dear artists everywhere...
Re: Artists with no web presence.
If your gallerist has a website, and a portfolio of your images, and your cv, and I can talk to your gallerist about you, hey, that's OK. You're covered.
But if your gallery's website kinda blows...or you don't have commercial gallery representation...and you're actually making art, and looking to show that art in some kind of venue or other...you really oughta have something searchable up somewhere.
Go ahead: Google yourself right now. Did anything appear that might lead a curator, or a writer, or a collector to your doorstep, or at least to your e-mail address?
No?
Let me guess: You found a jpeg of your name on a postcard for some group show you did in Ohio three years ago. Boy, that'll help.
Or maybe there's a YouTube video of a performance you did in grad school...except it's been removed for Terms of Service violations.
Or maybe you found a newspaper listing for some community center show you did that nobody actually reviewed...and the listing doesn't have a jpeg...and the community center's website is down, or under construction, or their exhibition archives don't go back that far.
Dear artists everywhere: I'm a curator who's trying to figure out what your stuff looks like, and how I might want to think about it, and whether or not it would fit in an upcoming show I'm putting together...and right now, if you're not on the web somewhere, in some meaningful capacity, I can't even figure out if you're still alive.
Word of mouth brought you to my attention...but absent anything else, you're dead to me.
Please, please, puh-leeze, for the sake of my sanity and your career: Get a goddamn website already.
If your gallerist has a website, and a portfolio of your images, and your cv, and I can talk to your gallerist about you, hey, that's OK. You're covered.
But if your gallery's website kinda blows...or you don't have commercial gallery representation...and you're actually making art, and looking to show that art in some kind of venue or other...you really oughta have something searchable up somewhere.
Go ahead: Google yourself right now. Did anything appear that might lead a curator, or a writer, or a collector to your doorstep, or at least to your e-mail address?
No?
Let me guess: You found a jpeg of your name on a postcard for some group show you did in Ohio three years ago. Boy, that'll help.
Or maybe there's a YouTube video of a performance you did in grad school...except it's been removed for Terms of Service violations.
Or maybe you found a newspaper listing for some community center show you did that nobody actually reviewed...and the listing doesn't have a jpeg...and the community center's website is down, or under construction, or their exhibition archives don't go back that far.
Dear artists everywhere: I'm a curator who's trying to figure out what your stuff looks like, and how I might want to think about it, and whether or not it would fit in an upcoming show I'm putting together...and right now, if you're not on the web somewhere, in some meaningful capacity, I can't even figure out if you're still alive.
Word of mouth brought you to my attention...but absent anything else, you're dead to me.
Please, please, puh-leeze, for the sake of my sanity and your career: Get a goddamn website already.
posted by jhcudlin at 4:52 PM
9 Comments:
Thanks for the honesty and hilarity.
You can find me here, www.terrisaul.com
Or here, @SisterRye.
www.cathiejoyyoung.com
Love it ;-) Love it even more when curators take the time to look at us with websites, a published book and 10 pages of Google search results. That would be Bryce Hudson (www.brycehudson.com) Book: Bryce Hudson: Explorations in the Shadow of Pop Culture. Would you like for me to send you a copy?
-B
So here's mine...
http://julielevesque.com
Completely agree with this - it staggers me how often I meet other artists who have no or little online representation.
I did a series of articles about this on my blog, trying to get across to artists that not having web presence makes them effectively invisible. If they can't manage a fully blown website, I always encourage them to at the very least get a Flickr account with their professional name on it & link it to a blog. Yet lots of artists still seem to think that the web doesn't matter - boy are THEY in for a big shock!
I agree. And have written a series of tutorials for non-techie artists to create their own website using wordpress and the template WPFolio http://bit.ly/2iuHoK
WPFolio was created by artists at eyebeam.org for artist portfolios with a simple and clean design.
I have also created a list of paid services for artist portfolios.
http://bit.ly/2de5kN
And I also agree that artists can and should use free available services like Flickr, blogs, facebook, vimeo, etc.
Daniel Wiener
http://www.danielwiener.com
This is funnneeeee! Thanks for the honesty.
Heres my website, and thanks.
www.anilaagha.squarespace.com
Anila
I always love honesty!
I have a website AND an art grant blog.
http://artist-cindyann.tripod.com
and
myartgrant.blogspot.com
Cindy
May I add?:
If/when you do get a website, PLEASE don't make it a Flash site. Please don't make it more dynamic than your artwork. Don't make it so clever that a curator needs all day to figure out what's a button to click to what. Don't make it so packed full of goodness that his/her slow government account needs until tomorrow to load it.
All this is of course, unless your art IS the site itself.
I'd just as soon see artists put nothing but images, titles, and an email address onto a long, scrolling white page - like old slide sheets except that they don't all slip and fall over when you stack them up.
Post a Comment
<< Home