Culture Watch: ‘Social Revolution: The Artworld on Facebook’
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
‘The Social Revolution: The Artworld on Facebook,’
Barbara Pollack (ARTnews, June issue)
Social media art?
Yes, visual and language-based art composed on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr is being actively explored, as Barbara Pollack’s overview of developments in recent years explains in the June issue of ARTnews magazine. It’s the latest iteration of new media art, the non-traditional genre that has attracted an array of artists, both established and not, for decades.
Social media art involves ‘seamlessly blending the online and offline worlds,’ in the words of L.A. artist An Xiao Mina, whose widely read series on the subject appeared last summer on the website Hyperallergic.com. The Internet offers a pair of elements that most other media don’t: open-endedness and enormous scale.
A potential limitation: Like the space in a shopping mall, social media sites create the illusion of being public places, when in reality they’re corporately owned and operated. On the up-side, the tension between public and private often provides fertile ground for creative exploration.
RELATED
More Culture Watch picks from Times writers
-- Christopher Knight
