Sunday, February 24, 2008

24th February 2008: Who's made a mark this week?

"Who's made a mark this week" has a couple of themes this week - (1) education and workshop and (2) museums and art gallery blogs. You could say it's all about learning........

Art blogs, education and workshops
Art Museums and Galleries Blogs

More and more art museums and galleries are getting involved with blogging. I am in fact involved with a pilot project which I can't talk about just yet! In the meantime here are three blogs which have not been featured on this blog before.
Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.
Brooklyn Museum: ArtShare on Facebook: A Progress Report
  • I'm personally not at all convinced by the metrics associated with the people who opine about the top 100 or top 20 art blogs. If they'd just remember to stick to saying "this is my personal opinion of the top 20" I'd be much happier! Here's another recent one (which is an opinion even if it doesn't say so clearly) Top 20 (or so) Art Blogs from All Things Visual, the blog forthe Visual Resources Collection, Department of Art History, The University of Chicago
Art Blogs - and their birthdays
  • Vartanian (Hrag Vartanian) has a really interesting post on What I love and hate about art blogging. Like Sharon B (Mindtracks) who highlighted this post, I agree with a lot of it but also don't think there is any need for more flaming. Personally I don't find being 'nice to one another' and constructive and civilised debate to be incompatible! ;)
  • Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) recently highlighted Simon Otto's blog (Simon Otto). Simon uses white ink/paint to good effect when doing his line drawings.
  • Shirley (Paper and Threads), who lives in the central New York, has been visiting museums and drawing.
  • Art Blog birthdays:
    • I suddenly remembered that Postcard from Provence had its third birthday last weekend until just after I published my post last Sunday! So I added it in as an 'afterword'
    • Which prompted Laura to highlight that Laurelines will also be three years old on 26th February.
    • If you're having a blog birthday, or know somebody who is, just leave a comment and tell me when it is and I'll be happy to highlight them in this weekly blog post. It's always good to celebrate the art blogs that keep going year after year!
Art Business and Marketing
  • Deborah at Sellout is having some problems with the level of responses she's getting to her blog and has decided to impose a blogging hiatus. I hope she gets her problems resolved soon as it has become a very popular blog in a very short space of time. Earlier in the month she had an interesting post about The Problem With Personal Finance Advice For Artists and behaviours associated with financial dependencies.
Art - open exhibitions and competitions

Two opportunities for portrait artists:
Websites and blogging
  • Smashing Magazine has 10 principles of effective web design - some good screen shots to illustrate the points made
  • Fadtastic has 25 Ways To Improve Your Site In 5 Minutes (Thanks to Sharon B again for both this and the above link!)
  • Turbomilk has produced a very clear and well illustrated article about 10 mistakes with icon design. (Note the theme - good illustrations to support learning?)
  • How many Blogger people have noticed that Google has enabled GrandCentral so you can receive calls and post voicemail with your blog? GrandCentral provides an innovative web-based voice communications platform that gives you One Number...for LifeTM - a number that's not tied to a phone or a location - but tied to you. This is the FAQs page. re. the Google takeover. I'm assuming that they're saying this is not tied to a location that it's not just a USA only service - anybody know anything more?
and finally.......

This is a little bit different this week.

Talking to a singer about her website in my drawing class on Thursday got me to thinking about all those other independent artists who are now making it big because they found their 'voice' and got online.

One such - in the music field - is Adele. For those of you outside the UK who have not heard of Adele take a look at her website and/or her My Space page (c.1.9 million views of her profile) and hear some tracks (my favourite is 'Chasing Pavements') from her new album which I bought yesterday. It's called 19 - because that's her age. She writes all her own material and last week she won the very first Critic's Choice award at the Brits - for artists yet to release an album. This is what the BBC had to say about her. My bet is she'll be winning Grammys within the next two years. You can read more about her here - she's a genuine original who's been influenced by some of the 'greats' but who got noticed and got her break by being online.

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