So, last Thursday I get an email from the publisher of the blog Artist A Day asking me for permission to be featured on his website. I was in the middle of a freelance job and I quickly looked at the blog. If you're not familiar with the blog, everyday the blog posts a new artist with two images from that artist followed by their bio and or statement and a link back to their website. And they allow their readers to rate each artist on a scale of one to five stars and post comments below the post. After seeing that few days before he contacted me, my friend Jen Stark was posted and was doing nicely in the site's ratings I gave them my blessing to post me (link). (maybe they got to my work from a link from her?)
Right after I gave them permission I got a little freaked out thinking back to my old rating/commenting experiences with someone posting me on metafilter and I was also thinking of Alec Soth's experiences with the dpreview lighting forums. But I didn't have much time to really think it over I had to get back to what I was working on so, I was hopeful this wouldn't lead down a bad road.
So, first of all I have to thank everyone for all the lovely comments. Its seems like their audience was the right one for this kind of thing. I have heard Metafilter and forums like dpreview have a different critical (?) audience.
Its also been fun to watch as the site seemingly goes through and posts new artist from my link section. First came Emiliano Granado then Amy Stein and then today Alec Soth!
So all this raises some questions for me that I haven't adequately answered. What does looking at artwork in the small format of the internet and then rating it to to art? it this progress? how does or doesn't this encourage critical discourse to allow for instant knee jerk ratings? What would happen if we were to give viewers rating meters when they browsed the MET or MoMA? Does art need a high popular rating to be critically good? In regard to this last question I am thinking no high popular ratings might kill good art. But then again I feel like lots of art would be considered good it its audience spent more time with it to understand it better.