Opinion
With college tuition costs in the US rising faster than inflation, the decision to go to art school is increasingly fraught. How do you know if the ends will justify the means? Is it worth it only if you have a scholarship? Why go to art school? That last question is the basis for a tumblelog called
Opinion
We dare you not to be fascinated by the wacky and amazing animated GIFs of Kevin Weird.
Opinion
If you follow the news these days, you might be worried about the American government and the secrecy and ruthlessness with which it has been conducting itself. You might be concerned about the National Security Agency (NSA) reading your email, or dismayed by Bradley Manning's 35-year sentence, or h
Opinion
We live in a world shaped by the proliferation not just of social media, but also of surveillance. Sometimes it seems as if we're constantly presenting and re-presenting ourselves, selfies upon selfies, in an effort to counteract the official narratives imposed by others. It's telling that the nonst
Opinion
What is the bizarre pleasure in looking at art in banal rooms? Is it the economic disparity between the blue-chip objects and their more middle and lower class surroundings? Maybe it emphasizes that context is everything in the realm of modern and contemporary art.
Art
Arts in Bushwick, Tumblr, and Hyperallergic have resurrected Walking Into the Dashboard from The World's First Tumblr Art Symposium for the 2013 Bushwick Open Studios.
Opinion
CHICAGO — What happens when blogs GURLDONTBEDUMB and WEIRD DUDE ENERGY face off in the reblogosphere, dueling it out in a viral battle-of-the-sexes? This post compares these two Tumblrs, both of which index hyper-gendered pop culture tropes, readily spinning off memes for the easy consumption of an
Opinion
Sometimes it’s not so much about who did something first, but who did it best. In the technology start-up world, it doesn’t matter that dozens of other companies were creating video upload sites before YouTube; YouTube just hit the right combination of community, buzz, and content. Art history is th
Art
We've heard the argument that everyone's a curator online by means of blogging and reblogging, but what about the professional curators who are responsible for producing major physical exhibitions — how are they using social platforms? The ability to publicly explore new theories, archive research,
Art
On the eve of web 2.0, there were a few sites emerging like Zing.com, an early place for photo sharing. The technology of self-surveillance wasn't up to speed at that point to make them stick though. Facebook and smartphones would go on to complete the social shift to "sharing." "Overexposed Dancing
Art
This brief essay will focus on something that I think is important to Tumblr — the need to negotiate with media already in circulation. It is a desire that has been expressed variously throughout the 20th century by other artists and writers who negotiated, or thought about how to negotiate, with a
Art
For centuries, images were a fairly quantifiable, classifiable thing. One could, if one wanted, generally divide them into two categories: those made by artists and those not; artworks and everything else. There were always complications, of course — where did photojournalism fall, or works made by