Rainbows on the windows of houses, graffiti popping up across the UK raising money for the NHS, people getting down with crocheting and hand embroidery in their small rooms in London. Since May 24th, when the UK was put in lockdown, arts have been flourishing all around the country.
Art has never had so many outlets. It’s used to make a social and political statement – Banksy binning superheroes and preferring to play with dolls resembling nurses; Rainbow Boy by State of the Art or Chris Shea raising £7,000 for the NHS; common people making extra cash online selling their artwork; singers performing live on Instagram to keep people’s morale up; Instagram pages sharing artists making art to entertain and calm people’s spirits. Domestic art and art on social media is turning into an obsession becoming in some way free online therapy.
Social media has been redefining art in every sense and it has become a place where to go, experience, see and buy art. Gotham magazine has recorded that in 2018, over 80% of Generation Y art buyers purchased art online, with most of half of those using Instagram for art-related purposes. Is social media side-stepping galleries?
Well, artists don’t necessarily have to deal with critics, collectors and galleries anymore. Thanks to social media, artists only need to have a good amount of followers and they can make 100% of their profit before the paint is even dry.
In the past year, approaching an art gallery was more for the elite, people either connoisseur of the arts or with enough cash to be able to buy something. If you walk down one of the secondary roads around Green Park and Regents’ Street, you can pass by many galleries, big rooms with white walls and well-dressed gents or ladies waiting patiently for their next customer. All these galleries look very elegant and posh from the outside, have you ever stepped into one because you saw something you liked? Now think, how many times have you come across a piece of art on social media and thought how and where to buy it? Maybe it’s because social media doesn’t have walls or doors nor create an environment that feels like is being made exclusively for the upper class to buy art.
Purchasing art is becoming more accessible and popular. Statista has reported that from 2018 to 2019 Instagram became the preferred choice for 79% of people interested in following artists. #art has more than 183M posts on Instagram to scroll through.
The online art business has been thriving during lockdown. In Poland in particular, The First News has reported that the art market has experienced a boom. This year only there have been 72 auctions online and 3740 works of art being sold – 12% more than last year. But it’s not only professional artists that are selling their stuff online but also casual hobbyists too with more and more people turning to social media to make some extra cash in a period characterised by salary cuts and furlough schemes.
Matt Jervis, 26, Customer Engagement and Design Consultant at IBM always loved arts but he’d lost touch trough university and his career but found that lockdown gave him time to go back to his passion: “Whilst browsing Instagram I saw a sponsored page selling custom dog portraits and thought they looked great but were really expensive and shipped from the US. One of my friends had recently got a new puppy so I decided to do one myself and then got it printed and framed as a gift.
“I posted a picture of the puppy with his new portrait and had people reach out asking if I was selling these and if I could do one of their pets. As my orders increased and the amount of content I had grew, I’ve recently created a dedicated Instagram and Facebook page @furryfaceprints.”
Matt says: “All of my commissions so far have been through social. My orders vary between 2-5 a week and I’ve been quite keen to keep it slow given I’m working full time from home”.
However, building social media presence it’s the key to get recognised in a crowded market. “I spend Probably too long on social media! I worried a lot about the name initially as I was trying to find something unique,” says Matt, “The reality is if you have the content you should just post it and get it out there for people to see.”
Social media also become the peephole to the artists’ laboratory with plenty of people filming themselves working on projects. An artist’s work is admired for its technique. Think about George Seurat’s dotting – that must have required much patience. To understand how an artwork is created, people relied on schoolbooks, classes and museums but now making art has been turned into art itself. People can easily find it on their Instagram feed shared by pages like ViralArt.
Similarly, the audience looks in awe the bucket filed of colours swinging in the air over rotating canvas, wow at statues being carved from the graphite of a pencil, envy the precision of an artist’ brush and marvel at the gorgeous nuances born from the friction between fingers, pastels and paper. The art of making art has found its gallery with social media encouraging and inspiring people to be more creative.
From big artist to newbies, social media is not all fake news and social pressure but also a place of creativity where anybody can access, share, experience and enjoy any form of art and the art of making it.
Yorumlar