ArtReview: “Please be my friend!”
Monday January 22, 2007 | 17:17 by in | permalink
Okay, I can’t decide if this genius or absurdity: www.myspace.com/artreview. Though it’s pretty funny that the magazine has chosen to describe itself as a 58-year-old female.
Still I think when it comes to the Web 2.0/social networking category of the Weich/ArtReview vs. Wilson/Saatchi Online Throwdown, you have to give round 1 to Rebecca Wilson and the Saatchi collection, whose YourGallery section has become the MySpace/Friendster/Facebook of the artworld, dis-intermediating the space between collectors and artists. That should make Charles Saatchi even more of a hero among art dealers. Not.
There have always been two factors determining the likely success of an old media product trying out new media: 1) the willingness or otherwise to fully embrace the new medium, and 2) their capability to do so.
ArtReview at least exhibits the first, if it is struggling with the latter. FWIW, my view is that the MySpace product looks amateurish, functions poorly and may be rejected by the MySpace community for invading their space under false pretences. I respect the attempt, but I don’t think it works, other than as a PR exercise.
I’m not a MySpacer, but I’d hazard a guess that at this point they are pretty used to people hijacking their “community” for commercial purposes. And the magazine seems to have plenty of friends, including Hans Ulrich Obrist (or an e-impostor - judge for yourself here.)
Design wise, I’d say Art Review needs to take a look at how their MySpace page looks on a laptop. Right now, it requires all sorts of lateral scrolling and their logo is consistently covered up by random ads, including one for “THE BEST MODEL SITES!”
BTW, I was checking out their blog entries, which is where they posted their recent auction reports. Apparently, London dealer Ivor Braka was talking pretty loudly when he quipped - after Peter Doig’s White Canoe was hammered at £5,732,000 - “That is the equivalent of Macclesfield town winning the FA Cup.” Because both Art Review and the Guardian’s auction stories ran the quote.
Well, MySpace was originally created as a tool to get a commercial message out - it was made as a tool for bands to get their music communicated. And it really works! It is a smart way to get your message/sound/text out there since it is soo easy to get hooked and addicted to the maze of connections.
The madness continues…. From Today’s NY Times:
PS 1, Printed Matter, Team Gallery etc all got MySpaces too. I’m taking SITE there soon too! Can’t beat the blend of the pretentiousness of SITE and the “democratic” blah blah of MySpace.