Kiasma - make a better one yourself

Crowdsourced contemporary art

Kiasma had a problem on its hands. There was a lot of negative buzz surrounding the museum at the time – the public didn’t necessarily see the museum’s value and people weren’t happy about recent exhibition cancellations. Instead of taking the conventional route and apologize for everything, we recommended that Kiasma go on the offensive a bit, but in a clever way.

When we look at contemporary art, we’re often inspired by certain pieces, but sometimes a bit puzzled by others. A common reaction can be summed up by the phrase “My preschooler could have made that.” So we thought, let’s call their bluff and invite these critics to make contemporary art themselves.

We wanted to engage people, invite them to have a dialog and challenge them to create something positive. Facebook provided a wide-reaching and useful platform that made the dialogue possible. The campaign’s web gallery used Facebook Connect to display all the submitted artwork, and then fans could vote for their favorites by using Likes. Every piece of communication we put out was a call to action, a challenge to “make a better one yourself then.” We ran posters outdoors that leveraged real critiques from real people. Comments such as “Just like a two-year-old’s scribble,” dared the public to try their hand at creating contemporary art.

This one won a bronze lion from Cannes and one of the first ever Facebook Studio Gold Awards.

Role: Art Director
Agency: hasan & partners