Is the art world growing enthusiasm for the all digital things?
Recently, museums and art galleries have started to use the internet and social media as a marketing tool, to increase online sales and visitors. However that is not the sole purpose of their interest in the digital realm. Pieces from collections that cannot be publicly displayed for reasons of budget or space, can be easily presented on Social Media such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. This way, there is no need to launch complicated and more time-taking custom-made websites.
For example, Tate posted some time ago Pitheads (1974) on various Social platforms, and received over 5,000 likes on Instagram alone.
Moreover artists in the 21th century are finding inspiration through the internet, “making Google as significant a technology as the camera was for the last century” as Gregor Muir, Executive Director of the ICA, explains.
Excellences and Perfections
As post-internet artist, Amalia Ulman has used Instagram as her canvas. She launched on the app Excellences & Perfections, an online performance where she pretended to be an aspiring LA actress undergoing cosmetic surgery. However, in reality, she was recovery from a serious bus crash. Ulma’s work is the example of how Social Media is now one of the main means of self-expression and it is considered one of the most outstanding artworks of the digital era. People had no idea that all of her photos were fake, that they were just part of an act, until she posted the last one: a black and white image featuring a rose and the words ‘the end’.
Now, a year and a half on, many of 175 photographs that Ulman created for her project will be shown in two new exhibitions: Electronic Superhighway, at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, which will trace the impact of computerised technology on artists from the Sixties to today; and Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera, which will examine the relationship between artistic performance and photography.
Aren’t art and social media complete oppositions though?
As Ben Davis argues, we have “a relatively exclusive, closed-in type of expression vs. a relatively open, relation-based mode of operation.” However they are somehow connected to each other.
Artists have found different ways to interpret the relations between our society and social media.
Tom Jeffreys, writer for Apollo magazine, takes as an example Benigson show at Carroll / Fletcher gallery in London in 2015 entitled ‘Anxious, Stressful, Insomnia Fat’. The artist, across video and installation, repurposed online imagery in order to explore both the way that the internet exerts normative pressures on the individual and the relationship between the virtual and the physical body. The internet is often hailed as a safe space for empowering self-expression. What such work, and comparable projects by the likes of Sarah Maple and Tamsyn Challenger demonstrate is rather how existing structures of power are played out again and again online.
It is stated then that artist can find inspirations from this new digital generation, but what about their online profiles? How far can they try and use Social Media to promote their art?
Here’s a guide on the use of Facebook and Social Networking for Artists, full of do’s and don’ts. And here some useful tips to promote your art on Instagram.
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