Images & Theory

Et Tu, Art Brute?:

This exhibition was curated in order to portray inclusiveness in the art world. It was made by advertising an open call for submissions from anybody to a gallery in New York. The atmosphere of the gallery was extremely busy and diverse due to the wide range of media, styles and concepts that they received. Andrew Edlin is the gallery founder responsible for the exhibit. It seems to have been made in order to break down the traditional norms of the art world when it comes to decided what's hot and what's not. The audience it generated must have been just as diverse as that of the people who submitted work for it. This being thanks to the variety. It relates to the methods of display social media has allowed for as it has broken down walls and given anybody the chance to get themselves and their work appreciated.


The Johnny Cash Project:

This piece was created by giving anybody the opportunity to trace and produce a personal version of a frame from one of Johnny Cash's music videos. Most of the frames produced look as though they've been created digitally. Although they are all of a specific set of frames there's an incredible amount of diversity to be seen in all of the renditions created. The originality that's generated from the shear number of submissions makes for a strikingly unique video. This links to the topic of my essay as it shows again how the internet (social media as well) has created a platform for which so many more people are able to expose their work to an audience. The huge number of people that submitted for this specific project shows that there's many people all over the world that are now utilising things like instagram to share their creativity. 


Gagosian Gallery, Instagram Art: 

Richard Prince is an artist who created an exhibition using screenshots he'd taken from Instagram after leaving a comment or two on the posts. He uses these pieces to highlight what instagram has come to mean to us today. All of the works exhibited where simple screenshots like previously mentioned. With these weird witty comments and the unusualness of seeing these instagram posts on a wall and presented as art, he manages to create quite a strange atmosphere through which the audience are bound to take a step back and reevaluate what instagram essentially is. The subjects of this project seem to be those that fall into the stereotypes that we often associate with social media and Prince manages to perpetuate those stereotypes through putting them in this context. Compared to my previous examples, it's harder to relate this specifically to my theory about social medias relationship with creative practice. It does show that instagram has given him a platform for which he can analyse. However he doesn't pick up on any of the specific relations between the two in his own work.