Spread the Love, Spread the Art

It may not be as popular as the Flappy Bird craze, but art is working its way through Facebook News Feeds everywhere! Well, kind of.

A recent trend has people posting pictures of art piece on Facebook–art that may otherwise remain unseen–with a quote and sometimes a biography in the caption. How this trend began is unbeknownst to me. I do know that I got four notifications one day last week from one of my best friends posting pictures of art with captions including the following quotation:

• “The idea is to occupy Facebook with art, breaking the monotony of photos of lunch, sushi and sports. Whoever likes this post will receive an artist and has to publish a piece by that artist with this text. ”

I am one of the people buying into the movement, but what exactly is the movement? And what might it mean? For me, I’m excited to see art that I admire constantly being showcased on a social media website that I tend to use as a mere distraction. But maybe that’s part of the point.

So often, Facebook revolves around a specific kind of posts, just as tumblr and twitter and Instagram all have the specific types of posts that fuel their popularity. But this idea tries to break the “monotony” for something perhaps more meaningful or at least, meaningful in a different way than finding out so-and-so is in a relationship or seeing another picture of snowy Middle Path. When I mentioned this new “spread art on social media” trend, someone reminded me that something similar occurred with poetry a while back as well. 

I learned in my contemporary art history class last semester (in addition to the concept of “contemporary art history” being contradictory and complicated) that very much of what defines art now is how it strives to make art truly public. It’s not just appealing to the public audience for art, but incorporating their creations into the art world. It lessens the division between lowly, everyday lives of people unworthy of representation in the past and the supposed world of high art.

Circulating art on Facebook brings the advantages of viewing art straight to our computer monitors and smartphone screens. Art, after all, is meant for the public. Hello, the purpose for the existence of museums. While I believe in museums as a space for learning about art and expanding our knowledge and understanding of the world, this new trend changes things. Although a piece will never look the same on a screen as it does in person (not yet anyway, without 3D, full-size projections for this being openly available), this is significant.

Maybe seeing a Van Gogh you’ve never heard of will make you realize you want to see the glory of his brushstrokes and use of color in person. Clicking that picture of a Michelangelo sculpture, since that guy’s name is everywhere, will make you want to see the soft curves of the marble for yourself. That is the ultimate value. Appreciating what has been and is being created for its awe-inspiring glory and really thinking about it, giving it a chance to wow you.

It starts, though, with some sort of exposure to what all is out there. Even if you just scroll past to hear about so-and-so’s mediocre day at work or that concert that this-and-that attended last weekend. Once you see something, your brain doesn’t forget it, not really. It’s in your subconscious, and it might appear in a dream and seem unfamiliar, but it came from somewhere. And if that somewhere is Facebook and that something is a Helen Frankenthaler painting or a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, maybe this fad can turn into something pretty great.