Use of social media in modern art

On the mid-90s of the twentieth century, American and then European art institutions began to move smoothly to the Internet, creating websites that usually included a logo and short text. Together with the researchers of the Museum sector have expressed different assumptions about the prospects for development of traditional system components of artistic activity structures, and virtualization of the processes of creation and distribution of art products. The development and spread of the Internet and WWW have once and for all called into question the durability and effectiveness of the traditional spread of contemporary art. The features of the world wide web, namely the ability to work with digitized video, audio, text and images, which are located on various remote servers, are now used by most art institutions around the world. Although galleries, museums and contemporary art centres continue to operate normally in real life and have the right to create an opinion about art in society and the culture of the state, modern electronic means of communication have also been added to their activities. In this case, the Internet can be called a reflection of reality, because the websites of art organizations continue to develop the existing system of life of art, but in cyberspace. For organizations operating in the real world ("real"), the purpose of their web pages is to quickly and easily disseminate information about their activities, which would not limit them financially (publications in thematic magazines, Newspapers, news). At the same time, one of the main criteria will be the extent to which this organization has penetrated the Internet, whether it maintains links with other art institutions, whether it positions itself as the core or link of a network of contacts with other galleries, centers, artists, whether it allows visitors to participate in the activities through forums, mailing lists, whether it uses Internet technologies that will attract artists, critics and art critics to creative and information exchange. As you can see, openness and integration into the network are important components of any successful and effective Internet project about art. Currently, famous museums and galleries are launching entire Internet projects and platforms. A Prime example is the Google Art Project, an online platform through which users from all over the world, while at home, can have access to images of works of art of various galleries and museums in high resolution. The project was launched in February 2011 at the initiative of the largest search engine Google in cooperation with 17 well-known international museums, including London's Tate Modern and new York's Metropolitan Museum of art. Just by going to the project website and clicking a couple of times with the mouse, visitors can embark on a virtual tour of galleries and works, explore the physical and contextual information about the works and collect their own virtual collection. Of course, nothing compares to the feeling of owning the original, and looking at a famous painting on a monitor or retina display is not like admiring it live, but this project like nothing else can bring anyone interested in the field of art to the beautiful. At the moment, Google Art project has signed agreements with 151 museums from 40 countries, adding more than 50,000 works of art and translating the platform into 18 languages. About the contradictory nature of the Internet and social networks, it is difficult to say something that would not have been repeated hundreds of times – limitless opportunities for self-education on the one hand, the fog of fake news and misinformation on the other, the possibility of high-quality entertainment.

Artists, galleries, museums have a new tool for advertising and promoting their works, exhibitions and events, and this is wonderful - thus access to a wide audience has become more democratic. You can not resort to the mediation of an art dealer to sell art. At the same time, with such breadth, the link of expert evaluation – that is, artistic criticism-is often lost; it is sometimes difficult for a potential consumer to understand what is actually offered to him from a set of pictures. But at the same time, critics also have a free platform – many posts on Facebook or channels in the Telegram, not constrained by any ethics of traditional media, are more interesting to read than ordinary," normal " articles. But here there is another problem – such stories are quite difficult to monetize – and even the most successful art bloggers with a million subscribers are often forced to look for earnings on the side, and their main activity is perceived as volunteering or a hobby.

The most positive role is also played by a variety of educational projects on the Internet-from the opportunity to look at Museum masterpieces in the highest resolution to free lectures. It seems to me that in General these opportunities are beautiful, and there is no point in talking about devaluation – after all, you will not be offended by the hammer when you accidentally hit yourself on the fingers – you just need to learn how to handle it.

Also, one can not be surprised if on the Internet any artist in a few months can become the most discussed, despite his artistic activity. For example, few people know the artist metro Meteor, which not only became the best-selling in his city, but also surpassed the earnings of van Gogh (for 120 small and 40 large works collectors gave about 35 thousand dollars, which is much more than van Gogh earned in life). Also, few people know that this artist is not really a man, but... a ten-year-old horse, who, barely recovering from a knee injury and thanks to his caring owners, became an abstract artist. And thanks to the world wide web, everyone can learn about the meteor. About 71-year-old Ken Delmar is not often heard outside the United States, but after he came up with the idea to draw portraits of celebrities on paper towels, and photos of his work flew around the thematic groups of all social networks, the prices of these works rose to $ 10,000 per paper picture. Frenchwoman Vivi Mack, who has no art education, began painting with ordinary food products, blowing up the Internet with her creativity. And although her perishable paintings are only photos, the age of advanced information technology allows the artist to share her creations with millions of people around the world thanks to the Internet. But this is not limited to a truly large-scale opportunities for the development and maintenance of interest in art online. The chief curator of architecture and design at new York's MoMA has launched an experimental online project called "Design and violence," which focuses on design projects and objects related to violence. Most of the works presented on the special site, which are accompanied by a brief essay and a question to readers, were created in the crucial year 2001, which marked the beginning and growth of the importance of cyberwarfare. Charles Saatchi gallery, a famous British collector, has launched a series of virtual exhibitions with the symbolic name "World Wide Wall", where 6 curators will select 10 works from 10 talented young artists and create an exhibition-sale of these paintings. Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has released 3D reproductions of the artist's best works, which are the works of the next generation, because they are made in the third dimension. Auction house Christie's organized an online auction, where you can buy not only works by Japanese artists, but also wood and ceramics, prints and lithographs. On the Internet there is a new website Larry's List, dedicated to collectors, which is based on detailed information about more than 3,000 people (not only contacts, but also information about the works that they have purchased in recent years). Any artist can now contact collectors directly, without intermediaries and offer them to buy their work at the price set by them (artists). Museum workers and curators of exhibitions also benefit from the mediatization of contemporary art, because they have launched a new service Vastari, which allows them to contact private collectors and thus facilitate the procedure of Museum loan for future exhibition in a Museum or gallery. In addition, well-known Russian and Ukrainian institutions hold various festivals of media art, where you can see media art: performances and installations. For quite a long time the field of art in our country was not perceived as commercially profitable and was exclusively the spiritual and cultural value of the people. Art objects were self-valuable, enlightened society and enriched the cultural heritage; artistic works were not of economic value, and financial support for the sphere of culture was at the expense of patrons, charitable foundations, as well as state budget funds. However, the XXI century has become a new stage of development of the art market. Thanks to globalization, such areas of human activity as virtualization, Informatization and mediatization have emerged, as well as interpersonal communications have changed. A quarter of a century ago, developing the theory of post-industrial society, D. bell spoke not only about changing the worldview, lifestyle, social foundations, but also about the modernization of culture. The topic of virtual art is interesting to discuss, because in this term put a variety of meanings. For example, works that exist only in electronic form and have no material analogues. There is a question: does virtual art have all the chances to become a new direction? After all, each art form goes through the period from emergence to recognition as an independent direction or species. The most beautiful example of this is such an art form as performance, which is now becoming increasingly popular. In the 1970s, an unknown girl performed performances and created large-scale installations, which were condemned by society and were not an art form: washed a pile of bloody bones in memory of the victims of the war in Yugoslavia, allowed the audience of her installation to cause her physical pain, laying on the table in front of them about 70 objects, among which was a knife, scissors and a pistol with one cartridge, inhaled carbon dioxide until she lost consciousness, exploring the ability of a person to absorb the life of another person. Now, after 40 years of unrecognized creativity, this girl is a famous performance artist, 67 – year-old Marina Abramovich, who opened her Institute of performance, holds various events and large-scale exhibitions, and is also quite popular as an artist because performance has become one of the types of modern art. In addition, this rapid development of art in the network has also made relevant the problem of the context of contemporary art, which are two: open and rapidly changing and closed hierarchical with all the numerous institutions. The first network art projects had the first context-they were created and distributed by art institutions, their authors were people who had experience in creating such projects or art education. Recently, however, thanks to critics and curators, art has become part of the institutionalized art world and the art market, because virtual art projects participate in numerous festivals and biennales of contemporary art. The role of modern art in the development of modern society is simply invaluable, because due to its internationality, art objects do not require translation into another language, and art itself in the network becomes a so-called art ideology, a concept without borders. At present, we can observe the flowering of experiments and the abundance of different trends in Western art, because the sphere of art itself is experiencing a turning point. This is a time of bold experimentation and debate. Social changes fundamentally change the position of art in society, because the artist paints or creates an expression of the world in which he lives, and sometimes the public simply can not keep up with the speed of development of this sphere. In the end, all these factors have led to the complete destruction of the artistic form and the emergence of new trends/trends / types and technical features: something either incredibly ordered, or absolutely formless and chaotic, that is, what we see when using computers in different areas of art. In the first case, based on the analysis of colors, visual forms, architectural elements, symbols and signs, ordered sets of elements are created, which are analyzed and distributed to the sender and recipient of the message. Then all the elements are combined and, following certain rules of artistic construction, acquire forms. The penetration of machine processes not only into the spheres of activity of society, but also into our thinking can be considered a revolution of worldview, which can be compared with Hegel's transition of quantity into quality. As Paul Valerie said: "our civilization is like — or at least tends to be like-a machine. This machine does not tolerate that its Kingdom is not universal, that there are individuals somewhere to whom it means nothing, who are outside its sphere. Accuracy — its most important quality-does not tolerate social uncertainty, does not tolerate eccentricities. It cannot accept the existence of people whose roles and conditions are not clearly defined. She tries to get rid of people whose role is not clear to her, she tries to reform other people in her own way, not interested in the past or even the future of the human race." And here there is an important question-will the machine replace the artist? Will there be such a machine that can take the place of the painter? Will a person give up his place to a machine or will a person have to let them into his life, learning their language and using them to his advantage, creativity? At least, there are already prerequisites. For example, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson created the machine "Connecting Cross Country With A Line", which is able to document the journey by painting round black and white abstractions. The black ball, previously dipped in ink, begins to "dance" on the white canvas installed in the train car, and notes the slightest fluctuations during the movement. The work of the machine begins when the train begins to move. Thus, the artist recreates the topography of the area on which his invention "rides". And Chicago-based media artist Harvey moon, wondering "Who's the artist?"I created a machine called "Drawing Machine", which is a mechanical hand that draws on its own.