TrendCentral: Art Basel Miami may have been just last month, but the young art world is once again on everyone’s mind. For years now, trendsetters have cited deviantArt, a popular site that provides a forum for visual artists to show their work and receive feedback from the community, as a favored web destination. Now there is a similar new kid on the block—with a big name attached.
Created by famed art collector Charles Saatchi, STUART (“Student Art”) aims to connect collectors that are unable to physically attend every gallery and view new works for themselves with the students that need help finding an audience for their talents. Students create profiles and upload their art, and can then chat online, giving each other feedback and of course, networking with important collectors. This non-profit online gallery has been giving the Saatchi site millions of new hits a day, and museum curators and dealers are already meeting and buying from some students. We think it will quickly prove to be a popular social network for young people studying and creating art, making it for artists what MySpace is to musicians.
The hot new networking site for art students [TrendCentral]
STUART
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Saatchi’s site for artists and art students are lame. Honestly, have you seen their site design? People would laugh at those sites if it were not for his name being attached to them! Instead the site has been featured in top art magazines and at the Pulse Art Fair, which I might add that I don’t have ANY respect for now because it is obvious that they can be bought out.
The only reason artists upload their art there is because they hope to be the next Damien Hirst, who I might add has bought most of his art back from Charles Saatchi out of fear that Saatchi would destroy his market since Saatchi has actually ruined a few careers by treating art like stock. It does not help that Saatchi has made statements like, “I spend hours a day looking at students’ work on the site,”… if that were true why don’t we ever hear about him buying art?
Anyone with a lick of sense knows that the site is just a get rich, or richer in Saatchi’s case, through ads and traffic site. If you are going to help a site become rich or make someone richer you might as well do it on a site that is visual pleasing. You would be better off uploading your art to http://www.deviantart.com or even http://www.myartspace.com.
Saatchi is probably laughing to himself because so many people are in a trance over a site that looks as if it crawled from 1998. It has the worst site design I’ve seen! If galleries are really using his site to find artists to represent I would like to see examples. If he is really viewing and buying art I’d like to see examples.
And why should we not have that info? As you might recall, Saatchi contacted many of us out of the blue about the site when it first opened. If he can have a staff member go through the trouble of harvesting my email he can at least be upfront about the validity of his site.