by Grady Mitchell | “I want anyone to feel like they’re allowed to like art,” says Jeff Hamada, the Vancouverite behind Booooooom, one of the world’s leading online archives of contemporary creativity. That’s why he started the site six years ago, and with millions of visitors each month – well, mission accomplished.

Along with a bottomless reserve of enthusiasm, one of the main reasons Jeff launched Booooooom was in response to the elitism he encountered in art school. He’s adamant, however, that he won’t spoon-feed art to the masses. When someone tells him “I love everything you post on your site,” he considers that a failure. The trickiest part of the whole Booooooom operation is balancing people’s expectations while introducing them to new, challenging work. The last thing he wants the site to become is an echo chamber endlessly reinforcing its own opinion.

What he does want, he says, “is to provide an opportunity for people to encounter something they’re not really sure about. I want the site to be more like an appetizer than a main course; for them to be hungry to discover more on their own.”

The Booooooom selection process doesn’t involve formulas or focus groups. In his mind, selecting only things you know people will like isn’t curation. Instead, a curator works to take people somewhere. Jeff uses the analogy of a river with five stepping stones. If the viewer stands on the first stone and Jeff’s on the fifth, he’ll lose them. If they’re both huddled on the same rock, nobody gets anywhere. But if Jeff stays one step ahead, eventually they’ll make their way across. The idea is to maintain that healthy gap and lead viewers along.

The key here is tacit, or intutive, knowledge. “Know how,” Jeff calls it. Like cooking an old family recipe without measuring ingredients, or ollying a skateboard, it’s something you learn to do from repetition. Viewing art, Jeff says, is similar. Anyone can train to do it if they spend the time it takes to look and think.

You don’t even have to like the work. There’s something valuable in trying to understand what others see in something, Jeff says, even if you don’t. Hell, especially if you don’t. To take an extreme example, let’s look at Nickleback. “If so many people like Nickleback,” Jeff says, “Who’s right about Nickleback?” Let’s not ponder that dilemma too deeply, just let it illustrate Jeff’s broader point: “It’s important to put yourself in the position of questioning.”

Good taste can only take you so far. The real thing that makes Booooooom stand out from so many other sites is the community. Like learning to study art, it’s something that’s built over time. The work of building it wasn’t actually hard, Jeff says, it’s just that there was a lot of it. From day one, he emailed every artist he featured (he still does). He didn’t ask for anything, just let them know he enjoyed their work. Send two or three emails a night over a couple years, eventually you’ll have a community on your hands.

Today, he uses his following to engage artists and art lovers through challenges and contests. The latest is Drawing On The Past, where he challenged readers to draw an influential person, place or thing from their life and write about it. In return they could win a limited edition Booooooom bag made in collaboration with Herschel Supplies. Jeff hopes to launch even larger creative collaborations in the future. Or, in his words, to at least have his ideas “rejected by bigger and bigger clients.” Whatever you’re doing, Jeff argues that getting shot down every once in a while is critical. “Rejection is a huge part of knowing that you’re still pushing it. If I succeed ten times in a row, to me that’s a failure. I’m not trying hard enough.”

He also hopes, someday soon, to take Booooooom from a strictly virtual space to a physical one. Less of a straight up gallery, he’s thinking, and more of a community hub where people who dig it can get together. If you haven’t already, give the website a visit. You can also check out Jeff’s personal work here.

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