In the 21st century, being good at painting (or sculpting or photography or making altered books or ...) is not enough. The internet has changed the face of art and art marketing irrecovably. Now you must be also be good at talking about your art, not just as part of an artist statement, but also in your blog, which you must update at least several times a week to gain any traction. You have to be better than average at photographing your work, or cough up the funds to find someone to photograph it for you. You have to master a slew of image editing tools to correct the mistakes you made with your photos before you put your art online. Because in this day and age, your jpeg is your proxy for your art. It's often the only thing someone will see when they decide to buy your art or not. Or show your work in their gallery or juried show or not. And even that is starting to change, because with the advent of webcams, YouTube, and all number of video embedding (and editing) programs, artists are putting out non-traditional versions of their art. You can watch some artists paint live. Or sped up. Or super sexy slideshows set to Creative Commons licensed music. And artists are having to learn a whole new skill set. Again.
In the coming months, EBSQ will be looking in greater depth at how the art market is changing to embrace all things Web 2.0. To get things jump started, we'd like to showcase a few blog posts from our resident new media expert, Natasha Wescoat:
For further inspiration, we'll also take a look at some of the staff's favourite EBSQ artist-made videos currently on YouTube.
The future of art is here. Are you ready?
Amie Gillingham
1 June 2008
Get out of the vacuum and express yourself!
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