Today, Facebook announced that it has acquired the hugely popular smartphone photo-sharing app, Instagram, and in the process further consolidating its position as the biggest visual archive in the world.
LOS ANGELES —London/LA-based artist Ed Fornieles has created a new Facebook-based project, Dorm Daze, with 35 characters who acted out a fictitious three months of college, with a series of dramas, like a college basketball star and math geek involved in a drug ring and the unrequited love of two fraternity guys.
The infographic above appeared in the April edition of National Geographic, and it demonstrates that the American addiction to digital images has created a huge surplus of pixels that tell us what most of us already know, people like to take A LOT of photos.
From pages of Reddit’s Funny section emerges this hilarious use of one of Michelangelo’s most iconic images from Sistine Chapel on Facebook.
According to Business Insider, “[Street] artist David Choe painted the inside of Facebook’s first headquarters back in 2005, and Mark Zuckerberg made him an offer: he could be paid a few thousand dollars in cash, or take the same amount in Facebook stock.” Choe took the stock and now it’s worth $200 million.
This week’s edition focuses on the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA, some final essays on the 9/11 Museum, an endangered mural in Manhattan, the timeline design of Facebook and Instagram as art.
As we hunker down for Hurricane Irene, we decided to make this week’s Required Reading a photo-heavy one. From images of chairs to maps comparing New York to cities around the world, there are images galore in the links.
Community is enough to make Google+ worth a whirl, but what exactly does the site provide for artists? Conversely, what is it missing? A few initial thoughts based on a week’s worth of use.
Is it time for the Western art world to join Chinese social media? That depends on your goals. “I don’t see any reason for anyone not directly involved in the Beijing/Shanghai art world to be on Weibo,” argued Robin Peckham. “It’s more about back-and-forth in-scene and doesn’t have much application in terms of PR and such, at least on the small scale of galleries and organizations.” Indeed, Chinese sites like Weibo and Douban, even as they gain more attention from the West, remain predominantly Chinese in both language and user base.
UK arts funding is still under the gun as protesters and artists alike continue to speak out publicly against the budget reductions. While debate rages, Facebook has recently deleted over 50 profiles belonging to UK organizations protesting for the arts. Though these accounts were against Facebook’s TOS, the magnitude is surprising.
