Jeffrey Sims, 'Nu-Nile,' 2010. (Courtesy of the artist)

Publicly juried art prizes are nothing new. There is, after all, the four-year-old annual ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Mich., which up until this year has been judged entirely by the public. “I’ve never seen more people engaged with art, ever,” said Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum, of her visit to the ArtPrize last year. Hoping to import some of its community engagement to New York, she and Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s managing curator of exhibitions, are bringing a partly publicly juried art competition to the Brooklyn Museum.

Three weeks ago, “GO: a community-curated open studio project,” colloquially known as Go Brooklyn, had its open studio weekend, a two-day event for which 1,708 artists in 43 neighborhoods opened their work spaces to visitors who registered with the museum’s website (and, for that matter, to whomever happened to stop by). This week, the museum will announce the 10 winners of that event, who were picked after registered users voted on them. From those winners, Ms. Atkins and Eugenie Tsai, a contemporary art curator at the museum, will choose two to 10 artists for the competition’s big prize: inclusion in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum, with the same name as the project, to open Dec. 1.

>> Click for the list of 10 artists selected from the competition.

New York, of course, isn’t Grand Rapids, where ArtPrize’s award is not a museum exhibition but a $200,000 cash prize, and where last year’s winning artwork was a stained-glass mosaic of Jesus. The art world may be globalizing, but New York remains its de facto center, and as such has a booming population of artists who are trying to make it within the good old established system of galleries and museums. A fair number of those artists live in Brooklyn, and the neighborhoods that predominantly house their studios—Red Hook, Williamsburg, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Dumbo and Bushwick—all have popular open studio events of their own. In that context, what is the place of a crowd-curated show?

One thing the Brooklyn Museum’s stamp on the event meant is that a lot more artists signed up than do for those local open studio tours. In Greenpoint alone, 205 artists participated in Go Brooklyn—that’s around 100 more than take part in Greenpoint’s open studios.

“Most open studio events are for hobbyists,” said Carmen McLeod, an artist who is represented by galleries in New York and Chicago. “This one feels different, because the museum is putting its name behind it.” Ms. McLeod had a Go Brooklyn visit from Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehmann, but then again the two know each other socially: Ms. McLeod’s wife, Mickalene Thomas, who did not participate in Go Brooklyn, opens a solo show at the museum on Sept. 28.

In general, the museum’s staff, for all their talk of “engagement” in Go Brooklyn, didn’t publish their itineraries online, and were reluctant to publicly share information about which studios they visited, though Ms. Atkins did reveal to The Observer that she visited around 20 neighborhoods.

While there weren’t, for the most part, the crude marketing ploys that characterize ArtPrize, a twinge of reality-show competitiveness did set in as the swarms of studio visitors gathered steam on Saturday afternoon, powered by an online map that allowed artist participants to monitor how much traffic each neighborhood was getting.

And for their part, members of the public who had registered were rated by the museum’s website on their “awesomeness,” gauged through a combination of number of studio check-ins, neighborhoods visited and miles traveled. In an effort by the museum to boost public visitation to outlying studios, voters got bonus points for trips to studios in low-density areas. The names of the top 10 “awesome” voters were displayed on the site.

Of course, put something online and you open the door for cheating—or at least the whiff of it. It rankled some artists that others were publishing their five-digit codes—the ones used to place votes—via Twitter and Facebook, something the museum discouraged since the object was to get voters to physically visit the studios, and, ideally, engage with the artists before obtaining those codes and voting. Others worried that by flouting the system, some artists would rack up votes from friends who hadn’t left their couches. In practice, though, voting required registering, and the system was so complicated that it tended to deter this kind of thing.

All of that said, it was humanly impossible for one person to visit all the studios, and tough in the extreme to get to most of them. (Even the indefatigable New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz admitted, via a response to an artist on his Facebook page, to being daunted by the 1,700 studios. “Alas, good luck,” he wrote. “I will not be in attendance in the flesh but only in spirit.”) The Observer started out with grand ambitions, but ended up, on the event’s first day, visiting mostly studios in well-populated areas like Gowanus and Red Hook—you could clock in at more studios there, and see more work, without wasting time on travel or having to do too much advance planning.

The next day, we did make it to some farther-flung and more sparsely populated places, like Lefferts Gardens and Ditmas Park, but for the most part our experience was indicative of what some artists considered to be a problem with the event: that high-density neighborhoods had a built-in advantage. Even the coordinators of the event admitted to staying local. Ms. Atkins started in her neighborhood of Windsor Terrace and made it to the low-density Kensington, but that was close by; Ms. Bernstein trekked through Red Hook, where she lives.

Jade Doskow, New York 1964 World's Fair, "Peace Through Understanding," New York State Pavilion, 2008. (Courtesy of the artist)

“It’s starting to feel like a popularity contest,” said Jeffrey Sims, an artist in Bedford-Stuyvesant. And the problem of artists sending out their codes via Twitter and Facebook only exacerbated this. “It’s hard enough for emerging or unknown artists not living or working within a high density area of artists to get visibility,” Mr. Sims added later over email. “The actions of Tweeting the artist codes makes it even harder.”

ArtPrize, it’s worth noting, suffered from the same problem last year when The B.O.B., a 70,000-square-foot building packed with studios, got the most traffic.

“Many of the top 10 [artworks]—praying mantis, crying driftwood octopus, living statue guy—were from there,” said Matthew Power, who wrote about ArtPrize for the September 2012 issue of GQ, “and it was pretty clear that it was due to a huge foot-traffic advantage.”

Screwball Spaces was the B.O.B. of Go Brooklyn. A sprawling brick building in Gowanus, it has some 80 studios, the highest number of any single participating venue, and saw nearly 1,600 visitors. “Maybe 300 people came to my studio,” said Julia Whitney Barnes, who works in Screwball. “There was so much stimulation. It was 18 hours of talking.” On Saturday night, while artists in other neighborhoods were bemoaning the weather and the MTA service disruptions on the F and G subway lines, Screwball Spaces threw a keg party.

Ms. Atkins shrugs off the possibility that the high density/low density divide could have affected the results. “I think there will be a lot of surprises in who the winners are,” she said.

But even in high-density areas, there were complaints about how Go Brooklyn went. “I fucking sat there for a long time,” said Brian Willmont, a multimedia artist in Greenpoint. He thought Greenpoint’s own annual open studio event, where he got roughly 100 visitors in just four hours, was much more successful. “I’m usually like a ringleader of a circus engaging five people at the same time.” He estimated that he got around 60 to 80 visitors during Go Brooklyn. And only two of them bothered to check in.

Not all the artists in the low-density neighborhoods, meanwhile, fretted about votes. Many were grateful for the exposure, no matter how meager. “People from real Brooklyn are never included in these events,” said Marie Roberts, a Brooklyn-born banner artist in Coney Island who was happy to have had 25 visitors.

Artists weren’t permitted to sell work during the event, which riled some participants. “It was a little bit self-serving,” said Mr. Willmont. “It felt like it was more about the Brooklyn Museum than about the artists. They tell you you’re not supposed to sell work in your studios. Who the fuck are they to tell me what I can or cannot do in my studio? What are you doing for me? Absolutely nothing.”

But despite the complaints and setbacks, the numbers from Go Brooklyn are impressive: Out of nearly 10,000 registered voters, 6,106 checked in to at least one studio. But the total number of check-ins was a whopping 48,918, and the actual number of people who made studio visits was close to 147,000. (That’s because only 30 percent of visitors were registered—the other 70 percent were people who wandered in off the street, or knew the artist.)

It’s possible the Brooklyn Museum will come under fire once again, this time for abdicating curation, not to the judges on a reality TV show, as it did two years ago when it agreed to host an exhibition for the winner of Bravo’s since-cancelled Work of Art, but to the general public. In the meantime, for many artists, attention mattered far more than votes. Daniel Freeman, who displayed paintings of Sarah Palin and Clint Eastwood (sans chair) in his Lefferts Gardens brownstone, used to exhibit alongside Keith Haring back in the 1980s. “I’m just happy to be able to engage with an audience again,” he said.

rjovanovic@observer.com