creates is that the viewer can now also be an active participant. It levels the playing field because it is free and accessible, and thus more democratic. With a Tumblr blog, a viewer across the globe can repost, and thus curate, a work in an entirely new context depending on images and media that surround it. A particular work we curate among selected others in a group show may take on a new life with previous meanings reinterpreted and multiplied once its image circulates online. A blog allows for a kind of super-curation that happens at a speed impossible to achieve in a brick and mortar space exhibiting physical objects.
the key aspects of this question is the representation of the art object. How do you see the relation between the jpg and the work? Or the gallery and the website? And can we compare the circulatory modes of, say, the exhibition and the blog or Tumblrstyle reblogging and quotation? Problems surrounding the image of a work and the object of a work have existed since the invention of the camera. Even before the camera, reproductions distanced the viewer from the original in exchange for a more accessible copy. One early example can be seen in Andrea Malraux’s use of photography to create a “museum without walls.” Our
The great majority of work on our blog has never been exhibited or even viewed in person by the members of Reference, but by adding it to our blog we endorse it, curate it amongst surrounding content and give it a new context. The gallery provides the work a particular art world context, a legitimacy, authority, and consideration, that is valuable in a different way. Our gallery’s website, at least at this point, functions as an index, database, and library of exhibited works arranged in chronological order of exhibition. It will be exciting to see how this changes, becomes more elastic, participatory, and open to reinterpreting and re-circulating from the viewer in the future.
art history professors still deal with the basic problem of showing slides of work, or black and white images of paintings in textbooks. These are enduring issues, and the Internet is the newest phase and tool in the attempt to bring distant viewers closer to an original and primary experience of art objects. The Internet allows for instant access to high definition video, which can provide panning views of sculpture, and full color high resolution detail shots viewable on our cell phones, which gets us ever closer to the work, but is still a mediated experience. One major difference the Internet (now Post-Internet or web 2.0), 48