Technology and ‘the death of Art History’
CHArt ANNUAL CONFERENCE
|
|
Technology and ‘the death of Art History’
|
Almila Akdag Salah
Performing Curatorial Practices in a Social Network Site: The Curators of DeviantArt
This research focuses on a Social Network Site called DeviantArt, a site that is created for sharing user generated artworks. Launched in 2000, today this initiative has about 12 million members coming from over 190 countries. The website offers various web-based services to its members enabling and enforcing a strong social interaction. With its collection of around 100 millions works, DeviantArt (dA) is the biggest art market of the world, presenting a new mode of displaying, evaluating and consuming arts. In that sense, dA generated a platform free of institutional and governmental politics, democratizing the way arts are generated, shared and enjoyed. However, some aspects of dA is astonishingly reminiscent of the existing art market, and in this paper, I’d like to scrutinize one of these aspects, namely the birth of curatorial practices.
Various structures in dA create a new value-system. The dA community itself uses page statistics as a means to judge the ‘quality’ of a work. These statistics cover numbers of comments a work receives as well as how many times it is ‘visited’ or ‘favoured’. However, with a fast growing archive of 100 million works, to rely only on these statistics are not enough. dA introduced a method to render some works more ‘visible’ then others. In order to promote a members work (which in dA terminology is tagged as ‘deviation’), every day, a chosen collection of deviations are published as the daily deviations (DD) on the homepage of the community. In this work, I’d like to name this activity as the ‘official curatorial’ practice of the website and analyze its effects by comparing it to the curatorial practices in the art market as well as to the other promoting methods inside dA that depend solely on members initiatives. Among these, the most prominent one is the publication of ‘feature’ articles as journals on members’ homepages, as well as of news articles, which are accessible through the main navigation toolbar of dA).This paper will investigate these three different curatorial approaches in virtual/real art market through the application of a mixture of traditional and technological methodologies: to analyze the power structure of dA, social network analysis will be deployed. In the second phase, the results of this analysis will be used for a close reading of members in dA who act as curators. The last stage of the methodology will be a comparative analysis of curatorship in the important institutions of the art market such as museums and biennials in contrast to the official curators in dA and the members of dA, who perform curatorship in self-assigned capacities.