Art
The influence of social media in art – DW (English)
How is the internet changing art? What about social media? A museum in the eastern German city of Leipzig explores the issue in an exhibition with a title that refers to a typical Instagram phrase — “Link in Bio.”
Using social media has long become part of many artists’ everyday lives, says curator Anika Meier at the Leipzig Fine Arts Museum. Social media have actually been part of their working lives for quite some time now — as is proven by the approximately 50 video installations, sculptures, photographs and paintings by 35 predominantly young artists at the Leipzig exhibition “Link in Bio.”
What distinguishes all these works is that the visual art is in a place where the audience already frequent: primarily on Instagram. Using the good old website seems to have become a thing of the past.
Is it necessary to print out digital art to show visitors what young, online-influenced artists are up to? “We didn’t do that,” says Meier, pointing out that this wouldn’t have been necessary because the works exhibited are as vivid as they are unusual.
The show kicks off with an internet-age exhibit that has already become obsolete by now: an original row of seats from a Berlin Internet café.
Oli Epp, Big Croc
The history of online art
Images flicker across a handful of screens, recalling the “speed shows” created by Aram Bartholl. The Berlin-based concept artist converted actual Internet cafés into galleries by using the computers for short-term exhibitions. Bartholl’s room installation reflects the history of net art, which existed even long before the internet became accessible to a mass audience.
The rise of social media, however, has dramatically boosted the number of viewers of digital art — not least thanks to the fact that nowadays everyone seems to own a smartphone with internet access.
Challenging the meaning behind symbols
The symbols of the internet age along with its modern consumer world counterparts provide a focus for Tom Galle’s work. The Belgian artist bent the blue Facebook “F” into a crowbar, and added finger holes to McDonald’s golden arches. Now the logo looks like brass knuckles.
Other artists examine the effects that the tendency that staging events in social media has on users. Andy Picci from Paris, for instance, placed his smartphone on a pedestal, and whoever approaches it gets to see the artist on the display, dressed in black in a white room.
“I wanted to put my digital self in its own cage on my smartphone,” Picci says.
He is one of a new generation of net artists embarking on a search for identity in the digital age. Some of them use augmented reality or artificial intelligence to test beauty ideals and challenge gender norms.
Andy Kassier, Just Swinging
Putting the ‘art’ in ‘artificial intelligence’
Thomas Webb is an artist who works with artificial intelligence to explore the boundaries of AI. He programmed computers to move smiley-faces with neutral expressions across a mirrored surface on the wall, and let them imitate viewers’ facial expressions. The result, Webb says, is not a reflection of the viewers’ emotions, but the superficial image created through AI – much like an emoji used in a message is not a reflection of the sender’s true feelings.
Not everything comes in a digital package at the Leipzig exhibition, however. Chris Drange from Hamburg took digital era motifs and approached them from a more visual arts-angle: he enlarged selfies from female members of the Kardashian clan, combined them with elements of classical painting, and had these images produced as oil paintings in China. Meanwhile Kristina Schuldt, a graduate of Neo Rauch’s Leipzig master class, alludes to the Old Masters in her works — except for the fact that they’re all holding smartphones in their hands.
The exhibition “Link in Bio” at the Museum of Fine Arts runs through March 15, 2020.
What’s the deal with Leonardo’s harpsichord-viola? Why were Impressionists obsessed with the color purple? Art Bites brings you a surprising fact, lesser-known anecdote, or curious event from art history. These delightful nuggets shed light on the lives of famed artists and decode their practices, while adding new layers of intrigue to celebrated masterpieces.
Beauty is pain. Elizabeth Siddal, one of art history’s most famous muses, had intimate experience with this adage. Siddal first met artist Walter Deverell in 1849, the year she turned 20, while working for a London milliner and soon became a favored model of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists. She was featured in William Holman Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1849–50) and most famously in John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52). It was during her contribution to the latter painting, that she fell ill.
Beauty was a matter of pain for Millais, too. In a rare move for artists of the era, he spent five months painting scenery for Ophelia in a hut along Surrey’s Hogsmill River. “My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced,” Millais remarked, describing “muscular” flies and powerful winds. “The painting of a picture under such circumstances would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.”
The Tate notes that Millais devoted only four months to portraying Ophelia herself. Siddal agreed to stand in for the doomed beauty. She spent long hours in a bathtub at the artist’s Gower Street studio, wearing a cheap gown Millais acquired. “Today I have purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress—all flowered over in silver embroidery,” he wrote. “It cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds.” The dress is still in the Tate.
Millais arranged oil lamps beneath Siddall’s tub to keep her bathwater warm. One of those lamps went out. Millais didn’t notice, and Siddal didn’t complain—by then she knew that beauty means pain. The water grew so frigid that Siddall fell ill with pneumonia. Siddall’s father ordered Millais to cover her extensive medical bills. The artist allegedly made off paying the least possible amount.
Siddal in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866–68; 1872–73). Collection of the Delaware Art Museum.
Siddal made a full recovery from her Ophelia-induced illness, but the bout proved foreshadowing. Siddall likely met Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti while they both sat for Deverell’s massive oil painting Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV (1850). Siddall fell for Rossetti, who made her his sole model. In 1853, Rossetti took Siddall on as an art student. He taught her to draw, and advised her to drop the last letter from her surname. By 1857, Siddal became one of the only women to exhibit alongside the Pre-Raphaelites. Over the next 15 years, she produced numerous drawings, paintings, and poems, often inspired by Lord Tennyson, her favorite poet since discovering his verses on a butter wrapping as a kid.
As time wore on, Siddal grew fearful that her philandering beau would abandon her for a younger muse. While Rossetti resisted their marriage due to Siddal’s working class background, the two wed in 1860. It wasn’t enough to stave off her consumptive melancholy. Siddal died from a laudanum overdose, a rumored suicide, in 1862—decades before 1894, when Ophelia was included the original Henry Tate gift. It’s one of the museum’s most popular paintings today, due in no small part to Siddal’s sublime beauty, the pain it brought her.
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TORONTO – The union representing hundreds of striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the museum.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says they reached the deal late last night, after 16 hours of bargaining.
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The union representing hundreds of striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the museum.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says they reached the deal late last night, after 16 hours of bargaining.
The downtown Toronto museum has been closed for a month while more than 400 workers represented by OPSEU – including assistant curators, archivists and food and hospitality staff – were on strike.
They walked off the job after rejecting an offer from the AGO, which the union said failed to address key issues such as wage increases, protections for part-time workers and contracting out positions.
The union didn’t share details about their new tentative deal, which will soon go to a vote among the members, and the AGO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
No information was immediately available about when the AGO would reopen.
The union has previously said that part-time employees make up more than 60 per cent of the AGO’s work force, and they earn an average of $34,380 per year.
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