Critic Paddy Johnson just penned a column for L Magazine about something she terms “Twitter art,” by which she means (I assume) art that uses Twitter. I often enjoy her take on new media but in regards to her treatment of Twitter-related art, I think she misses the mark. Here’s why.
I’m sure everyone reading this blog has had the same brain-fart online experience: someone sends you a link, you catch something on Twitter, you open a recommendation from a friend, but as soon as it pops in to a new tab in your browser, you forget about it. It’s not that the new thing isn’t interesting, or that you don’t mean to open it, you just get distracted. Twenty minutes and an email/Twitter/Facebook update later, the tab catches your eye catches and you click into it. Often, I find that I have no idea how I found the thing I’m opening, where it came from, or what it is. This built-in web browser surprise creates an interesting context (or lack there of) for online content, particularly for images.
Ten years is a longtime for a web-based project and Newsgrist is celebrating a decade of existence this month.
I spoke with its creator Joy Garnett about her online project and how it has evolved since its inception. She assured me that, “after all these years [it] remains as close to my heart as ever.”
Today, I was browsing Facebook and I discovered a post by Joy Garnett, who was offering one of her paintings to the first collector to pledge $10,000 to a fund for Haiti. She’s an artist known for painting images of disasters and I wanted to talk to her about her latest bout of altruism.
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