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.
In response to my post on ambient creativity, speaking to how our online creative outlets of Twitter and Facebook might be sapping our ambition for bigger projects, the idea came up that maybe we don’t need to seek out masterpieces of these new media. Instead, what about thinking of social media networks as aggregate works of art?
Social media has brought the art community huge benefits, chief among them the ability to easily share artistic creations, whether it’s through Twitter, Facebook or a group Tumblr. But is the possibility of easy creation and publishing diminishing our drive for making more ambitious works?
Since the inception of Facebook’s photo viewer, an influential tool that’s become the go-to for documentation of everything from social events to product launches, users have been stuck at a pretty lousy 72 DPI and 720 pixels. Those digits mean an image size that’s low enough to make even high quality pictures look bad, adding grain and distorted colors. The limitations were even annoying enough for artist Jonald James to start a Facebook group in protest, Artists Against Facebook’s Image Compression Process. Yet though difficulties remain, new Facebook updates point to a way forward for art and artists online. The message of James’ group is that Facebook isn’t just for presenting shitty party pics, but also presents a tool that artists depend on for marketing and sales. “Let’s face it,” their About statement reads, “Facebook’s photo management really sucks.”
Now that Jerry Saltz has proven himself — yet again — to be an attention whore with his stint on Work of Art, I’m starting to like him more … yes, I love a car crash. And just when we were all jonesing for another fix of “What is crazy uncle Jerry up to?” Artist Jennifer Dalton is opening a show today at the Flag Art Foundation called “Making Sense,” which (among other things) is an “ … attempt to make sense of … New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s incredibly popular Facebook page.” Let the games begin …
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Statue Porn
Shit Art World People Say
Luckiest Artist in the World Set to Make $200M from Facebook Stock
Can Art Create World Change? 3 Artists at Davos
Artists Kickstarting Their Own Careers
Earliest Known Paintings Discovered in Spain
Alone Among The Living and the Dead
Mike Kelley Dead at 58, Apparent Suicide
Beach Boys, Artists and Copyright Lawsuits
