an online experience. I see digital paintings in my email inbox, downloading the ones I find particularly striking. I bookmark the websites of galleries, artists, and museums; I subscribe to museum podcasts and the RSS feeds of art collector blogs in the states and beyond. My experience of surfing banks of JPGs detailing work from various exhibitions that dot the globe is collaged together with all that entertainment, that pop detritus that has historically been art's antithesis but now being all online, is now its prime interlocutor. For the past few weeks this has meant, videos of Juke dancing on YouTube, machinima snapshots on Flickr, and articles from the AvaStar, SecondLife's version of US Weekly mingle casually with posts from jameswagner.com and the recent podcasts put forth by Heather Marx Gallery.

It's in online space that both entertainment and contemporary art are undergoing a massive shift; without doubt, the deck is being reshuffled. Entertainment that was once broadcast out from mass-media channels is becoming more populist through sites whose basis is the social bond, although online access is still the gatekeeper, a broader range of social and political imaginations has emerged through this change. As a form of culture that has been relentlessly critical of entertainment, contemporary art is faltering in its efforts to develop a forum where just as many antagonisms can be voiced. The highly creative media made by users of these sites have underlined the field of contemporary art's elitism, leaving it looking relatively conservative. Arts professionals have readdressed their practice accordingly and many local art spaces have also taken note. Breakthrough being the most recent salient example was able to show the discord between the gallery and online networks. There have surely been others in the past, perhaps readers remember Clark Buckner's show A Vlog is a Vlog at Mission 17 this past fall.

In any regard, SFAC Gallery took on the immense task of translating the social economies and collective intelligence of participatory media sites into a gallery space, a task that would certainly challenge any curator. The exhibition structured the gallery space into two sections, JPG: Community and Opportunity and Takes on Flickr. In the former, JPG Magazine, a local organization that publishes a magazine of images that have been uploaded to its social networking site, presented an exhibition that according to the far-too-utopic description, “celebrates global participation and exposes the editorial process.” The work presented was comprised of a photomosaic made from 3288 thumbnail prints, each image submitted under the “breakthrough” theme. From this lot of 3288 images, a DVD was created which ran 500 of these files as a slideshow; it played on a pedestaled monitor. However, the primary focus of the first section were the 20 files that had been chosen by SFAC Gallery Director Meg Shiffler and artist Noah Lang. Printed and arranged on the room's longest wall in a sparse salon style they showed subjects like brilliantly colored landscapes and smiling kids, images that I imagine most regular gallerygoers find familiar. A handful of photos were passionate and others were studied, all together they were visually engaging and technically aware.

In the latter portion of the exhibition, six Bay Area curators picked clumps of images from the massive photo sharing site, Flickr. Each curator worked from their own criteria. The chosen works were printed and taped to the wall, small bits of text nearby noted the title of the work, name of the user, and how the selection had been curated. In addition, each curator wrote a bit of text, some were casual, some were turgid, explaining how they went about their selections. In one group, Renny Pritiken chose files that were, “studies of the human figure in juxtapositions to built space.” Heather Champ, a Flickr community manager, chose a half dozen photos that appeared to be taken with a pinhole camera, while Joseph Del Pesco sought and found photos whose subject was built on the bare bones self-reflexivity of people taking photos of other people.

The exhibition made awkwardly apparent that a digital image is not just a photograph waiting to be printed. And that, when having named a show for photography, the JPG may not be the best place to begin. In a sense, at the core every printed and taped photo illustrated that the experience of viewing these once-digital-files in a white cube was radically different than flipping through them online. Given this, the exhibition was one of the largest photo selections I've ever seen in a gallery, let alone a space of SFAC's modest size. However, recalling who participates in Flickr, the selections appeared overly tailored to contemporary art's aesthetics. This left the more popular aesthetic criteria without acknowledgement, despite having an overwhelming presence on Flickr, uses of the JPG that were not based art-historically were not selected. Both sections of the exhibition identified recurring art historical tropes in the community, conventionally landscapes and portraits were dominant. From the millions of photos on Flickr, the chosen curators were unabashed about searching for what they already know, the aesthetic formats that have precedence and are pre-qualified to appear in a gallery. Renny Pritiken's two selections that included stills from mid-20th-century sci-fi films showed that these categories allowed for some leakage within the horizontality provided by Flickr, but not much. Largely, the lot of files was curated into and from the canon of art photography, works were chosen on their ability to mirror with clarity the last century of photography in art.

Each section of the exhibition also worked at returning to the category of art and the outmoded distinction between amateur and professional. It's a duality that sites like Flickr rarely make effort to recognize, but allows galleries to maintain the image of cultural authority. This was writ large in the exhibition's title, Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution. It's a revolution for these photographers, but they're still amateurs. In this exhibition, I'm unsure as to whether a traditional gallery exhibition can critically frame the social economies of participatory sites and identify the collective intelligence they gather, let alone participate in this online culture in a way that isn't overbearing and brimming with hubris. These new media sharing sites, these forums of online culture, are an arena where the aesthetics of contemporary art can only have a proportional stake. When curators engage with online culture, they should do so with a certain criticality, an understanding that in these forums, their values are far from the presiding ones. Curating through the scope of contemporary art will only be effective in finding what is already known, it will most likely not yield an exhibition that is representative of the context from which it was built.