You may have seen it on your friend’s Facebook pages or the screen of a mobile phone, on a Twitter image service or a Tumblr blog. An aesthetic rash has been plaguing popular photography as of late, but it’s not a new one. A slew of iPhone ‘Polaroid’ applications are turning people’s visual diaries into retro, oversaturated documents of social lives, friends and lovers. But what makes these applications so popular
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Always Social: Social Media Art (2004-2008), Part One
Some time in 2004, I logged onto Facebook for the very first time. My alma mater was one of the few allowed coveted access to the Harvard-originated social network. I filled out a profile, uploaded a picture and began adding friends. A coast away, Tim O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0” … Computers and the Internet, after decades of association with nerds and misfits, were on the brink of mainstream cool.
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Social Media Art Roundtable Continues …
Over the last two days, artist and Hyperallergic contributor An Xiao has been leading and moderating a discussion on the Hyperallergic Facebook page on the nature of Social Media Art. Today, the discussion continues but first let’s look back to see what has been said so far.
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Join Our Social Media Art Roundtable on Facebook
Just as social media have quickly gone mainstream, we’re starting to see social media art received more attention from the mainstream art world. I’m currently writing a survey of social media art’s (brief!) history for Hyperallergic and as part of my research, I’ve invited a number of contemporary social media artists to a roundtable discussion on Hyperallergic’s Facebook page.
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New Museum’s Richard Flood Equates Bloggers with Prairie Dogs
Referencing prairie dogs and Mussolini, yesterday New Museum chief curator Richard Flood wound up his talk at the Portland Art Museum on “Creating Networks: The New Internationalism” with some bracing criticism of his own directed at online critique of his institution. Unlike the rest of his talk which very sharply traced American art world’s relationship with work by international artists 1980s to present from his vantage points at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Artforum, the Walker Art Center, the New Museum, his final comments were wildly out of touch with the ways we have conversations about art now.
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Joy Garnett’s Gesture for Haiti
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.
