LOS ANGELES — Twitter is filled with poetry everyday. The short, pithy updates of 140 characters represent an ideal format for short-form verse, whether that be haiku or heroic couplets. Or, as it turns out, iambic pentameter.
Posted inOpinion
Clement Greenberg in Tweetable Form
The fad for fake art personas has passed. They were soo 2010, though they lingered into 2011. Perhaps tired of the fakery, someone has decided to rekindle the words of the maestro of Modernism into 140 characters or less, @Clem_Greenberg.
Posted inOpinion
Twitter Portraits of Rupert Murdoch
Artist Michelle Vaughan continues to render tweets into letterpress. Her 100 Tweets project was the first to give the quips of the twitteratti some permanence in print but now the queen of the twitter press has created a small series devoted to the dark lord of right-wing news media himself, Rupert Murdoch.
Posted inArt
Live Tweeting the Arts
LOS ANGELES — If some reject the idea that culture can be engaged with through your smartphone, others are finding ways to do exactly that, particularly using Twitter.
Posted inOpinion
Is Twitter Going to Censor? Ai Weiwei Threatens to Quit Tweeting
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it will start censoring tweets in certain countries as a concession to governments as the service expands globally. Some, including Ai Weiwei, are not happy.
Posted inArt
Getting Naked for Ai Weiwei [NSFW]
BEIJING — When Ai Weiwei’s assistant, Beijing artist Zhao Zhao, was brought in for questioning recently, the supposed charges were simple: distribution of pornography. The image in question was “One Tiger, Eight Breasts,” a shot of Ai with four young women, all of them naked. I first saw the photo in August 2010, when he tweeted a link to it and said “Trusting each other fully,” though the link to the image no longer works.
Posted inArt
Looking at London, Revolting!
LONDON — We are now six days into the unrest that started in the Greater London neighborhood of Tottenham, spread throughout London and then erupted across England. London has been relatively — but tenuously — calmer than it was on Monday night, when looting, arson and violence escalated and reached new and disparate parts of the city … What’s been more interesting to me, however, has been the ways in which many denizens of England have established identities as non-rioters or anti-rioters and expressed criticism through social media and images circulated through it.
Posted inNews
Is Ai Weiwei Back on Twitter?
Seems so … just started about 45 minutes ago. First Google Plus and now this … hmmmm
Posted inOpinion
Artist Wants to Hear About Everyone You’ve Never Met
Artist William Powhida has taken to Twitter for his latest project, “Everyone We’ve Never Met (from memory and imagination),” and he explains, “In another effort to broaden the project and to make the ideas of ‘Everyone’ mean more than Sheboygan and vacationers from Chicago in a way that I can still incorporate over the next two weeks, I am going to introduce it to Twitter and use this social media platform to ask people to share their memories through the drawings of others … “
Posted inOpinion
The Way Forward For Social Media Art
My latest thoughts on the evolving discussion about the use of social media in art and where it should (in my opinion) go.
Posted inOpinion
Missing the Point About “Twitter Art”
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.
Posted inArt
Looking at Chinese Social Media: Censorship and Speaking Mandarin (Part 2 of 3)
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.
