Listed as #3 of "Best Submissions Ever." Seriously..?
...until people found out about it. Such is life...
It's really a terrible thing how everything goes to shit when something goes mainstream. It gets filled up with idiots, kids, no talents, and they group together. There was a time when dA (deviantArt) used to have lots of great and talented ART on it...but since that time it has become a playground for 15 year olds that just got a their 'brand new shiny Rebel XTI from gramma!' and think they're professionals because they have a camera that can shoot, and they can far over-sharpen their shitty pictures with Photoshop.
What will they shoot? Well, MySpace photos of course. Then all their 60,000 MySpace friends will favourite their sweet medicine cabinet "slice-my-wrists" mirror secret-internet-fatty (SIF) photos and that photo will rise into "best photos of all time". What the hell?
The site used to be great for browsing actual art and talent but now it has just become an utter shit-hole. It's truly a sad thing because they have one of the best user-experiences for a website. I am very impressed with functionality and ease-of-use (which has been SERIOUSLY improved over the past several years). Now if only we can filter out the bullshit so the content doesn't suck.
I'd ask if anyone had recommendations on a good new art site similar to what dA used to be... but inviting more people to it is exactly the problem... so you should probably keep it secret.
Example of this problem:
Page 3 of Portrait Photography under "Best Submissions Ever"
This MySpace mirror shot fanboy brought over his collection of unknown internet groupies to make him popular. 7,525 favorites on THIS? Happy to see all this in an ART GALLERY. I hate the internet.
Matt: You should check out Behance Network (behance.net) - the leading creative professional platform...
ReplyDeletecheck out conceptart.org
ReplyDeleteThis is why Kurt Cobain killed himself...(and for that matter, many other artist)
ReplyDeleteNobody wants to see their work go pop...
DA has always had a portion that fit that description, but it also continues to have good content.
ReplyDeleteI am somewhat biased, as I used to be one of the admins for the traditional galleries. But my criticisms of DA (and my praise) pretty much has been constant since I first joined DA some 8768 years ago:
1. There is some great stuff
2. There is some dreck
3. It is always going to require *some* effort to seperate the two, and there will always be some trite offal that manages to ride the trend graph.
There are other sites out there, and they either suffer their own variation, or likely will eventually (Behance, Artician, etc). I think so far the ones that don't are the invitation-only groups like Raster, Creativestem and Breed (more disclosure: I belong to the latter 2) but that is where the critical difference is:
Exclusivity vs. Inclusivity. You have certain costs with both.