1. The Art World in 2006: A Snapshot
This blog was started in a different time — This was the era of the “Return to Painting.”
- The Turner Prize: Tomma Abts won in 2006. She was the first female painter to win, which sparked a massive debate about whether “traditional” painting was making a comeback against the conceptual heavyweights of the 90s.
- The Whitney Biennial: The 2006 theme was “Day for Night.” It was the year of Marilyn Minter’s hyper-realistic “glamour” paintings and Mark Bradford’s massive layered paper works.
- Banksy Goes Mainstream: This was the year of the Barely Legal show in Los Angeles (the one with the painted elephant).
- The “New” Digital Art: Marisa Olson coined the term “Post-Internet Art” in 2006. I began blogging about art just as the art world was starting to figure out how the internet would change making art.
2. The Digital Landscape: The “Web 2.0” Era
In 2006, the tools we were using were primitive by today’s standards, but they felt like magic at the time.
- The Platforms: I started on Tumblr, which was a thriving ecosystem that later self-destructed. Moved to likely started on WordPress (which Google had just bought) the later to a proper hosted site.
- The Consumption: People didn’t find you back then on an Instagram feed; they found you through RSS feeds. If you were a “power reader” of art blogs in 2006, you were likely using Bloglines or the brand-new Google Reader.
- The Community: Discovery happened via a “Blogroll” (that list of links in your sidebar) or Technorati, the search engine that tried to index every blog in the world.