Take a look at this picture. It's a view of the front window of the legendary—and now long-gone—Dubrow's Cafeteria on King's Highway in Brooklyn, N.Y., shot from the street by Marcia Bricker Halperin in 1979. The reflections on the window—cars, signs, a checker cab—seem to mingle with the patrons inside the cafeteria. A couple of guys kibitz in the back; an old woman seated by the window clutches her check and stares quizzically out at the camera. It's a beguilingly complex image in the tradition of classic black-and-white street photography.

Like the picture? Join the crowd. It was the top choice (from among 389 images) of 3,344 people who participated in the Brooklyn Museum's odd experiment in curatorial crowd-sourcing, "Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition." Organized by Shelley Bernstein, the museum's manager of information systems, "Click!" was inspired by the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds, by New Yorker business columnist and Slate contributor James Surowiecki. In the book, Surowiecki argues that under the right conditions, a large, diverse group of people will often make better judgments and smarter decisions than individual experts. Bernstein set out to test this thesis in the context of visual art.