Examining the Arts: An Appraisal of the Online Art Community

As two vital forces of daily life, art and society are inextricably linked. While art is shaped by societal developments, visual culture exerts its subsequent influence over impressionable audiences. This blog will consider this exchange by examining society’s impact on artistic development through technological advancement, international conflict, world leadership and the economy. As a new addition to the web community, I am eager to assert these issues in a relevant and timely manner.

To help facilitate these goals, I have compiled a list of resources which will attend to the concerns of this blog (See linkroll, left). To ensure the quality of these sources, I exhaustively searched the internet for the most pertinent art sources available, attempting to communicate a better understanding of the multi-faceted art community. While I encountered some difficulty in locating sites exclusively dedicated to the fine arts, I hope my research will provide an easy source of information for those with similar interests and inquiries.

To this end, I sought to explore both large and small publications. Through the use of Google Reader and other directories (such as ArtsLynx), I was able to expedite my search and select only the most viable entries. While I wanted to avoid including too many general art sources, I found comprehensive sites such as Artcyclopedia and Axis Web (see right) to be excellent platforms from which to perform more detailed inquiries.

For more focused searches, publications such as The Art Newspaper and ArtForum include scholarly news entries which address global concerns while personal blogs (most notably Art and Politics Now and Art Markets Blog) prove extremely informative and easy to navigate when investigating specific art issues. I also thought it pertinent to include charitable organizations which gear towards the concerns of this blog (such as the Community Arts Network and Americans for the Arts.) Though these sites center heavily on community outreach and charitable donations, they also include more focused articles relevant to the art world on a community level.

While this list is by no means comprehensive, it is my hope that the sites I have selected will both accompany and enrich the issues to be discussed in this blog. Though my search produced several potentially relevant sites, in adhering to IMSA and Webby Awards criteria, I was able to select sites which are both easy to navigate and provide a breadth of academic material. Having completed an extensive search, I am satisfied my research has produced the best sites the online art community has to offer.