Chicano inspired artist and others draw on Facebook to connect, or sell their work

By Mary Brophy Marcus, USA TODAY

El Mac's graffiti art — spray-painted on walls across the globe — sometimes stretches multiple stories high and half a city block long. His larger-than-life portraits are inspired by Mexican and Chicano art, religious iconography, local personalities in the neighborhoods where he paints, and the classical artists he has studied since childhood, such as Vermeer and Caravaggio.

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But on Facebook, his massive murals look more like postage stamps. Though the Web allows for slightly larger images, seeing his work online can't compare with the real thing. And without the context of a location, his cultural or political message is sometimes diminished or lost.

For the Los Angeles-born artist, now based in Phoenix, figuring out how to best use social media and other virtual platforms has been a conundrum.

"I think I'm still trying to figure it all out," says El Mac, 30, whose real name is Miles MacGregor. "It's got to be a sign of the future, but it's a devilish sort."

El Mac is like a lot of visual artists wondering how much weight a Web presence carries. Artists — like scores of others in less visual fields — are struggling with how to use the potential of the new media for marketing,networking, selling their wares and, for some, making their solitary workday a little less lonely.

Many artists say they value the beauty of Web surfing and discovering a gem of a painting, the pleasure of meeting other creative souls they might otherwise never have known, and debating critics and bloggers. But they also see the limitations of the virtual world and grapple with how much time to spend online away from their studios.

For many visual artists online, one of the biggest hurdles is that the aesthetic experience is lost on the viewer. A picture online doesn't translate size, as El Mac discovered. The thickness of paint, the way sunlight plays on a surface and changes throughout the day, the texture of a sculpture or woven fabric against your hand — diminished or nil.

Some fields, though, such as photography, are less affected. Photographer Marco Di Lauro says he got on Facebook "about two or three years ago without having a specific aim in mind."

"As I was adding people, I realized that most of the photo editors at magazines and newspapers are on Facebook. I have about 3,900 'friends' now — most involved in the photo industry," says Di Lauro, who's based in Rome and shoots for Getty Images around the world.

While jobs come through his agency, Di Lauro uses Facebook to show his photos and network. For instance, last month he posted a link to a photo that earned him an international award. He says colleagues and friends also use Facebook to send him messages now. "Facebook is becoming like an e-mail service, plus a lot of other things," he says.

And while he uses it mostly professionally, Di Lauro admits to a little non-work surftime. "It's fun to look at the women," he says with a laugh.

Soho painter and photographer Laura Levine says she jumped on Facebook a few years ago to reconnect with musicians she hung out with 20-some years ago. Levine, 52, one of New York's prolific rock 'n' roll photographers in the 1980s, shot for Rolling Stone, among others.

'On and off Facebook all day'

"I think there's something about this age, our midlife, when people start to appreciate the friends they had back then," Levine says. "I'm on and off Facebook all day — it's terrible." She also curates a professional page, where she promotes shows and sells her now-vintage rock photo prints, but she keeps a tight leash on who sees her personal page.

Others are more open to the masses. Collage artist Michael Anderson, whose studio is in Harlem, N.Y., has more than 2,800 Facebook friends. He says social media have been great for networking with other artists, but he's concerned that the whole concept of "artist" is getting watered down.

"The arts community is definitely very expanded because of sites like Facebook. There are so many more artists today than there ever were. There is so much more crap out there, too."

He doesn't believe it's the place to sell. "I don't feel that the people who are my real collectors are really looking for my work on Facebook."

Museums are catching on, though, says Tyler Greene, a Washington art blogger. While some contemporary museums such as The Getty, in Malibu, Calif., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "get" the importance of social media, many others aren't there yet. "The days of putting out a press release in the local paper to share what they're doing in the community are long gone," he says.

Much of the Phillips Collection in Washington is online, and the museum is on Twitter. "We want people to visit. But when they can't, our goal is to meet people where they live," says Ann Greer, director of communications and marketing.

A recent National Endowment for the Arts study showed that more than half of Americans participate in the arts via electronic media, says Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis. Last fall, NEA published a report based on a 2008 survey of more than 18,000 adults. Last month, it released additional research showing that people aren't just pleasure-viewing art online. They're also using it for educational enrichment and creating art, Iyengar says.

Sheila Pepe, 51, an installation artist and a professor in the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., says she finds the cult of personality in the Facebook art world fascinating, and notes that some artists and art critics have so many "friends" that they have to reject new requests because they've hit the 5,000-friend limit.

Seattle art blogger and painter Joey Veltkamp believes virtual-world popularity comes down to how successful a self-promoter you are. "Social media lets you say, 'Hey look at me,' " he says. If you're good at that, you become a Facebook celeb, which he says annoys those who don't have that skill set. Still, he doesn't think anybody's ever going to reach stardom in the art world by being popular on Facebook.

Connecting with a job

But being a good self-promoter helped Elyce Abrams, a painter from Philadelphia with 1,932 Facebook "friends," land a show in New York last year. "One of my friends on Facebook was showing at their gallery, and he had commented on my work and his gallery saw his comment. That's how we connected," she says.

But even while savvy social media use can help an artist's career, those who seem to sit on Facebook and post all day long may not be taken seriously, says painter Amanda Church of New York."I sometimes think 'Get to work' when I see people posting and commenting a lot."

Artists and critics agree that social media sites have expanded opportunities for artists in smaller fields and unified them.

Typeface designer Chris Lozos of Falls Church, Va., says the font design world consists of about 500 professionals, many based in Europe. He uses Facebook and Twitter daily to keep up with colleagues and clients.

"Most of us are one-person shops and can't afford blitz media. This is the poor man's marketing," he says.

Animators like it for the same reasons. "We are like moles sitting in separate holes," says New York animator Signe Baumane, who shares works in progress on Facebook. "I get to see a lot of very fresh movies."

Artists who move far from home, such as Victor Ekpuk, a Nigerian-born painter who has lived in Washington, D.C., for the past 12 years, says his website and Facebook page help keep his Nigerian family, friends and fellow artists up to date on his blossoming career, including a recent sale to the Smithsonian. It also has helped him reach out to young people.

"There's a group of artists I connected with on Facebook called Take Me to the River. We're collaborating with artists from around the world — professional poets and visual artists — to help at-risk youth who are poets and artists," Ekpuk says.

Social media sites also are spurring vibrant conversations about the arts. The recent Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery controversy over the museum's decision to pull a video excerpt of an ant-covered Jesus on a Crucifix generated a heated debate on Facebook and Twitter, Greene says.

Ironically, those same social media sites sometimes censor art. Earlier this year, Facebook pulled down a drawing of a nude female torso — mistaken for a photo — posted on a page by the New York Academy of Arts.

"It happens on YouTube all the time, too. Classic works of video art have been posted that contain nudity and they've been taken down — these are works by well-known artists who are in museum collections, and they end up getting booted," says Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight.

"Social networking sites create the illusion of being public spaces, but they are corporate and they're owned. Any freedom is an illusion," he says.

Though the free-for-all sharing of art on the Web can draw positive attention and unite artists worldwide, it can work against an artist, too, says Paddy Johnson, a popular New York-based art critic and blogger.

An 'interesting' downside

"It raises a lot of interesting questions," she says. "Sometimes an artist will discover a YouTube video of their work — something someone else shot and posted — and it wouldn't have been something they'd wanted up there. ... All of a sudden you have people evaluating work that you didn't want out there."

How artists define themselves online and how they interact with others can be important in terms of future success, says John Sisson, assistant director of Career Services and Alumni Relations at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which offered its first social media course this semester.

"You have to be concerned about how you're presenting yourself — although that's open for debate. But things stick around," he says.

El Mac says he wonders whether he should be spending more time honing his professional image and being available online, but "if I spend a couple days just doing computer stuff, I start to feel bad, depressed.

"I have to be painting," he says. "I'm not going to be a happy person when I'm not creating and making art."

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